Word: smetona
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Died. Antanas Smetona, 69, Lithuania's first President (1919-20; 1926-36), first and only dictator (1926-40); suffocated in the burning of his son's house; in Cleveland. Short-bearded, long-mustached Newspaper Editor Smetona was a prime builder of the eastern Baltic's political spillikin-pile. Long an agitator for in dependence from Czarist Russia, he headed a successful putsch against Lithuania's pro-Soviet Russian Socialists in 1926, ten years later dissolved all opposition parties. He fled to the U.S. when Russia took over...