Issues of Lithuanian civil servants' loyalty in 1918-1940
ENThe aim of this paper is to explore how the changes of political conjuncture (1918-1940) altered the formation of the Lithuanian state servantsí loyalty (to the state). The paper employs three layers characterizing the loyalty formation instruments and the problematic context in order to analyse (uncover) the active and purposeful efforts by the state to establish an administrative apparatus that is loyal to the political regime. Within the first layer, the period of the First Lithuanian Republic (1918-1940) is introduced as the establishment of the basis of the civil service management, in which the importance of the bureaucratic apparatusí loyalty was made relevant by the increasing professionalism of the civil servant institution, as well as by the stateís internal political realities (e.g. the authoritarian regime established in 1926), and by the geopolitical context. In the second layer, the Lithuanian stateís ability to 'communicate' (both on value and professional issues) with the administration of Klaipėda Region (1923-1939), which was an autonomous region governed under sovereignty of Lithuania. The third sub-theme is dedicated to the fundamental transformations of the concept of loyalty, which coincided with the first Soviet occupation of Lithuania in 1940. The paper is based on the methods of the analysis of scholarly literature and documents. The specifics of the sources makes one focus not on the feelings, experiences, or reasoning of the servants themselves, but on the political regimeís measures with which loyalty was being constructed. Thus, the paper considers the archival documents from the Lithuanian Central State Archives and the Kaunas County Archives to be relevant. The contributions made to this topic by separate researchers are fragmented: only some individual aspects of this subject were analysed.
