Lithuania

From the last pagan kingdom of Europe to a Baltic republic restored from Soviet rule.

Lithuania's history runs from a medieval pagan power to a modern European democracy. The tribes of the Lithuanians were united under Mindaugas, who was baptised and crowned the only King of Lithuania in 1253, and the realm grew into a vast Grand Duchy that under Gediminas, Algirdas and Vytautas the Great stretched from the Baltic to the Black Sea, the last great pagan state in Europe. The Union of Krewo in 1385 bound Lithuania to Poland through the marriage of Grand Duke Jogaila to Queen Jadwiga, bringing Christianity in 1387 and victory over the Teutonic Knights at Grunwald in 1410; the Union of Lublin of 1569 fused the two states into the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The partitions of that Commonwealth ended in 1795 with Lithuania's annexation by Russia, and a century of Russification, including a forty-year ban on the Latin-script Lithuanian press, gave way to a national revival sustained by clandestine book smugglers. Independence was declared on 16 February 1918, but the interwar republic was caught in bitter territorial disputes over Vilnius with Poland and over the Klaipeda region. Occupied and annexed by the Soviet Union in 1940 under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, suffering mass deportations and a long partisan war, Lithuania became in 1990 the first Soviet republic to declare the restoration of its independence, and joined NATO and the European Union in 2004.