Republic of Lithuania

The Republic of Lithuania of the interwar years was re-established as a democratic state on 16 February 1918, after more than a century under the Russian Empire that had erased both Lithuania and Poland from the map in 1795. A Vilnius Conference had met in September 1917 under German auspices, and independence came at the end of the Great War. The new state never got its old capital: Vilnius was taken by Poland in 1920, and the government sat at Kaunas from 1919 until the city was recovered in 1939. The republic built a land reform, a national census in 1923 and a soled foreign debt. The Third Seimas elected in May 1926 was the first in which the Christian Democrats lost their majority, and the December coup of the same year put an authoritarian regime in power. Independence ended in 1940 when the Soviet Union occupied Lithuania under the terms of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.