Lithuania Declares Independence: Freedom From Empire

Twenty men in a rented hall in Vilnius signed a document declaring Lithuania an independent democratic republic on February 16, 1918, while German troops still occupied every inch of Lithuanian territory. The Act of Independence was an audacious act of political will by the Council of Lithuania, asserting sovereignty over a nation that had not governed itself since the Russian Empire absorbed it in 1795 — 123 years of erasure undone in a single page. Lithuania had once been a major European power. The Grand Duchy of Lithuania, at its peak in the 15th century, stretched from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea. But the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was partitioned out of existence in the late 18th century, and Lithuania spent the next century under Russian imperial rule, enduring forced Russification, a ban on Lithuanian-language publications in the Latin alphabet, and the suppression of national institutions. World War I created the opening. Germany occupied Lithuania in 1915, and as the Russian Empire collapsed, Lithuanian leaders organized a national conference in Vilnius in September 1917. The conference elected the Council of Lithuania (Taryba) and authorized it to pursue independence. Germany initially tried to make Lithuania a satellite state, proposing a "perpetual alliance" with the German Empire. The Taryba rejected the arrangement and on February 16, 1918, declared unconditional independence with no ties to any other state. The declaration was more aspiration than reality. German forces remained until November 1918, and the new republic immediately faced invasions from Soviet Russia, Bermontians, and Poland, which seized Vilnius in 1920. Lithuania survived by fighting on multiple fronts simultaneously, establishing its capital in Kaunas, and building democratic institutions from scratch. The republic lasted until Soviet annexation in 1940. When Lithuania declared independence again in 1990, becoming the first Soviet republic to break away, it dated its sovereignty to that February day in 1918 — treating the Soviet period as an illegal occupation, not a legitimate change of government.