Lietuvos III Seimo prezidiumo 1936 m. rugpjūčio mėn. 27 d. posėdžio protokolas
Minutes of the Meeting of the Presidium of the Third Seimas of Lithuania of 27 August 1936

Summary/Abstract: It is the publication of the minutes of the meeting of the Presidium of the Third Seimas of Lithuania which was in operation in 1926–1927, dated 27 August 1936. The document makes it clear that when President Antanas Smetona dissolved the Third Seimas of Lithuania on 12 April 1927 and authoritarian regime was established in the country without calling the elections to a new Seimas, the Presidium of the Third Seimas of Lithuania continued its activities. The Seimas statute declared that the term of office of the presidium of the previous Seimas expired with the beginning of the term of office of a new Seimas. With this provision in mind and considering that a new Seimas of Lithuania had to commence its activities in September 1936, even if elected by undemocratic means, the Presidium of the Third Seimas of Lithuania considered its activities over. The published minutes make it clear that President Antanas Smetona, having established his rule after the coup of 17 December 1926, with the rejection of the idea of calling a democratic Seimas, launched the discrediting campaign of the so called times of the Seimas (bearing in mind the terms of office of the Lithuanian democratically elected Seimas in 1920–1927) at the national scale from the very first year of his regime, whereas from the summer of 1927 he undertook to liquidate any remains of the democratic parliamentarism in the country: the Seimas Palace was reorganized into a girls’ gymnasium, the Presidium of the Third Seimas of Lithuania was totally disregarded; the documents kept at the Seimas Palace were deliberately taken away. With no information about the whereabouts of the fund of the Seimas of the independent Lithuania (1918–1940) and the cases stored in it to this day, the information provided in the published document leads to an assumption that the activities of the authoritarian regime could have had a decisive influence on the destruction of the said documents.

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