Summarize this segment from a chapter from an alternate history book series.

"Extract from recorded lecture on “Eastern Europe: The Twentieth Century’s Battlefield” by Maj. Gerald Linacre, recorded November 10th, 2020—

In the 1940s, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was not the place it had once been. To explain this, I have to go back a bit. Before the Partition War in 1767, Lithuania and Poland were united as the Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania, which you may remember from that – somewhat romanticised – film The Vienna Hussars. (Audience cheers and cries of ‘Freedom!’, followed by sigh from speaker) Well, I don’t have time to explain how that’s all wrong…suffice to say that Lithuanian-speakers only made up about ten percent of the population of the Commonwealth, and were a minority even in their own component, outnumbered by Ruthenians. The Lithuanian nobility had also become Polonised, that is, adopting the Polish language and ways as they were considered more prestigious at court. (Audience murmurs) All of that began to change when Tsar Peter III and the Prussian king signed a treaty splitting up the increasingly-dysfunctional Commonwealth. Broadly, the Prussians took Poland and the Russians took Lithuania. Both states directly annexed parts of their lands, notably the Russians taking Podolia and a number of other Ruthenian-speaking lands. However, Ruthenian-speakers still outnumbered Lithuanian-speakers in the new Grand Duchy under the Tsar’s son Paul – or ‘Grand Duke Povilas’.

Given Russia’s later history, one might expect the new regime to favour the Ruthenians, promoting Slavicism and the Orthodox Church. However, this was a time before the Potemkin Revolt, when Peter and Paul were often considered western-looking Germans ruling over Russian stock (Audience murmurs) and before Slavicism was devised as a counter to the nativist, Muscovite sentiments that the Potemkins had whipped up. Paul saw Lithuania as his own personal power base, and understood that he could both usurp the authority of the old Lithuanian nobility and win the favour of the Lithuanian peasantry directly if he promoted the Lithuanian language. He also limited the activities of the Orthodox Church to avoid alienating the Catholics, with the Orthodox Church instead mostly focusing on attempting to reclaim the Ruthenian Uniates, whether by evangelism, subtle pressure or brute force. The Lithuanian identity was also boosted by the establishment of grand flag-flying projects, most obviously the Patriotic Fleet, with its visit to right here in the Empire in 1788. It also led to the establishment of the Russo-Lithuanian Pacific Company. The colony that eventually became Povilskaja in Africa was also presented as Lithuanian first, whatever the reality. The Lithuanian identity had the highest prestige it had had since the days of the Jagiellonians.

When Paul became Tsar after the Potemkin Revolt, he was succeeded as Grand Duke by his son Peter – Petras I – who was also very popular with the Lithuanian people. When Petras in turn had to move on to being Tsar in 1829, it wasn’t a popular move – and then he died only two years later, in a railway crash. Many furious Lithuanians claimed it was a deliberate assassination, and that the backward Russians had turned on a man they saw as half-Lithuanian and an alien influence – and it is true that Petras, or Peter’s, reformism had made him enemies. Petras’ own son Konstantinas I, who was already Grand Duke, now refused to become Tsar. After a brief and farcical civil war, the Russian throne passed to his brother, and now the two Romanov branches had separated, each country having its own succession.

Konstantinas, mindful of the feelings of his people, warned his brother Fyodor that he would assert Lithuania’s independent agency and no longer follow Russia automatically into wars. It was more rhetoric than reality in some ways, with Lithuania adopting a pro-Russian neutrality in the Swedish Civil War that probably helped Russia more than active alliance would have. Over the following years at the beginning of the long peace, the Lithuanian assertion of independence took on more reality, much to Russia’s displeasure. In practice, the two countries were still linked through the RLPC and their colonies. But as time wore on the Russian state also tried to deepen its control of the RLPC – reaching a head when it seized direct control of Yapon and Russian America after the 1878 revolt. A fully independent Lithuania was an unwelcome variable in the struggle for Eastern Europe, for all that it was being fought mostly with money and diplomacy throughout the Long Peace.

