History

 

LIUDAS VAINEIKIS

 

Prepared by “Encyclopedia Lituanica”. II. Boston, 1972. P. 24-25.

 

VAINEIKIS, Liudas (1869-1938), physician, active participant in the Lithuanian national renaissance, born in Svirpliai, county of Siauliai, on Aug. 19, 1869. With several interruptions, he studied medicine at the University of Moscow beginning in 1889. For taking part in the underground movement of Lithuanian students and for circulating and contributing to the banned Lithuanian press, he was expelled from the university in 1896. Nevertheless, that same year he passed the physician's qualifying exams at the University of Kazan' and started to practice (1897-1900) in Palanga, a Lithuanian resort on the Baltic Sea, which at that time was close to the German (Prussian) and Russian border. Over this border he organized the stealthy traffic and dissemination of Lithuanian books and newspapers outlawed by the Russian government (see Press Ban). He maintained close ties with Lithuanian socialists and Russian revolutionaries abroad and helped to disperse their publications aimed against the tsarist regime. He was arrested in 1900, imprisoned for two years in Liepaja (Latvia), and in 1902 exiled to Yakutsk, Eastern Siberia. Released during the revolution of 1905, he returned to Palanga. For several years he was active in the Social Democratic party, assisting in the editing of its Darbininku Balsas (The Workers' Voice) published in Tilze (Tilsit). He spent the years 1915-20 practicing medicine in Central Asia. From 1921 he again lived in Palanga, where alongside his physician's duties he concerned himself with the resort's social, economic, and cultural affairs; in 1928 he was officially appointed physician of the resort. He died in Kaunas on Jan. 17, 1938.