Beginning Prior to the
First World War, the territories of modern-day Belarus were part of the
Russian Empire, which it gained from the
Partitions of Poland more than a century earlier. During the war, the
Great Retreat in the
Western Front in August–September 1915 ended with the lands of
Grodno Governorate and most of
Vilna Governorate being occupied by Germany. The resulting front, passing at 100 kilometres to the west of Minsk, remained static towards the end of the conflict, despite Russian attempts to break it at the
Lake Naroch offensive in late spring 1916, and General
Alexei Evert's inconclusive thrust around the city of
Baranovichi in the summer of that year, during the
Brusilov offensive further south, in western Ukraine. The abdication of
Nicholas II in light of the
February Revolution in Russia in February 1917, activated a rather dormant political life in Belarus. As central authority waned, different political and ethnic groups strived for greater self-determination and even secession from the increasingly ineffective
Russian Provisional Government. The momentum picked up after the incompetent actions of the 10th Army during the ill-fated
Kerensky offensive during the summer. Representatives of Belarusian regions and of different (mostly left-wing) newly established political powers, including the
Belarusian Socialist Assembly, the
Christian democratic movement and the
General Jewish Labour Bund, formed a Belarusian Central Council. However, the national parties in Belarus were unable to secure mass support, and the nationalist movement was confined to a small, divided and ineffective
intelligentsia. Towards the autumn, political stability continued to shake, and countering the rising nationalist tendencies, were the
soviets led by
Bolsheviks when the
October Revolution hit Russia; that same day, on 25 October (7 November) 1917, the Minsk Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies took over the administration of the city. The Bolshevik All-Russian Council of Soviets declared the creation of the
Western Oblast, which unified the Vilna,
Vitebsk,
Mogilev and
Minsk governorates that were not occupied by the German army, to administer the Belarusian lands in the frontal zone. On 26 November (6 December), the executive committee of Workers', Peasants' and Soldiers' Deputies for the Western Oblast was merged with the Western front's executive committee, creating a single
Obliskomzap. During the autumn of 1917 and winter of 1918, the Western Oblast was headed by
Aleksandr Myasnikyan as the head of the Western Oblast's
Military Revolutionary Committee, who passed this duty on to
Kārlis Landers. Myasnikyan took over as chair of the
Russian Social Democratic Labour Party's (RSDRP(b)) committee for the Western Oblast and as the chair of the
Obliskomzap. Countering this, the Belarusian Central Council reorganised itself as the Belarusian National Council (
Rada), and started working on establishing governmental institutions, and discarded the
Obliskomzap as a military formation, rather than governmental. As a result, on 7 (20) December, when the first All-Belarusian Congress convened, the Minsk Bolsheviks commanded the pro-Soviet troops to disbanded it. Following this, they proclaimed the rule of soviets dominated by the Bolsheviks. The first Soviet government in Belarus was established at the end of December by communist organs in Minsk with the support of Russian troops of the Western Front. However, its authority only extended to the regions occupied by pro-communist forces and the major cities, where the local soviets followed Bolshevik leadership.
German involvement The Russo-German front in Belarus remained static since 1915 and formal negotiations began only on 19 November (2 December N.S.), when the Soviet delegation traveled to the German-occupied city of
Brest-Litovsk. A cease-fire was quickly agreed and proper peace negotiations began in December. However, the German party soon went back on its word and took full advantage of the situation, and the Bolsheviks' demand for a treaty "without annexations or indemnities" was unacceptable to the
Central Powers, and on 18 February, hostilities resumed. The German
Operation Faustschlag was of immediate success, and within 11 days, they were able to make a serious advance eastward, taking over Ukraine, the Baltic region, and occupying eastern Belarus. This forced the
Obliskomzap to evacuate to
Smolensk. The
Smolensk Governorate was passed to the Western Oblast. At the end of February, the Germans entered Minsk, which the Soviet authorities had already cleared a few days prior. Faced with the German demands, the Bolsheviks accepted their terms at the final
Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which was signed on 3 March 1918. For the German Empire, Operation Faustschlag achieved one of their strategic plans for World War I, to create a German-centered hegemony of
buffer states, called
Mitteleuropa. On the eve of Germany's occupation of Minsk, some members of the disbanded Belarusian National Council emerged from hiding and formed a provisional government, hoping to achieve German recognition. However, the Germans did not recognise it as another assembly in Vilna was created under their auspices. The Minsk and Vilna organisations issued a joint proclamation on 25 March establishing the
Belarusian Democratic Republic (BDR) with German approval. The new government also sought material aid from Germany. The more radical nationalists who disapproved of collaboration with the Germans went to the communists and fled to Russia. The communists who did not escape to the east during the German occupation were driven underground. In the spring of 1918, the Germans disapproved of the socialist inclinations of the nationalists in the Belarusian government and forced a change in leadership of the puppet government; however, the Germans were also displeased with him and removed him. As a result, the Germans permitted the government less jurisdiction compared to the one in Ukraine. An increase in repression by the Germans also led to an agrarian revolt, although not as violent as the one in Ukraine, which benefitted the communists. The communist underground was directed by the party's Northwestern Regional Committee in Smolensk, which aimed for an alliance with the peasantry.
