Stasys Matulaitis

Stasys Matulaitis (24 October 1866 – 10 April 1956) was an activist of the Lithuanian National Revival who became one of the leaders of the Social Democratic Party of Lithuania. He later joined the Communist Party of Lithuania and became a historian.

Educated as a physician at Moscow University, Matulaitis joined Lithuanian public life from an early age. He contributed short correspondences to ''Aušra'' and increasingly became involved with the publication and editing of ''Varpas'' and ''Ūkininkas'' (he was their editor-in-chief from 1895 to 1897). At the same time, he wrote and published fiction, popular science works, and brochures on history and socialism. In total, from 1893 to 1935, he published about 30 original and 17 translated works. Due to his involvement with the smuggling of illegal Lithuanian publications, he was exiled to the Astrakhan Oblast and the Komi Republic for three years. After serving in the Russo-Japanese War as a medical doctor, Matulaitis lived in Vilnius where he edited newspapers of the Social Democratic Party of Lithuania and was active in various Lithuanian societies, including the Lithuanian Scientific Society.

During World War I, Matulaitis was once again drafted to serve as a military doctor. In 1918, he joined the Central Bureau of the Lithuanian Sections of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) and became co-editor of the communist periodical ''Tiesa''. Upon return to Lithuania, he joined the Communist Party of Lithuania which was outlawed in interwar Lithuania. He was arrested by the Lithuanian police in 1925 and escaped to the Soviet Union. In 1927, he joined the Institute of Belarusian Culture (reorganized into the Belarusian Academy of Sciences) and devoted his time to researching the history of Lithuania. He was awarded doctorate in 1934 for a study of economic causes of the Uprising of 1863. He was imprisoned by the NKVD during the Great Purge. After two years in prison, he was exiled to Kazakhstan.

Matulaitis returned to Lithuania in 1946 and joined the Lithuanian Institute of History and taught history at Vilnius University. However, he could not accept the party-imposed version of history and publicly criticized in 1950. As a result, Matulaitis was dismissed from his posts and spent the last years of his life in poverty and obscurity writing texts openly critical of the Soviet regime that remain unpublished. Provided by Wikipedia