Vilna conference

On 18 September 1917, exactly two years after the Germans took Vilna, a conference of Lithuanian national activists met in the city. The German military administration had allowed it to be called because it expected the Lithuanians to declare for separation from Russia and a close union with the Reich. The conference, which sat until 22 September, demanded an independent Lithuanian state instead, and made rapprochement with Germany subject to conditions. It also elected the twenty-member Taryba, the Council of Lithuania, which was to put these resolutions into effect.

A conference without elections

Since 1915 the Lithuanian lands had been under Ober Ost, the German military administration subordinate to the supreme command in the east. The Germans treated them as spoils: they requisitioned food, felled the forests and drafted the inhabitants into labour battalions. Berlin was thinking of surrounding the Reich in the east with a belt of formally independent states subordinate to it, and in 1917 the Germans began looking for a Lithuanian body that would support these plans. In the spring the occupation authorities proposed a council of trust attached to the military administration. Some Lithuanian leaders, among them Antanas Smetona, refused to take part in it.

The talks with the Germans were conducted by the Lithuanian Society for the Relief of War Sufferers. It demanded a congress elected by the people, but the Germans agreed only to a conference without elections. A five-member organising committee, which included Smetona and Jurgis Šaulys, invited the delegates itself, several from each district, trying to bring in representatives of different parties and classes. 264 people were invited. 213 came to the opening, and the number of participants later rose to 222. According to historians’ tallies, priests, farmers and members of the intelligentsia were the most numerous. The proceedings, chaired by Jonas Basanavičius, were held in a Vilna theatre, behind closed doors and without German participation.

Resolutions

The delegates began with complaints about forced labour, requisitions and the felling of forests. They then unanimously adopted a resolution under which Lithuania was to be an independent, democratic state within ethnographic borders. Its system of government and its relations with its neighbours were to be decided by a constituent assembly, elected in Vilna in democratic elections by all the inhabitants of the country, and national minorities were to be guaranteed cultural rights. The part concerning Germany was conditional. The conference stated that Lithuania’s interests inclined not so much to the east or the south as to the west, that is, not towards Russia or Poland but towards Germany. It considered a union with the Reich possible, however, only if Germany proclaimed the Lithuanian state before the peace conference and supported its cause.

On 21 September the conference elected the twenty-member Taryba. The Social Democrats protested that they had received only two seats in it, while several went to priests. Later two members stepped down, and Jonas Vileišis and Stanisław Narutowicz, brother of the future President of Poland, were co-opted in their place. Smetona became chairman of the Taryba.

The Germans and the Poles

The Germans were dissatisfied. They had expected a declaration of union with the Reich and received a conditional resolution and a demand for independence. The censors did not allow the resolutions to be published. Even so, on 23 September the German military administration, on behalf of the Commander-in-Chief in the East, Prince Leopold of Bavaria, formally recognised the Taryba, although it treated it more as an advisory body than as a Lithuanian authority.

The conference met a few days after Germany and Austria-Hungary had established a Regency Council in Warsaw. Polish and Lithuanian plans soon collided. The Lithuanians saw Vilna as their historic capital, although according to the German census of 1916 Lithuanians made up less than 3 per cent of the city’s inhabitants and Poles about half. There were no representatives of the Vilna Poles in the Taryba. The Poles were dissatisfied with its creation and denied its right to represent all the inhabitants of Lithuania, and Lithuanian and Polish notions of what “ethnographic Lithuania” meant differed fundamentally.

The Taryba was to negotiate with the Germans and proclaim independence. In December, as Germany prepared for peace talks with the Bolsheviks, it adopted a declaration that was to bind this independence to the Reich.