Creation On 11 September 1918, the
Revolutionary Military Council ordered the creation of the Western Defence region in the Western Oblast out of
Curtain forces which were stationed there. Simultaneously the Council reorganised the Western Oblast as a
Western Commune. After Germany was defeated in the First World War, it announced its evacuation from the occupied territories. The Germans began to depart in November 1918; however, there was no nationalist organisation in Belarus that was capable of assuming political authority, unlike in Ukraine. On 13 November, Moscow annulled the
Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Two days later, it transformed the Defence region into a
Western army. It began an initial
advance westward on 17 November. The Belarusian National Republic barely resisted, evacuating Minsk on 3 December. The Soviets maintained a distance of about between the two armies, and took Minsk on 10 December. As the Red Army re-occupied Belarus, the soviets in the country were dominated by Russian and Jewish parties sympathetic to the communists. Encouraged by their success, in Smolensk on 30–31 December 1918, the Sixth Western Oblast Party conference met and announced its split from the Russian Communist Party, proclaiming itself as the first congress of the Communist Party of Byelorussia (KP(b)B). The next day, the
Soviet Socialist Republic of Byelorussia was proclaimed in Smolensk, terminating the Western Commune, and on 7 January, it was moved to Minsk.
Aleksandr Myasnikyan emerged as head of the All-Byelorussian Central Executive Committee and
Zmicier Zhylunovich as head of the provisional government. The new Soviet republic initially consisted of seven districts:
Baranovichi,
Vitebsk,
Gomel,
Grodno,
Mogilev and
Smolensk. On 30 January, the republic announced its separation from the
Russian SFSR and renaming as the
Soviet Socialist Republic of Byelorussia (SSRB). This was conferred by the First Congress of deputies, composed of workers, soldiers and Red Army soldiers, which met on 2–3 February 1919, to adopt a new socialist constitution. The Red Army continued its westward advance, capturing the city of Grodno on New Year's Day 1919,
Pinsk on 21 January, and Baranovichi on 6 February 1919, thereby enlarging the SSRB.
Litbel The
western winter offensive was not limited to Byelorussia; Soviet forces similarly moved to the north into
Lithuania, as the newly created Soviet republic had hoped to include Lithuania. On 16 December, the
Lithuanian Socialist Soviet Republic (LSSR) was proclaimed in
Vilnius. The
Lithuanian operation and continuing conquest of Byelorussia were threatened by the rise of the
Second Polish Republic after the withdrawal of German forces. However, the
conflict with Poland did not break out and the Soviet High Command's 12 January directive was to cease advance on the
Neman-
Bug rivers. However, the region to the east of those lines was historically mixed among a population of Belarusians, Poles and Lithuanians, with a sizeable Jewish minority. The local communities of each respective group wanted to be part of the respective states that were establishing themselves. , Soviet forces faced Poland as a competing power in the region. In the
Kresy ("borderland") areas of Lithuania, Belarus and western Ukraine, self-organized militias, the
Samoobrona Litwy i Białorusi numbering approximately 2,000 soldiers under General Wejtko, began to fight against the local communist and advancing Bolshevik forces. Each side was trying to secure the territories for its own government. The newly formed Polish Army began sending its organised units to reinforce the militias. On 14 February, the
first clash between regular armies took place and a front emerged. The operations in Lithuania brought the front close to
East Prussia, and the German units that had withdrawn there began to assist the Lithuanian forces to defeat the Soviets; they repelled the Red offensive against
Kaunas in February 1919. Eager to win support, the Bolshevik government decided to merge the Lithuanian and Byelorussian republics into the
