What made the Soviet Union fall apart? Some say guns, others butter. Others credit Ronald Reagan, Mikhail Gorbachev or Pope John Paul II. No doubt these all played their parts. But a more rewarding case can be made that it was the little-known Republic of Uzupis that did it in the end.

Like most epic historical claims, the case for Uzupis’s role in defeating the Soviet empire is a circuitous one. One should avoid noting, for instance, that this leafy 168-acre neighbourhood in Vilnius possessed neither statehood nor the accoutrements of it in that fateful year, 1991. Likewise, disregard the fact that Uzupis’s independence, declared in 1997, remains a source of laughter in the Lithuanian capital today.