• Preface


• Introduction: Violence, Revolution, and Nation-Making


• 1: State Failure, Social Disaster, and Refugee Politics during the Great War


• 2: Breaking from Isolation: War and Nation-Building


• 3: New War, New Mobilizations


• 4: Two Visions of Lithuania: Revolution and the Advance of the Red Army


• 5: Multi-Directional War and Paramilitarism


• 6: Homefront


• 7: The Polish-Lithuanian Conflict: 'a Dirty War'


• Epilogue: Peace or a Long-Term Crisis?


• Bibliography

Tomas Balkelis received his PhD in History at the University of Toronto in 2004. After graduation he worked at the Universities of Manchester and Nottingham. During 2009-2013, he was a European Research Council Postdoctoral Research Fellow at University College Dublin, and in 2015 and 2016 he was a visiting scholar at Stanford. He is the author of The Making of Modern Lithuania (2009) and a co-editor of Population Displacement in Lithuania in the 20th century: Experiences, Identities, and Legacies (2016).

This book explores how the Lithuanian state was created and shaped by the Great War from its onset in 1914 to the last waves of violence in 1923. Tomas Balkelis investigates the effects of the war on the evolution of Lithuanian society by telling the stories of war veterans, volunteers, POWs, paramilitary fighters, and refugees.