Lithuanian–Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic (
Litbel) on 28 February 1919. Its capital was proclaimed as
Vilna, with five governorates:
Vilna,
Grodno,
Kovno,
Suwalki and
Minsk. The Vitebsk and Mogilev governorates were transferred to the Russian SFSR, and were soon joined by the
Gomel Governorate, which was created on 26 April. The two parties of the republics were also combined. The republic was headed by
Vincas Mickevičius-Kapsukas and the combined party was headed by nationalist
Zmicier Zhylunovich. However, the Belarusian nationalists disapproved that the republic was being expanded, and Zhylunovich resigned shortly after, followed by other nationalists. In March 1919, Polish units opened an offensive: forces under General
Stanisław Szeptycki captured the city of
Slonim (2 March) and crossed the Neman, whilst Lithuanian advances forced the Soviets out of
Panevėžys. A final Soviet counter-offensive retook
Panevėžys and
Grodno in early April, but the Western Army was too thinly spread to fight both the Polish and Lithuanian troops, and the German units assisting them. The Polish offensive quickly gained momentum, and
Vilna offensive in April 1919, forced Litbel to evacuate the capital first to
Dvinsk (28 April), then to Minsk (28 April), then to
Bobruysk (19 May). As the Litbel lost territory, its powers were quickly stripped by Moscow. For example, on 1 June,
Vtsik's decree put all of Litbel's armed forces under the command of the Red Army. On 17 July, the Defence Soviet was liquidated, and its function was passed to Minsk's
Milrevcom. When on 8 August Polish forces
captured Minsk, that same day the capital was evacuated to
Smolensk. On 28 August, Lithuanian forces took
Zarasai (the last Lithuanian town held by Litbel) and the same day
Bobruysk fell to the Poles. By late summer of 1919, the Polish advance was also exhausted. The defeat of the Red Army allowed the outbreak of another historic disagreement over territory between Poland and Lithuania; their competition to control the city of Vilna soon erupted into a
military conflict, with Poland winning. Facing Denikin and Kolchak, Soviet Russia could not spare men for the western front. A stalemate with localised skirmishes developed between Poland and Lithuania. The Polish Sejm had also declared that the territories of Belarus were an inalienable part of the Polish Commonwealth. As the Sejm was voting for annexation,
Józef Piłsudski offered the Belarusians federal ties instead; however, the Polish occupation authorities disregarded the social radicalism of the masses and nationalist sentiments among parts of the Belarusian intelligentsia, with the Poles ordering for the lands confiscated by the communists to be returned to the landowners, and Polish being introduced as an official language.
Pawn on a chessboard The stalemate and the occasional, though fruitless, negotiations gave Russia a much-needed pause to concentrate on other regions. During the latter half of 1919, the Red Army successfully defeated Denikin in the south, taking over the Don, North Caucasus and eastern Ukraine, and pushed Kolchak from the Volga, beyond the Ural mountains into
Siberia. In the autumn of 1919,
Nikolai Yudenich's advance on
Petrograd was checked, whilst in the far north the
Evgeny Miller's army was pushed into the Arctic. On the diplomatic front, on 11 September 1919, the
People's Commissar of Foreign Affairs of Soviet Russia,
Georgy Chicherin, sent a note to Lithuania with a proposal for a
peace treaty. It was a
de facto recognition of the Lithuanian state. Similar negotiations with
Estonia and
Latvia, gave way for a peace treaty with the former on 2 February 1920 and a cease-fire agreement with the latter a day earlier. Lenin feared that a Polish offensive was incoming, and offered to accept the current frontline as a permanent border between Poland and Russia, which would include nearly all of Belarus going to Poland. However, Piłsudski had greater ambitions, and he also made an agreement with
Symon Petliura in Ukraine to exchange
Galicia in return for a promise to force out communists in right-bank Ukraine.
