NationStates Jolt Archive

In a small village outside the city of Kaunas, Lithuania

The downtrodden malcontents gathered in the cold and damp town square as the light rainfall threatened to turn to snow.

Young Henrikas arrived carrying his son on his shoulders.

Father Andrius stood on the empty potato box gesturing towards the crowd. The priest was an averaged height man, a little less than six feet and with a stocky build. His black cassock was wet and dirtied at the bottom from the mud running in the gutters.

"... a proud people subservient only to God and his Church!"

Cheers erupted from the crowd, bundled in their soggy clothing.

"The domain of Lithuania once extended from Memel to Moscow, and we must be great once more! The Russians are starving us! You think the Russians care about our welfare? No one is going to help us but God, so we must help ourselves. Now gird your loins, we move boldly into the future and to restore our homeland to its path of destiny!"

The crowd gathered weapons and began in frenzy towards the small city hall, run by Russian officials. Henrikas returned home and left his son with his wife, grabbed his hunting rifle from above the mantle, and hurried out the door.

When reaching the small wooden building, the crowd threw rocks through the windows and stormed in, severely beating and capturing the Russian officials. They destroyed all the Russians’ property and installed a Lithuanian as the head of the town.

The riot continued throughout the countryside around the city of Kaunus in Central Lithuania and the crowd moved on the major city with a larger Russian presence and arsenal under the leadership of Fr. Andrius and a former army officer, Aras Ramius.

At dawn the next morning over seven thousand Lithuanian men arrived outside the city armed with crude rifles and weaponized farm equipment.

Ramius has called for all citizens of the city to join the rebellion:

"My brothers and sisters, do not let the Russians deny us our national identity, and our relation with the One True Church! We are starving in our poverty, the Russians know this and they do nothing! Will we sit here and let ourselves die? It's our duty to God, ourselves, our families, and our Lithuania to throw off this yoke imposed on us by the Czar and his heretics! IT IS TIME TO RISE LITHUANIA!"

{OOC: How was that for my first RP?}

{Russia hasn't replied, and it's been a while, I think I've done a good enough job publicizing my thread on the forums and I telegrammed him. Do you think I should just take the city without any resistance from him?}

Russia
OoC: During the time when The Scandinvans left their claim to Russia derelict, the nation of Paternia seems to been deleted. As the present Russian player, therefore, I am assuming that the Rebellion meets its logical and proper conclusion.

Even by Russian standards, the results were savage.

Escapees and informants, seeking to curry favor with their Great Russian overlords, had alerted the local nobles and the garrison. Seven thousand peasants, armed with old blunderbusses, rusty sabres, and farm implements, proved no match for the few hundred Cossacks and riflemen that met them on the road to Kaunas that morning. Though Ramius issued creditable commands, most of the peasants were not trained soldiers, and even when their leader's orders were heeded they fell over each other disarray trying to fulfill them. The Catholic heretic Andrius stood bravely before the Cossack captain, calling down damnation and hellfire upon his enemy's head before the latter shot him in the mouth with his pistol and left the mad priest to die in the mud. When Ramius, too, was cut down trying to get his men to simply stand in a rank, the Lithuanians belatedly realized their mistake.

To underestimate the power of Russia.

Some knelt down in the mud and begged for mercy from the soldiers of the Tsar-Batyushka, claiming they had been misled or even forced by others to take up arms against their beloved Sovereign.

But Cossacks are born with hearts of iron. These men died on their knees.

The majority simply broke and ran. Many were cut down, but most escaped. In the end, however, it did not matter. Over the next few weeks, under the personal oversight of V.K. Plehve, the Tsar's ruthless Minister of the Interior, Lithuania in her entirety was ravaged by Russian security forces, both the terrible Cossacks and the equally-dreaded Okhrana, the Tsarist political police. Thousands were linked to the plot, and either executed outright or deported to Siberia to serve as slave labor on the railroads or in the mines. Their families, too, were deported, and their properties were confiscated and given over to the informants, or more often to Great Russian landowners and Plehve's political allies.

By the beginning of the next year, over a hundred thousand Lithuanians of both genders and all ages had been dispatched to the East, nearly one in fifteen. Those who remained were forced to take Great Russian names, and the use of the Lithuanian language was made a crime equivalent to sedition. Catholic priests were henceforth compelled to sign statements of loyalty to the Tsar or leave the country. Great Russian migration into the principality was encouraged by American-style land giveaways, and this system encouraged further oppression, since now a Russian accusing his Lithuanian neighbour of treason could be rewarded with his victim's properties. A brisk business in traitor-hunting began.

Lithuania was broken.

ooc
ACK! But realistic. Oh well. The US is appalled, and thats about all really. More Lithuanian immigrants to the US probably result.

IC
The US government issues a strong condemnation of the slaughter.

ooc
The US government issues a strong condemnation of the slaughter.

The Russian ambassador in Washington assures Secretary Hay that his concerns will be accorded all due consideration. When subsequently confronted with the outrages at social events, he subtly draws pointed analogies between Russian actions in Lithuania and the American Negro and Amerindian Questions. All but the most die-hard New England liberals tend to drop the subject.