ABSTRACT
Modernization is a particular challenge in societies where social mobility between the urban and rural milieus is almost non-existent. In the late nineteenth century Lithuania, the gap that developed between the countryside with its largely Lithuanian-speaking peasantry and cities, dominated by Poles, Jews and Russians, seriously obstructed nation-building efforts of the patriots. This is how socialist Kipras Bielinis saw the condition at the turn of the century:
Due to ethnic, religious and other differences, there was no sense of unity between country and urban populations. An urban dweller differed greatly from a villager, and each of them lived their separate lives. Neither a church-town beggar, nor a town trader . . . could deliver the sense of unity to the countryside. A villager who ended up among them was also perceived as a stranger. The local society could not develop without social institutions and its local press . . . The future country intelligentsia was still in their high school benches, unable to realize what challenges they will have to deal with in the near future.1
