Declaration of the Taryba

On 11 December 1917, in German-occupied Vilna, the Taryba, the twenty-member Council of Lithuania headed by Antanas Smetona, met. It adopted a declaration in which, invoking the right of nations to self-determination and the resolution of the September Lithuanian conference in Vilna, it proclaimed the restoration of an independent Lithuanian state with Vilna as its capital and the severing of all state ties that had bound Lithuania to other states. The second part of the act, however, asked the German Empire for protection and assistance and declared in favour of a “perpetual, firm alliance” with Germany. This was to be realised through military and transport conventions and a customs and currency union. It was independence under a German protectorate.

The Taryba had been created in September 1917. The Germans, who since 1915 had ruled Lithuania through the military administration of Ober Ost, allowed a conference of more than two hundred Lithuanian activists to be convened in Vilna, because they expected it to come out in favour of separation from Russia and a close union with the Reich. The conference, which sat from 18 to 23 September, demanded an independent Lithuania, however, and made closer relations with Germany conditional on Germany’s recognition of the new state. It also elected the Taryba, which was to put this resolution into effect. German censorship did not allow the resolution to be published.

After the Bolshevik coup and the start of talks on an armistice on the Eastern Front, Berlin needed a document that, before the peace negotiations, would show that the Lithuanians themselves wanted to break away from Russia and bind themselves to Germany. According to Lithuanian historians, the first draft of the act demanded by Chancellor Georg von Hertling was prepared by the German Foreign Office. A small Taryba delegation with Smetona and the Social Democrat Steponas Kairys agreed a compromise text in Berlin, and the German side demanded that it be adopted without a single word changed. On 11 December the Taryba did just that. According to Lithuanian accounts, 15 members of the Council voted for the declaration, three against, one abstained and one did not take part in the vote. The act was drawn up in German. Its German copy bears 19 signatures.

Some Lithuanian politicians, including those in emigration, considered that the Taryba had exceeded its powers: the Vilna conference had stipulated that the system of government and relations with neighbours were to be decided by a democratically elected constituent assembly. For Poles something else mattered most. The declaration proclaimed as the capital of the Lithuanian state Vilna, a city in which, according to the German census of 1916, Poles made up about half the inhabitants and Lithuanians about 2.6 per cent. There were no representatives of the Vilna Poles in the Taryba, and its plans meant that the dispute over Vilna and the lands of the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania would become one of the main conflicts in this part of Europe.

The Germans were in no hurry to recognise Lithuania and did not invite its representatives to Brest-Litovsk. In January 1918 the Taryba tried to remove the clause about the alliance from the act and add a commitment to a constituent assembly. When the Germans rejected this and the majority of the Council gave way, four left-wing members, among them Kairys and Stanisław Narutowicz, brother of the future president of Poland, left the Taryba for a time. On 16 February 1918 the Taryba adopted a new Act of Independence, this time without any mention of a union with Germany. Emperor Wilhelm II, however, recognised independent Lithuania on 23 March 1918 on the basis of the declaration of 11 December.