Juozas Pajaujis-Javis

Juozas Pajaujis (14 March 1894 – 10 June 1973) was a Lithuanian politician, a long-term member of the Lithuanian Popular Peasants' Union, best known for his attempt to organize a coup against the president Antanas Smetona in spring 1927.

Pajaujis received doctorate in sociology and political science from Kiel University in 1926. He was elected to the Third Seimas in May 1926. He became a vocal critic of the coup d'état of December 1926 and started organizing a counter-coup to restore the ousted president Kazys Grinius. However, the plans were discovered and he along with two co-conspirators were sentenced to death in April 1927. His arrest in violation of the parliamentary immunity became the pretext to dissolve the Third Seimas. Pajaujis received presidential pardons and was freed in 1929, but ordered to leave Lithuania.

He returned to Lithuania in 1932 and taught at the . In late 1938, he returned to politics by joining the anti-Smetona coalition, known as Axis, which grew into the Lithuanian Activist Union. After the Soviet occupation in June 1940, Pajaujis was arrested by the NKVD but freed in February 1941 and given a teaching job at Vilnius University. In June 1941, he became the minister of work and social security in the short-lived Provisional Government of Lithuania. Pajaujis retreated to Germany in 1944 and moved to the United States in 1946. He worked at the University of Alaska (1950–1952) and the Library of Congress (1952–1967), and continued to be involved in Lithuanian political life.

Biography Education Pajaujis was born on 14 March 1894 in near the present-day Lithuania–Poland border. His family were modest farmers who had four other children.