Local government in Vilnius and the German occupation administration in 1916: transformation in the context of "high politics" and geopolitics

The author of the article attempts to look at the changes that took place in the Vilnius administration in 1916 through the prism of international politic s and geopolitics at the time, which is an absolute novelty in research regarding this kind of subject matter, which is rarely analysed from an academic point of view. When Vilnius and the adjacent region came under German occupation and became part of a special administrative unit established by the Germans — Ober-Ost, already at that time the architect of this administrative structure, Erich Ludendorff, was planning to transform it into a peculiar „kingdom” of militarists, which would crown the annexation. At the beginning, however, those plans were hindered by geopolitical calculations on the part of Berlin’s ruling elites. According to them, the Vilnius Country could become part of Poland governed by the Habsburgs. Therefore, at the end of 1915, the administration of Vilnius and the region, into which some local element had been partly incorporated, acquired a distinctively Polish character, which distinguished it from the purely German administration in the western part of Lithuania. The old (previous) municipal council still functioned in Vilnius. The situation began to change in the winter of 1915, when German politicians decided to deal with the Polish problem themselves and Eric h Ludendorff had now more freedom to act. He immediately implemented the anti-Polish policy in the Vilnius Country. The pressure exerted on the municipal council was also part of this policy. However, one should notice a certain paradox here, since the municipal council was to a certain extent a part of the Tsar’s administration, of which fact all the parties were aware. In the beginning, in February 1916, the municipal council was reformed and transformed into an advisory body. Individual structures and offices of the self-government apparatus were closed down one by one, and their func­tions were taken over exclusively by the German municipal administration, which had existed since the very beginning of the occupation and was becoming increasingly stronger. As a result, in the summer of 1916, against a background of Russian military misfortunes, the old municipal council received a painful blow — several dozen civil servants were dismissed, together with the president of Vilnius, Michał Węsławski. The German authorities did not confine themselves to that and until the end of the year exerted economic and financial pressure on the Vilnius intelligentsia, resorting to blackmail, so as to discourage it from conducting social activities. By the end of 1916, the Vilnius Country had transformed into a regular unified and standardised, in administrative terms, administrative province of the Ober- Ost