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The paper analyses the territorial expansion of Vilnius in the first half of the 20th century, based on archival and historiographic material. The ‘grand’ plan for Vilnius’ expansion that the German government started realising during the years of the First World War continued into the ‘Polish’ (1919–1939) and ‘Lithuanian’ (1939–1940) stages of the city’s development. The author concentrates not just on the government’s decisions to geographically expand the city, but also on the ethnic demographic structure of the day, its changes, and how it related to the territorial expansion of Vilnius.
There was one very special document in the life of each adult citizen of the USSR. This document was the internal passport, which was a short chronicle of a person’s life. It reflected almost the whole life of an individual: from the place and time of their birth, to the duties the holder had to their children (indicated by a stamp in the passport about any underage children and any duty the parent had to support them financially). This article presents an analysis of the development of the Soviet passport system in east and southeast Lithuania in the period 1944 to 1989, and efforts to introduce modernisation, revealing the functions and some details of the universal obligatory registration of citizens based on their place of residence.
The article deals with the ethnic-demographic developments in the city of Vilnius in 1920–1939, the ‘Polish’ period, when Poles in 1920 occupied Vilnius by armed means and quickly incorporated it into Poland. Due to political, socio-economic and cultural factors (the ethnic policy undertaken by Poland, the importance of Vilnius as the political-economic, cultural-education centre, processes of intensive migration, etc), significant ethnic-demographic changes occurred in the city. It became an attractive object for the Polish population, the number of people of Polish nationality, mainly due to migration, increased steadily (from 70,000 in 1920, to about 130,000 in 1939). During the discussed period, Vilnius was a Polish-Jewish city, in which by 1939, Poles accounted for about 66 per cent, and Jews about 29 per cent of the city’s population.
This article analyses a sphere of the social life of the population of Vilnius that has received little attention in historiography, the unemployment problem during the ‘Polish period’ (1920–1939). It discusses the efforts by the government of the time to reduce the number of unemployed in the city, and to mitigate the negative outcomes of unemployment. The author shows why the unemployed of Vilnius received less support than the unemployed in other regions in Poland, and illustrates aspects of their daily life.