ABSTRACT
Some historians studying national movements among small East European nations traditionally distinguish between those ethnic groups that preserved their own traditional elites and ‘high cultures’, and those who inherited a so-called ‘incomplete social structure’. For the latter, it basically meant that either their landowning aristocracies were assimilated into a political or cultural structure of a dominant ethnic group, or they failed to develop their native middle-class groups altogether. Even if it is difficult to find such clearcut divisions in every case, this distinction is useful in helping to differentiate individual cases. Thus, if the Poles clearly belong to the first group, then the Lithuanians, Belarusians, Latvians and Ukrainians belong to the second.1
Their intelligentsias had to develop not from their old landowning elites, who leaned heavily towards Polish or German cultures, but from the peasantry. Thus many consistently repeat that in Lithuania (as well as in Latvia or the Ukraine) there was a peasant national movement.2 Such a perspective traditionally emphasizes the social origins of nationalist intelligentsias, bearing in mind that their values, outlook, or ‘class’ mentalities are derivatives of their social roots.
