Western Belorussia

before the Partitions of Poland in 1772, 1793, and 1795, overlaid with the outline of the Second Republic (1918–1939). Most territories annexed by the Russian Empire during the partitions (in shades of green) remained in the Soviet Union after World War I. The territories of contemporary Belarus, Poland, Ukraine, and the Baltic states were a major theatre of operations during World War I; all the while, the Bolshevik Coup overturned the interim Russian Provisional Government and formed Soviet Russia. The Bolsheviks withdrew from the war with the Central Powers by signing the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, The non-Russians inhabiting the lands ceded by the Soviets to the German Empire, saw the treaty as an opportunity to set up independent states under the German umbrella. Three weeks after the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was signed on 3 March 1918, the newly formed Belarusian Central Council founded the Belarusian People's Republic. The idea was rejected by the Germans, the Bolsheviks and the Americans. Woodrow Wilson rejected it, because the Americans intended to protect the territorial integrity of European Russia. The fate of the region was not settled for the following three and a half years. The Polish–Soviet War which erupted in 1919, was particularly bitter; it ended with the Peace of Riga of 1921. Notably, the peace treaty was signed with the full active participation of the Belarusian delegation on the Soviet side. Rada of the Belarusian Democratic Republic in Exile (1903, yellow) and Mitrofan Dovnar-Zapol'skiy (1919, red), overlaid with the territory of post-1991 Belarus (green) As soon as the Soviet-German peace treaty was signed in March 1918, the newly formed Rada of the Belarusian Democratic Republic laid territorial claims to Belarus based on areas specified in the Third Constituent Charter unilaterally as inhabited by the Belarusian majority. The same Rada charter also declared that the Treaty of Brest-Litowsk of March 1918 was invalid because it was signed by foreign governments partitioning territories that were not theirs. In the Second Constituent Charter, the Rada abolished the right to private ownership of land (paragraph 7) in line with the Communist Manifesto. The League of Nations ratified the new Polish-Soviet border. The peace agreement remained in place throughout the interwar period. The borders established between the two countries remained in force until and the Soviet invasion of Poland. On Joseph Stalin's insistence, the borders were redrawn in the Yalta and Potsdam Conferences. ==Second Polish Republic==

"Despite Soviet efforts at sealing the border [with Poland], peasants – refugees from the BSSR – crossed into Poland in the tens of thousands, wrote Per Anders Rudling. According to the Polish census of 1921, there were around 1 million Belarusians in the country. Some estimated the number of Belarusians in Poland at that time to be perhaps 1.7 million, or even up to . Following the Peace of Riga, thousands of Poles settled in the area, many of them (including veterans of armed struggle for Poland's independence) were given land by the government. In his negotiations with Belarusian leaders in Vilnius, Józef Piłsudski rejected the call for Western Belorussian independence. In December 1919 the Rada was dissolved by Poland, while by early January 1920 a new body was formed, the Rada Najwyższa, without aspirations for independence, but with proposed cultural, social and educational functions. Józef Piłsudski negotiated with the Western Belorussian leadership, but eventually abandoned the ideas of Intermarium, his own proposed federation of partially self-governing states on the lands of the former Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. In the 1922 Polish legislative election, the Belarusian party in the Bloc of National Minorities obtained 14 seats in the Polish parliament (11 of them in the Sejm). In the spring of 1923, Polish prime minister Władysław Sikorski ordered a report on the situation of the Belarusian minority in Poland. That summer, a new regulation was passed allowing for the Belarusian language to officially be used in courts and schools. Obligatory teaching of the Belarusian language was introduced in all Polish gymnasia in areas inhabited by Belarusians in 1927. Polonization The Belarusian population of West Belarus faced active Polonization by the central Polish authorities. The policy pressured Belarusian schooling, discriminated against the Belarusian language, and imposed the Polish national identity on Roman Catholics in Belarus. In January 1921, the starosta from Wilejka wrote of the popular mood as being one of resignation and apathy among the Western Belorussian peasants, impoverished by food requisitions by the Bolsheviks and the Polish military. He insisted that, although the new Belarusian schools were 'springing up everywhere' in his county, they harbored anti-Polish attitudes. In 1928 there were 69 schools with Belarusian language in Western Belorussia; the attendance was minimal due in part to lower quality of instruction. The first-ever textbook of Belarusian grammar was written only around 1918. In 1939, over 90% of children in Poland attended school. As elsewhere, the educational systems promoted Polish language there also. Meanwhile, the Belarusian agitators deported to the USSR from Poland were put in prison by the Soviet NKVD as bourgeois nationalists. Most Polish inhabitants of the region supported the policy of cultural assimilation of Belarusians as proposed by Dmowski. The polonization drive was inspired and influenced by Dmowski's Polish National Democracy, who advocated refusing Belarusians and Ukrainians the right of free national development. Władysław Studnicki, an influential Polish official, stated that Poland's engagement in the East amounts to a much needed economic colonization. Belarusian nationalist media was pressured and censored by the Polish authorities. Belarusians were divided along religious lines with roughly 70% being Orthodox and 30% Roman Catholic. According to Russian sources, discrimination was targeting assimilation of Eastern Orthodox Belarusians. The Polish church authorities promoted Polish in Orthodox services, Hramada , Poland, 1935 Compared to the (larger) Ukrainian minority living in Poland, Belarusians were much less politically aware and active. The largest Belarusian political organization was the Belarusian Peasants' and Workers' Union, also referred to as the Hramada. Hramada received logistical help from the Soviet Union and the Communist International and served as a cover for the radical and subversive Communist Party of Western Belorussia. It was therefore banned by the Polish authorities, its leaders sentenced to various terms in prison and then deported to the USSR, where they were killed by the Soviet regime. Tensions between the increasingly nationalistic Polish government and various increasingly separatist ethnic minorities continued to grow, and the Belarusian minority was no exception. Likewise, according to Marek Jan Chodakiewicz, the USSR considered Poland to be "enemy number one". During the Great Purge, the Polish National District at Dzyarzhynsk was disbanded and the Soviet NKVD undertook the so-called "Polish Operation" (from approximately 25 August 1937, to 15 November 1938) – where the Poles in East Belorussia, i.e. BSSR, were deported and executed. According to Bogdan Musiał, many were murdered in prison executions. In addition, several hundred thousand ethnic Poles from Belarus and Ukraine were deported to other parts of the Soviet Union. The Soviets also promoted the Soviet-controlled BSSR as formally autonomous to attract Belarusians living in Poland. This image was attractive to many Western Belorussian national leaders, and some of them, like Frantsishak Alyakhnovich or Uładzimir Žyłka emigrated from Poland to the BSSR, but very soon became victims of Soviet repression. == Demographics ==

