Tomas Balkelis's excellent study of Lithuania during and after the First World War is one of a range of recent studies that focus on the role of violence and challenge the notion of November 1918 as a zero hour (Robert Gerwarth and John Horne, War in Peace. Paramilitary Violence in Europe after the Great War; Joshua A. Sanborne, Imperial Apocalypse: The Great War and the Destruction of the Russian Empire; Robert Gerwarth, The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End, 1917–1923). The author argues that violence represented a “mobilizing moment” and thus became “an essential part of the formation of the Lithuanian nation state and identity” (1). According to Balkelis, war and violence had a profound impact on people, policies, and institutions that shaped the interwar Lithuanian state. In line with nationalism studies, Balkelis argues that war and violence helped identify the enemy and thus disseminate national identity. Although the author devotes much of his analysis to the experience of soldiers and civilians as well as to the long term legacy of violence on Lithuanian society, the study also provides significant insights into the impact of the First World War and the Russian Revolution on state building, and thus on an interwar order of polities that defined themselves as nation states. The crucial context for this, as the author convincingly argues, was the competition between two state-building projects (not only in Lithuania, but in much of the former Russian Empire's periphery): both nationalist and Bolshevik projects attempted to capitalize on the social unrest brought about by war and revolution.

The book's first chapter focuses on displacement, expulsions and ‘evacuations’ and thus places the roots of the making of the Lithuanian nation firmly in the First World War. This is completely convincing, although the focus on violence occasionally slips out of place, as the author tends to subsume a broad range of occupation policies under violence but leaves the large-scale forced requisitions aside. The second chapter shows how nationalists formed much closer bonds with broader society through relief work conducted among displaced Lithuanians in Russia. Balkelis thus provides a sophisticated explanation for how formerly-isolated intellectuals established themselves as national leaders while at the same time managing to keep their distance from the occupying forces. Chapter 3 focuses on the military mobilization for nation and state building, which functioned according to entrepreneurial logics as competing organizations vied for returning and new soldiers. Balkelis mentions the striking case of the village of Šėta, where inhabitants volunteered to join both the Lithuanian and Polish army, with relatives often joining opposing sides. By reconstructing the impact of the Russian Revolution on Lithuania, the fourth chapter treads exciting ground never covered before. Importantly, Balkelis concludes that socialist revolutionary activity in post-November Armistice Lithuania arose very much from within Lithuanian society, instead of being “imported on the bayonets of Red troops” (82).

The following three chapters focus on the nature of warfare and on its impact on interwar Lithuanian society. The author argues that the emergence of paramilitary forces made Lithuania's “Wars of Independence” a multi-directional war, in which the dividing line between combatants and civilians increasingly blurred and civilians were increasingly subjected to acts of terror. Paramilitary units moved to the center of state- and nation-building activities, resulting in a militarization of society. Balkelis concludes with the case study of the Polish-Lithuanian War as a protracted “dirty war” (154), which was characterized by frequent incursions of paramilitary units into Lithuanian and Polish-held territory, a strong pressure on civilians to choose sides based on national categories, and a delay in the demobilization of soldiers.

This book provides crucial insights concerning the impact of continuing warfare on interwar state-building. In this it is more similar to Mark Jones's book on Weimar Germany (Founding Weimar: Violence and the German Revolution of 1918–1919) than to similar books that focus rather on the impact of protracted violence, warfare, and ethnic cleansing on the international order. Convincingly, the author claims that the loss of Vilnius and (initially) of Klaipėda placed Lithuania within a culture of defeat similar to that of the Great Powers defeated during the war. This idea could have been pursued further, given the inextricable link between German occupation, German paramilitary involvement in the Baltics, and Lithuanian statehood. Balkelis has carried out an impeccable historical reconstruction of Lithuanian state and non-state organizations, of the logics of mobilization, and of institution building. This achievement is all the more praiseworthy because it transcends the rupture of 1918, which has so often represented the starting or end point of historical studies, and because the analysis is firmly entangled in the complex constellation of nationalist and revolutionary aspects of wars and violence after 1918.