Konstantinas Avižienis

Konstantinas Avižienis (17 April 1894 – 2 January 1922) was a Lithuanian military officer who acted as an assistant military attaché in Moscow under Jurgis Baltrušaitis. Avižienis collected personal documents of some Russian covert agents working in Lithuania, and after sending them back to the country, was shortly killed. Despite the official explanation being that Avižienis was killed by a jealous husband, it is widely believed that Avižienis was murdered by a Cheka agent due to him sending sensitive information to Lithuania. Avižienis was part of the Rūta Lithuanian Students' Society, where in 1914 he was one of the members responsible of organizing a societal evening. In 1917, he was mobilized to the Imperial Russian Army. He then graduated from the with the rank of podporuchik. After returning to Lithuania in 1919, Avižienis was mobilized into the newly-formed Lithuanian Army's 1st Artillery Regiment. He was made lieutenant on 8 October 1920. On 2 January 1922, Avižienis was found dead. Although the killer, named Zheldukov-Pavlov, was found guilty, the Soviet government did not officially conduct any investigation into his motives. Under the pretext of potentially finding sensitive documents,

Avižienis also possibly was involved in Juozas Purickis's corruption scandal, as Avižienis was the addressee of 4 kilograms (8.8 lb) of cocaine in a wider attempt to bypass Lithuanian customs services using diplomatic exemption. According to Bernardas Gailius, it is highly suspicious that possibly the main suspect of the "saccharine case" died just in the heat of the interrogations; the question of who exactly sent Avižienis the cocaine did not arise, and the court seemingly avoided discussing clues against Avižienis.

After Avižienis's death, Jurgis Baltrušaitis noted that the Russians were very unhappy with how the Lithuanian press wrote about the death of Avižienis, accenting their especially negative perception of an article in the Christian Democrat daily newspaper Laisvė. Baltrušaitis wrote to the Lithuanian Ministry of Foreign Affairs to not publish the article, which was entitled Rusija ir Lietuva (Russia and Lithuania). Furthermore, for being responsible for Avižienis's death, Baltrušaitis accused not the "Bolshevik barbarians", but rather another military attaché named Kazys Svila. Supposedly, Svila invited Avižienis's sister to Kaunas to "cause ruffle". Diplomat Vytautas Žalys considers Baltrušaitis's actions to be appeasement of the Soviet Union's foreign policy.