The table below shows a comparison of the number of Belarusians and the number of Poles in Western Belarus based on the 1931 census (questions about mother tongue and religion). Belarusian/Poleshuk("Tutejszy")/Russian and Orthodox/Greek Catholic plurality or majority counties are highlighted with yellow, while Polish and Roman Catholic plurality or majority counties are highlighted with pink: ==Soviet invasion of Poland, 1939==

. Soviet order of battle marked in dark pink. Soon after the Nazi-Soviet invasion of Poland following the Nazi–Soviet Pact, the area of Western Belorussia was formally annexed into the Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic (BSSR). The Soviet secret police NKVD, aided by the Red Army, organized staged elections which were decided in the atmosphere of intimidation and state terror. The Soviet occupational administration held the elections on 22 October 1939, less than two weeks after the invasion. The citizens were threatened repeatedly that their deportations to Siberia were imminent. The ballot envelopes were numbered to remain traceable and usually handed over already sealed. The referendum was rigged. By design, the candidates were unknown to their constituencies which were brought to the voting stations by armed guards. The so-called Elections to the People's Assemblies of Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia were conducted in Russian. The petition was officially accepted by the Supreme Soviet of the USSR on 2 November and by the Supreme Soviet of the BSSR on 12 November 1939. From then on, all citizens of Poland but also born in Poland would find themselves living in the Byelorussian SSR as the Soviet subjects, without the recognition of their Polish citizenship. The Soviet propaganda portrayed the Soviet invasion of Poland as the "reunion of Western Belorussia and Ukraine". Many ethnic Belarusians and Jews welcomed unification with the BSSR. Mostly wealthy groups of citizens changed their attitude after experiencing firsthand the style of the Soviet system. Deportations, arrests, and the reign of terror . The Soviets quickly began confiscating, nationalizing, and redistributing all private and state-owned property. During the two years following the annexation, the Soviets arrested approximately 100,000 Polish citizens across Kresy. Due to a lack of access to the secret Soviet and Belarusian archives, for many years after the war the estimates of the number of Polish citizens deported to Siberia from the areas of Western Belorussia, as well as the number who perished under Soviet rule, were only estimated. In August 2009, on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the Soviet invasion, the authoritative Polish Institute of National Remembrance announced that its researchers reduced the estimate of the number of people deported to Siberia to 320,000 in total. Some 150,000 Polish citizens perished under Soviet rule. The majority of Lithuanians in Belarus intelligentsia and communists were also repressed. ==The Soviet–German War 1941–1945==

The terms of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact signed earlier in Moscow were soon broken, when the German Army entered the Soviet occupation zone on 22 June 1941. After Operation Barbarossa, most of Western Belorussia became part of the German Reichskommissariat Ostland (RKO), as the so-called Generalbezirk Weißruthenien (General Region of White Ruthenia). Many ethnic Belarusians supported Nazi Germany. By the end of 1942, sworn Germanophile Ivan Yermachenka formed the pro-Nazi BNS organization with 30,000 members. The Belarusian Auxiliary Police was formed. Known to the Germans as the Schutzmannschaft, the ethnic Belarusian police played an indispensable role in the Holocaust in Belarus, notably during the second wave of the ghetto liquidations, starting in February–March 1942. It was initially planned to move the capital of the BSSR to Vilna. However, the same year Joseph Stalin ordered that the city and surrounding region be transferred to Lithuania, which some months later was annexed by the Soviet Union and became a new Soviet Republic. Minsk, therefore, remained the capital of the enlarged BSSR. The borders of the BSSR were again altered somewhat after the war (notably the area around the city of Białystok (Belastok Region) was returned to Poland). Still, in general, they coincide with the borders of the modern Republic of Belarus. Sovietization (now Western Belorussia) assembled to greet the arrival of the Red Army during the Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939. The Russian text reads "Long Live the great theory of Marx, Engels, Lenin-Stalin". Such welcomings were organized by the activists of the Communist Party of West Belarus affiliated with the Communist Party of Poland, delegalized in both countries by 1938. The Belarusian political parties and the society in Western Belorussia often lacked information about repressions in the Soviet Union and was under a strong influence of Soviet propaganda. In total, during the next two years some 1.7 million Polish citizens were put on freight trains and sent from the Polish Kresy to labour camps in the Gulag. == Republic of Belarus ==

The majority of Poles live in the Western regions, including 230,000 in the Grodno oblast. In addition, Sapotskin and its selsoviet have a Polish majority. The largest Polish organization in Belarus is the Union of Poles in Belarus (Związek Polaków na Białorusi), with over 20,000 members. ==See also==