Varniai concentration camp was an internment camp in Varniai, Lithuania. It was created a month after the coup d'état of December 1926 to house political prisoners, mostly members of the outlawed Communist Party of Lithuania. In total, more than 1,000 people passed through the camp before it was closed in 1931 due to financial difficulties brought by the Great Depression. Later, the authoritarian regime of Antanas Smetona operated two other internment camps, one in Dimitravas in 1936 and another in Pabradė in 1939.

Karolis Juozovic Požela was one of the early Lithuanian communist leaders. As a medical student at the University of Tartu, he joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (bolsheviks) in 1916. In the short-lived Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic he organized communists in Šiauliai. After the collapse of the Soviet regime, Požela joined the underground Communist Party of Lithuania (CPL) becoming a member of its Central Committee in 1921. When party leadership was arrested in Königsberg in 1921, he remained essentially the only party leader in Lithuania. He continued political work and became a member of CPL Orgburo in 1923 and Politburo in 1926. At various times, he edited and published various communist newspapers and publications, including Tiesa (Truth), Kareivių tiesa, and Darbininkų gyvenimas. For his communist activities, he was imprisoned a total of six times. When Lithuanian military organized the coup d'état of 17 December 1926, the official rationale was to protect Lithuania from an imminent Bolshevik revolt. In the aftermath, many communists were arrested. Požela and three others, who became known as the four communards, were executed on 27 December in the Sixth Fort of the Kaunas Fortress.