Konstantinas died in 1858 at the age of fifty-one and was succeeded by his son Jonas IV. Jonas was the most full-heartedly Lithuanian nationalist of any of the Lithuanian Romanovs, and explicitly and pointedly explored anti-Russian alliances with his neighbours, including the hated Scandinavians. Petrograd – as it had recently been renamed, from St Petersburg – grumpily tolerated this while Fyodor IV was still alive, out of respect for his deceased brother and his nephew. However, when Fyodor was succeeded by Paul II in 1872, things changed. Paul had little awareness of Russia’s wider empire, but was determined to assert his will in what he saw as Russia’s front yard. He was particularly incensed by the Lithuanians’ refusal to support Russia during the recent Euxine War or the expansions into Tartary that they were now planning. An example must be made.

A year later, the Russians were able to exploit a poor harvest and restless subjects in Lithuania as an excuse to militarily intervene ‘to restore law and order’. The childless Jonas was effectively forced to abdicate in favour of his more pliable brother Petras II, and died in mysterious circumstances not long afterwards. The Lithuanian colonists and RPLC members were naturally angry about this, and it’s thought that some of them may have deliberately aided the Hanran Yapontsi revolt I mentioned, just as a way to take revenge on the Tsar. Others defected to the Coreans in the south of the islands, or joined the UPSA corporate empires.

Tsar Paul II was hardly the man his better-known namesake was. All his intervention had achieved was to shock and alienate Lithuania’s neighbours. It was the falling domino that drove formerly-neutral Poland into the arms of Germany and Danubia, forming the Pressburg Pact and ensuring that their lands would be fought over three ruinous times in the Pandoric War, Black Twenties and Sunrise War. (Murmurs) Nor was he successful in turning Lithuania into a well-behaved little brother in the Balto-Slavic family that was the Vitebsk Pact. Petras II’s son Petras III was another strong ruler who exerted Lithuanian influence in a different way; rather than trying to escape the Russian bloc altogether, Petras instead made himself a player in internal politics. In the Pandoric War, he was responsible for the logistical breakthroughs that turned the tide against the Ottomans and allowed the Russians to conquer Trebizond. A quarter-century later, he was the one responsible for negotiating the Treaty of Vienna that ended the Black Twenties.

But Petras III was not quite as clever or as capable as he thought himself. Negotiating the treaty won him no favours, and he was forced to give up Karaliaučius to the English as Conisbrough, in order to avoid accusations that he was favouring Lithuania at the expense of Russia. This only alienated both nations. Petras’ attempts to get involved in the shadowy struggle to be the power behind the throne of the weak and underage Tsar Fyodor V – his role in the faraway negotiations meant he was about the only major player in Vitebsk Pact politics who wasn’t accused of being involved in Paul III’s death. (A few chuckles) Paradoxically, in the eyes of some seasoned veterans of Russian court politics, that made him look weak and opportunistic, not incorruptible. Petras backed the wrong horse, gambled poorly and was shut out of influence along with Dowager Empress Anna and General Pichegru. He might have made a comeback after the Pendzhab debacle and the disgrace of Alexander III of Courland, but by that point he had already passed away, in 1932. An anticlimactic end to a generally successful career.

Petras was succeeded as Grand Duke by his son Konstantinas II, rather daringly named for the predecessor who had triggered the first break with Russia. But the younger Konstantinas faced a world quite unlike the one his ancestor, a century earlier, had. As Russia modernised her technology and adopted Photel broadcasts, film and centralised propaganda, there was a drive to push a single message, a single culture, throughout the Vitebsk Pact. Konstantinas fought back against this, citing the example of Finland, which had remained loyal to the Pact in the Black Twenties because its people had been allowed to freely continue to use their own language and culture – arguably the beginnings of Russian Diversitarianism. (Audience murmurs) Konstantinas saw the example of Livonia, which had been under direct Russian control and forcibly Slavicised for years, and feared that Lithuanian language, literature and religion could also be driven underground. Like his predecessors, his concerns were partly driven by genuinely identifying with the Lithuanian cause, but also because he knew that no ruler associated with an alien ruling class could hope to keep his throne in the long run.

By the 1940s, Lithuania was a tense and complex society. The nobility, those same who had once embraced Polish culture, now fiercely resisted Russification. The common people made common cause with them, whilst viewing the Ruthenians with suspicion as alleged crypto-collaborators with their fellow Slavs. The remaining Polish and Jewish minorities were targeted by all sides. It was into this toxic mix that one of the twentieth century’s most colourful characters, Eljiso, first entered history…"