first few years. Antanas Smetona had served as Lithuania's first president between April 1919 and June 1920; he then withdrew from formal political involvement, although he published political criticism, for which he served a brief prison term in 1923. Augustinas Voldemaras represented Lithuania at the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in 1918 and later served as Prime Minister, Minister of Defense, and Minister of Foreign Affairs. He resigned from the government in 1920, although he continued to write and publish political criticism, for which he also was sentenced to a short prison term. Kazys Grinius had chaired a post-World War I repatriation commission, and went on to serve as head of the 6th Cabinet of Ministers and in the First and Second Seimas. Mykolas Sleževičius served as prime minister in 1918 and 1919, oversaw the organization of the Lithuanian armed forces in 1920, and was a member of the Second Seimas between 1922 and 1926. 1926 parliamentary election Between 8 and 10 May 1926, regular elections to the Third Seimas were held. For the first time since 1920, the bloc led by the Lithuanian Christian Democratic Party, which strongly supported the Roman Catholic Church and its clergy, did not obtain a majority. The Lithuanian people were disillusioned with this party, as its members had been involved in several financial scandals: Juozas Purickas had been using his diplomatic privileges in Moscow to deal in cocaine and saccharin; Eliziejus Draugelis and Petras Josiukas had purchased cheap low-quality smoked pig fat from Germany instead of buying from Lithuanian farmers; and the Minister of Finance, Vytautas Petrulis, had transferred a large sum of money from the state budget to his personal account. The party's strategies for coping with an economic crisis were perceived as ineffective. An additional tension arose when the Concordat of 1925 between Poland and the Holy See unilaterally recognized Vilnius as an ecclesiastical province of Poland, despite Lithuanian requests to govern Vilnius directly from Rome. Although it was not traditionally a Vatican policy to establish an arrangement of this type, the decision was objected to strongly by many Lithuanians. The decision implied that the Pope had recognized Polish claims to Vilnius, and this created a loss of prestige for the Christian Democrats. Diplomatic relations with the Holy See were severed, and they did not improve when Pope Pius XI unilaterally established and reorganized Lithuanian ecclesiastical provinces in April 1926 without regard to Lithuanian