Francis McCullagh – an Irish journalist in prewar Lithuania

At the outbreak of the second World War, British prime minister Neville Chamberlain shrugged off warnings about the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia, describing it as a small foreign state of which little was known. Some 70 years later the fate of three other small foreign nations – Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia – has been brought sharply into focus by the Russian invasion of Ukraine and this, in turn, has heightened tensions in the relationship between Russia and these Baltic states.

In the 1920s, ironically, these states were probably better known in Ireland than they are today. This was because the Irish Jesuit magazine Studies devoted no fewer than four articles to these countries in 1923. One of them – that devoted to Lithuania – was by Francis McCullagh, an Omagh-born Irish journalist who was in the middle of a stellar career as the much-travelled Moscow correspondent of the New York Herald.

Writing about Lithuania in Studies in March 1923, McCullagh – who had personally visited Vilna (as Vilnius was then named) for his paper – told his readers that the problems of Vilna, where Poles and Lithuanians vied for ascendancy, “reminded me somewhat of the problem of Belfast, despite the fact that both Poles and Lithuanians are Catholics.”

”This unfortunate controversy between two Catholic peoples who were long allied to one another”, he observed, “is embittered by the fact that all the gentry in Lithuania is Polish or Polophile. Even the landlords who are of Lithuanian descent have no sympathy with the Lithuanian national movement, not only because they themselves have lost their native language and have insensibly come to regard the people who speak it as ‘low class’, but also because they are in danger of losing their estates as well. For the Lithuanian republic, being based primarily on the peasants, has had to take notice of that imperious demand on the part of the peasants for more land, which has gradually changed the whole face of every modern country in Eastern Europe.”

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McCullagh’s instinctive sympathy for Polish claims did not amount to a blank cheque, and he praised, in particular, the Lithuanian devotion to education.

“Even in prewar days, the percentage of illiteracy in Lithuania was lower than in other parts of Russia, including Poland, and the thirst for knowledge among the peasant masses was most strongly marked. These characteristics are even more pronounced today. Peasant parents are not content with giving their children a middle-school education, they make desperate efforts to send them to the university.”

He might have been writing about Ireland. Further, he contrasted developments in Lithuania favourably with those in the other newly independent Baltic states.

”The people are united”, he wrote. “There have been no murders, shootings and disorders. The little Lithuanian army is well disciplined and entirely under the control of its officers and the government. There is perfect religious freedom; and if the enormous Russian church which the late Tzar built in Kovno is now used for Catholic worship, there is no confiscation in that; for the congregation used to be exclusively military, and the Russian soldiers who filled it when I was first in the Baltic states are now replaced by the Catholic soldiers of the young Republic.”

McCullagh made a stab at foretelling the future, suggesting that the Baltic states might form a link between a Slavonic group of nations on one side and a Teutonic group on the other. And Ireland, he suggested more speculatively, “might form a link instead of a barrier between the British group and the American group.”

In the 99 years since that Irish journalist visited the Baltic states, many things have changed – and some, it appears, have to a degree remained the same. Few of his predictions came to pass, and indeed the later assimilation of the Baltic states by the Soviet Union created a postwar hiatus after 1945 which crumbled only under perestroika.

But even in 1923 an intelligent journalist like McCullagh could make a fair stab at predicting the future. Most of the leaders of the new Baltic states, he observed, parroted George Washington. And then he added:

”But I know that some of those who do so are only paying lip-service to an exaggerated and antique nationalism, of which they seem to be afraid. May it not be that we are on the eve of a great readjustment in international relations which will lead to a veritable United States of Europe?”