Vilnius — Smetona faces the ultimatum

Antanas Smetona, 65, has led the Republic of Lithuania since the authoritarian coup of 1926 — a semi-authoritarian, pre-fascist regime without mass repression, comparable to Salazar's in Portugal. The country has 2.8 million inhabitants and its official capital is Kaunas, since Vilnius — Wilno in Polish — was annexed by Poland in 1920, during General Lucjan Zeligowski's coup de force. The loss of Vilnius, Lithuania's historic and cultural capital, has remained the great national wound of the interwar years.

On 17 September 1939, the Soviet invasion of eastern Poland places Vilnius under Red Army control; Soviet troops enter on the 19th. Moscow then offers Lithuania a mutual assistance treaty: she would recover Vilnius — her historic revenge — in exchange for the installation of Soviet military bases on her soil, on the model already imposed on Estonia and Latvia.

Smetona convenes the Seimas, the parliament, on 6 October. Debate is intense: to accept is to obtain Vilnius but lose real independence; to refuse is to resist the USSR, militarily impossible with 27,000 Lithuanian soldiers facing 200,000 Soviets massed on the border. On 9 October, negotiations open in Moscow under direct threat, led by Foreign Minister Juozas Urbsys.