Domas Cesevičius

Domas Cesevičius (1902–1986) was born in Dapšioniai, Panevėžys County. In 1924, he graduated from Panevėžys Gymnasium and enrolled in the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Lithuania (later Vytautas Magnus University), specialising in philosophy. After completing his studies in 1928, he pursued further education in economics at the Faculty of Economic and Social Sciences of the University of Cologne, where he defended his doctoral dissertation, “The Lithuanian Financial System”. In 1929, he served as the secretary of the Lithuanian Consulate in Cologne. Upon returning to Kaunas in 1933, Cesevičius joined the Faculty of Law at Vytautas Magnus University as a junior assistant in the Department of Private Economy Studies. In 1934, he was promoted to a senior assistant. Between December 1934 and January 1935, Cesevičius completed his military service. In 1935, he became a senior research associate in the Department of Economic Policy and was appointed a Privatdozent a year later. From 1933 to 1937, he was the economics editor at the Lithuanian daily newspaper “Lietuvos Aidas” and became its editor-in-chief in 1939. He completed his research fellowships in France (1937), at the universities of Manchester, Oxford, and London (1938), as well as at the University of Chicago (1939). On 1 January 1940, Cesevičius was transferred by the Minister of Education to Vilnius University as an associate professor at the Faculty of Economics. In July 1940, he was arrested by the Soviet authorities and deported in June 1941, spending four years in a labour camp in Komi until 1945. After his return, he served as the head of the Industrial Economics Department at Vilnius University from 1945 to 1946, when he was dismissed from his position by the Order of the Rector, citing that “he continued to promote bourgeois theories in his lectures, which were contrary to the principles of Soviet science and the Soviet state”. In 1950, Cesevičius was arrested and imprisoned in Vilnius, and in 1951, exiled to the Krasnoyarsk Krai. After his return to Lithuania in 1954, he worked at the Institute of Economics and, from 1960 to 1964, at the Institute of Urban Planning.