Pranas Lesauskis

Biography Lesauskis was born on November 17, 1900, in Žeberiai, Tverai County, Telšiai District, Russian Empire. In 1921 he graduated the War School of Kaunas, in 1927 University of Lithuania, in 1927-1930 he studied at Turin Higher School of Artillery Technology (1927–1930), and in 1931 he defended his PhD thesis at Royal University of Rome. Lesauskis took an active part in public life – he was elected a member of the Construction Commission of the Kaunas Garrison Officers' Club Building, the College of the Military Museum and the Editorial Board of the military science magazine Mūsų žinynas. Moreover, he also was a member of the Lithuanian Society of Naturalists and Economic Studies, chairman of the Society for Scientific Management, and participated in the activities of the Naujoji Romuva Intellectuals' Club, where he multiple times lectured reports and published articles on management in the journal Naujoji Romuva.

Following the Soviet occupation of Lithuania in 1940 which resulted in the abolition of the Lithuanian Armed Forces and its institutions in the same year, he began lecturing at the Vytautas Magnus University. In order to preserve the Research Laboratory, Lesauskis together with Juozas Vėbra proposed to connect it to the university. This preserved the unique laboratory, most of its staff in 1941 avoided political repressions and started working at the Faculty of Technology of Kaunas University, which was established in the Research Laboratory (now – Faculty of Chemical Technology of Kaunas University of Technology).

In 1940 Lesauskis was invited to lecture at the Leningrad Military Academy, but chose the Vytautas Magnus University Faculty of Technology. On January 4, 1941, Lesauskis was recognized as a professor. Nevertheless, on the night of January 2, 1940, Lesauskis was arrested by the NKVD, sentenced to 8 years for deliberate damage to the sale of weapons to the Spanish Republic, and imprisoned in a Gulag, where he died due to exhaustion from famine. On April 28, 1958, he was posthumously rehabilitated by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the Soviet Union.