After the partition of the Lithuanian and Polish Commonwealth at the end of the 18th century, Lithuania suffered under the occupation of tsarist Russia for more than a hundred years. After two unsuccessful uprisings in the 19th century, the tsar’s administration tried to russify Lithuania, forbidding people to speak Lithuanian in public institutions such as schools and offices and banning any Lithuanian publication in the Latin script. A movement for national revival in the 19th century culminated in the declaration of Lithuanian independence on the 16th of February 1918 after the First War. The date was celebrated as Independence Day during the inter-war Republic of Lithuania. When the USSR occupied Lithuania in 1940, the celebration was prohibited, although participants in the post-war resistance movement would mark it by raising the national flag or posting anti-soviet proclamations. Only when Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of perestroika (re-structuring) was in full sway in the late 1980s, could the day be openly celebrated again.

The poster ‘The 16th of February’ was published by the state publishing house Mintis. The military flag of the medieval Grand Duchy of Lithuania forms the main component of the poster. During the famous battle of Grunwald in 1410, when the joint armies of Poland and Lithuania won a decisive victory over the Teutonic Knights, the Lithuanian soldiers had gone into battle under a red flag with a silver knight. The same emblem was used on the coat of arms of the restored Lithuanian state in 1918. The poster therefore reminded Lithuanians of two glorious moments in the country’s distant and more recent history and invited them to seek Lithuanian independence once more.

The poster design was assembled for printing as a collage. The motif from the coat of arms was photographed from an inter-war publication, then cut and pasted on a red surface. The text was assembled from re-photographed letters.

The poster designer Stasys Aukštuolis (b. 1957) graduated from the Tallinn Art Institute in Estonia. When he returned to Lithuania in 1982, he worked as an artist for a state publishing house producing posters, graphic design projects and prints. He has participated in exhibitions in Lithuania and abroad and currently practices printing and drawing.