SUMMARY:

This article is devoted to the question of Vilnius as the capital of a modern Lithuanian nation-state in the Lithuanian national movement in the late imperial period. In this article, the author attempts to reveal the reasons behind such a decision, to identify the problems that Lithuanian nationalists faced in seeking to implement this goal, and to answer the question of how the leaders of the Lithuanian National Movement hoped to implement the goal. It is claimed that despite the very unfavorable ethnodemographic situation of Lithuanians in the city and disapproval among other nationalities, Vilnius was proclaimed the future national capital of Lithuanians/Lithuania not only in order to claim historical rights for an independent state but also because this city was the most important religious and official center of the region, and finally because of the need to nationalize the population of the Vilnius region. Lithuanian political forces tried to find allies among the movements that opposed the Russian Empire, but their search produced no results. Some of the Lithuanian leaders, particularly from the right, hoped for the support of the imperial government, but the latter was not ready to agree to the territorialization of ethnicity, and thus to the autonomy of ethnographic Lithuania with Vilnius.