Ladas Vladas Serbenta

Ladas Vladas Serbenta (1900–1974) was born in the village of Prapuoleniai, Vilkaviškis County. In 1905, his father, Andrius Serbenta, emigrated to the United States. He completed primary school in Marijampolė and later enrolled in Marijampolė Gymnasium. While he was in the third grade, World War I broke out. In addition to his studies, he helped support his family, working in a bookbinding shop, as a painter, and as a typesetter. For some time, he lived in Voronezh in a dormitory for children of deportees, where he completed the fourth and fifth grades. He moved to Kharkiv for a short time, and later returned to Voronezh. In 1918, he organised a workers’ trade union in Marijampolė, and in 1919, elections to a workers’ representative council. For these activities, he was imprisoned. In 1921, he finally graduated from Marijampolė Real Gymnasium and subsequently worked as a teacher. In 1926, he emigrated to Austria. From 1926 to 1929, he published the underground periodical Revoliucionierius (The Revolutionary) in Königsberg. From 1929 to 1934, he studied political economy in Vienna, where he also worked as a journalist. Ladas Vladas Serbenta returned to Lithuania in 1939, and in 1940 was appointed Director of the Vilnius Secondary School of Economics. In 1944, he became an associate professor at Vilnius State University and taught at the Faculty of Economic Sciences until 1950. That year, he was arrested and deported to the Irkutsk region. Later, he worked at the Institute of Economics of the Academy of Sciences and at the Lithuanian Institute of Agricultural Economics.