War continues were lost after the
Polish victory on the
Nieman River. In April 1920, Poland initiated its
major offensive on Kiev, which although was initially successful, ended in a Polish defeat. The Soviet Red Army was much more organised than it was a year earlier, and though Polish troops managed to make several gains in Ukraine, notably the capture of
Kiev, in Byelorussia, both of its offensives towards
Zhlobin and
Orsha were thrown back in May. In June, the RSFSR was finally ready to open its major Western advance. To preserve the neutrality of Lithuania (though the peace treaty was still being negotiated), on 6 June the exiled government of Litbel was disbanded. Within a few days, the 3rd Cavalry Corps under command of
Hayk Bzhishkyan broke the Polish front, causing a collapse and a retreat. On 11 July Minsk was re-taken, and on 31 July 1920 once again the Soviet Socialist Republic of Belorussia was re-established in Minsk. As the front moved west, and more Belarusian lands were adjoined to the new republic, the first administrative decrees were issued. The entity was divided into seven
uyezds:
Bobruysk,
Borisov,
Igumen, Minsk,
Mozyr and
Slutsk. (Vitebsk, Gomel and Mogilev remained part of the RSFSR.) This time the leaders were
Aleksandr Chervyakov (head of Minsk's milrevcom) and
Wilhelm Knorin (as chairmen of the Central Committee of the Belarusian Communist Party). The SSRB sought to join further territories, as the Red Army crossed into Poland, but the decisive Polish victory at the
Battle of Warsaw in August ended these ambitions. Once again, the Red Army found itself on the defensive in Belorussia. The Poles were able to successfully break the Russian lines at the
Battle of the Niemen River in September 1920. As a result, the Soviets were not only forced to abandon their
World Revolution targets, but
Western Belarus too. However, early autumn rains halted the Polish advance, which exhausted itself by October. A cease-fire agreed on 12 October, came into effect on 18 October.
Slutsk uprising As the negotiations between the Polish Republic and the Russian Bolshevik government took place in
Riga, the Soviet side saw the armistice as only a temporary setback in its western advance. Seeing the failure of overcoming the Polish nationalist rhetoric with Communist propaganda, the Soviet government chose a different tactic, by appealing to the minorities of the Polish state, creating a
fifth column element out of
Belarusians and
Ukrainians. During the negotiations, RSFSR offered all of BSSR to Poland in return for concessions in Ukraine, which were rejected by the Polish side. Eventually a compromising armistice line was agreed, which would see the Belarusian city of
Slutsk handed over to the Bolsheviks. News of Belarus' upcoming permanent division angered the population, and using the town's Polish occupation, the local population began self-organising into a militia and associating itself with the
Belarusian Democratic Republic. On 24 November the Polish units left the town, and for nearly a month the Slutsk partisans resisted Soviet attempts to regain control of the area. Eventually the Red Army had to mobilise two divisions to overcome the resistance, when the last units of Slutsk militia crossed the Moroch River and interned by the Polish border guards.
Early Soviet years In February 1921, the delegations of the Second Polish Republic and the Russian SFSR finally signed the
Treaty of Riga putting an end to hostilities in Europe and Belarus in particular. Six years of war had left the land neglected and looted, and the endless change of occupying regimes, each worse than the previous, left their mark on the Belarusian people, who were now divided. Almost half (
Western Belarus) now belonged to Poland. Eastern Belarus (Gomel, Vitebsk and parts of Smolensk guberniyas) were administered by the RSFSR. The rest was the SSRB, a republic with 52,400 square kilometres and a population of a mere 1.544 million people. An interesting paradox arose in the status of SSRB within the future Bolshevik state. On one hand its small geographic, population and almost negligent economic indicators did not warrant it much political weight on Soviet affairs. In fact the leader of the Communist Party of Byelorussia (Bolshevik),
Alexander Chervyakov would represent Byelorussian communists at seven party congresses in Moscow, but not once be elected into the party's
Central Committee. Moreover, the weak national sentiment of the Belarusian people would easily have allowed SSRB to be disbanded and annexed to the RSFSR, unlike for example Ukraine. On the other hand, the region's strategic role decided its fate, as a full
Union republic within the negotiations upon forming the future state. For one,
Leon Trotsky and his supporters within the Soviet leadership still supported its
World Revolution concept, and as said above, viewed the Treaty of Riga as only a temporary setback to the process, and a future advance would require a prepared bridgehead. This justified giving the SSRB the status of a full union republic within the
Treaty on the Creation of the USSR that was signed on 30 December 1922. SSR Byelorussia became a founding member of the Soviet Union in 1922 and became known as BSSR. However the politics in Moscow took a different course of events, and eventually the accession of
Joseph Stalin saw a new policy adopted:
Socialism in One Country. In accordance with which, expansionist and irredentist claims were removed from Soviet ideology, which instead would focus on making regions economically viable. Thus in March 1924, by decree of the
All-Russian Central Executive Committee, Russia returned most of territories that made up the Vitebsk and Mogilev Governorates, as well as parts of Smolensk. The passing of land that largely survived the destruction of war not only doubled the SSRB's area to 110,600 square kilometres, but also raised the population to 4.2 million people.
SSRB in the mid-1920s According to its entry in the
Great Soviet Encyclopedia, in 1925 SSRB was a largely rural country. Out of the 4,342,800 people that inhabited it, only 14.5% lived in urban areas. Administratively it was split into ten
okrugs:
Bobruysk,
Borisov,
Vitebsk,
Kalinin,
Minsk,
Mogilev,
Mozyr,
Orsha,
Polotsk and
Slutsk; all of which contained a total of 100
raions and 1,229
selsoviets. Only 25 towns and cities and an additional 49 urban settlements. Trotsky's plan for the SSRB to act as a future magnet for the minorities in the
Second Polish Republic is clearly evidenced in the national policies. The republic initially had four official languages:
Belarusian, Russian,
Yiddish, and
Polish, despite the fact that the
Russians and the
Poles made up only around 2% of the total population (most of the latter lived next to the state border in the Minsk and Borisov districts). The most important minority was the
Jewish population of Belarus, which had a long history of targeted oppression under the Tsars, and in 1925 made up almost 44% of the urban population and began to be aided by
affirmative action programmes. In 1924 the government created a committee –
Belkomzet – to allocate land to Jewish families, in 1926 a total of 32,700 hectares were given for 6,860 Jewish families. Jews would continue to play a major role in Byelorussian politics, society and economy right up to the
Second World War; in fact, between 1928 and 1930, the first secretary of the
Communist Party of Byelorussia,
Yakov Gamarnik, was a Jew. Yet, the titular nation of the SSRB were the
Belarusians, which made up 82% of the rural population, but less than half of the urban one (40.1%). The Belarusian national sentiment was a lot weaker than that of neighbouring Ukraine, this was greatly exploited by the Bolshevik-Polish power struggle in the
Polish–Soviet War. (In fact to avoid being annexed to Poland, at the census of 1920, many chose to be label themselves as
Russians. Other estimates put the number at higher than 1.4 million persons, of which 250,000 were sentenced by judicial or executed by extrajudicial bodies (
dvoikas,
troikas, special commissions of the
OGPU,
NKVD,
MGB). Excluding those sentenced in the 1920s–1930s, over 250,000 Belarusians were deported as
kulaks or kulak family members to regions outside the Belarusian Soviet Republic. The scale of Soviet terror in Belarus was higher than in Russia or Ukraine, which resulted in a much stronger extent of
Russification in the republic. A
Polish Autonomous District was founded in 1932 and disbanded in 1935. In September 1939, the Soviet Union, following the
Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact with
Nazi Germany, occupied eastern Poland after the
1939 invasion of Poland. The former Polish territories referred to as
West Belarus were incorporated into the Belarusian SSR, with an exception of the city of
Vilnius and its surroundings that were transferred to
Lithuania. The annexation was internationally recognized after the end of World War II.
Nazi German occupation In the summer of 1941, Belarus was occupied by Nazi Germany. A large part of the territory of Belarus became the
General District Belarus within the
Reichskommissariat Ostland.
Nazi Germany imposed a brutal regime, deporting some 380,000 people for
slave labour and killing hundreds of thousands of civilians more. 800,000
Belarusian Jews (about 90 percent of the Jewish population) were killed during
the Holocaust. At least 5,295 Belarusian settlements were destroyed by the Germans and some or all their inhabitants killed (out of 9,200 settlements that were burned or otherwise destroyed in Belarus during
World War II). More than 600 villages like
Khatyn were totally annihilated. (right) served as Soviet foreign minister (1957–1985) and as
Chairman of the
Presidium of the Supreme Soviet (1985–1988) After World War II, the Byelorussian SSR was given a seat in the United Nations
General Assembly together with the Soviet Union and Ukrainian SSR, becoming one of the founding members of the UN. This was part of a deal with the United States to ensure a degree of balance in the
General Assembly, which, the USSR opined, was unbalanced in favor of the Western Bloc. A Byelorussian, G.G. Chernushchenko, served as
President of the United Nations Security Council from January–February 1975.
Dissolution In its last years during
perestroika under
Mikhail Gorbachev, the Supreme Soviet of Byelorussian SSR declared sovereignty on 27 July 1990 over Soviet laws. On 25 August 1991, after the
failure of the coup in Moscow, the republic proclaimed its political and economic independence from the Soviet Union, however, continued to consider herself part of the USSR. On 19 September the republic was renamed the
Republic of Belarus. On 8 December 1991, it was a signatory, along with Russia and
Ukraine, of the
Belovezha Accords, which replaced the Soviet Union with the
Commonwealth of Independent States. Belarus received independence on 25 December 1991. A day later the Soviet Union ceased to exist. However, the Constitution (Fundamental Law) of the Republic of Belarus of 1978, was retained after independence. ==Politics and government==