Belarus
World War and Revolution
Figure 5. Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR), 1923
Source: Based on information from Paul Robert
Magocsi, Ukraine: A Historical Atlas, Toronto, 1985, 9, 24.
The outbreak of World War I in 1914 turned Belorussia into a
zone of strict martial law, military operations, and great destruction. Large German and
Russian armies fought fiercely and caused the expulsion or departure of more than 1
million civilians from the country. The Russian government's inept war efforts and
ineffective economic policies prompted high food prices, shortages of goods, and many
needless deaths in the war. Discontent in the cities and the countryside spread, leading
to strikes, riots, and the eventual downfall of the tsarist government.
The two revolutions of 1917--the February Revolution and the
Bolshevik Revolution--gave nationally conscious Belorussians an opportunity to advance
their political cause. Bolshevism did not have many followers among the natives of
Belorussia; instead, local political life was dominated by the Socialist Revolutionary
Party, the Mensheviks
(see Glossary), the Bund
(see Glossary), and various Christian movements in which the clergy of both the Russian
Orthodox Church and the Polish Catholic Church played significant roles. The Belorussian
political cause was represented by the Belorussian Socialist Party, the Socialist
Revolutionary Party, the Leninist Social Democratic Party, and various nationalist groups
advocating moderate forms of socialism.
In December 1917, more than 1,900 delegates to the
AllBelorussian Congress (Rada) met in Minsk to establish a democratic republican
government in Belorussia, but Bolshevik soldiers disbanded the assembly before it had
finished its deliberations. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March 1918 put most of
Belorussia under German control, but on March 25, 1918, the Central Executive Committee of
the Rada nullified the treaty and proclaimed the independence of the Belorussian National
Republic. Later that year, the German government, which had guaranteed the new state's
independence, collapsed, and the new republic was unable to resist Belorussian Bolsheviks
supported by the Bolshevik government in Moscow. The Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic
(Belorussian SSR) was established on January 1, 1919, by force of arms.
For the next two years, Belorussia was a prize in the
PolishSoviet War, a conflict settled by the Treaty of Riga in March 1921. Under the terms
of the treaty, Belorussia was divided into three parts: the western portion, which was
absorbed into Poland; central Belorussia, which formed the Belorussian SSR; and the
eastern portion, which became part of Russia. The Belorussian SSR was incorporated into
the Soviet
Union (see Glossary) when the Soviet Union was founded in December 1922 (see fig.
5).
The territory of the Belorussian SSR was enlarged in both
1924 and 1926 by the addition of Belorussian ethnographic regions that had become part of
Russia under the Treaty of Riga. The area of the republic was expanded from its original
post-treaty size of 51,800 square kilometers to 124,320 square kilometers, and the
population increased from 1.5 million to almost 5 million persons.
The New Economic Policy (NEP--see
Glossary), established by Vladimir I. Lenin in 1921 as a temporary compromise with
capitalism, stimulated economic recovery in the Soviet Union, and by the mid-1920s
agricultural and industrial output in Belorussia had reached 1913 levels. Historically,
Belorussia had been a country of landlords with large holdings, but after the Bolshevik
Revolution, these landlords were replaced by middle-class landholders; farm collectives
were practically nonexistent. When forced collectivization
(see Glossary) and confiscations began in 1928, there was strong resistance, for which the
peasantry paid a high social price: peasants were allowed to starve in some areas, and
so-called troublemakers were deported to Siberia. Because peasants slaughtered their
livestock rather than turn it over to collective
farms (see Glossary), agriculture suffered serious setbacks. However, the rapid
industrialization that accompanied forced collectivization enabled the Moscow government
to develop new heavy industry in Belarus quickly.
During the period of the NEP, the Soviet government relaxed
its cultural restrictions, and Belorussian language and culture flourished. But in the
1930s, when Stalin was fully in power, Moscow's attitude changed, and it became important
to Moscow to bind both Belorussia and its economy as closely to the Soviet Union as
possible. Once again, this meant Russification of the people and the culture. The
Belorussian language was reformed to bring it closer to the Russian language, and history
books were rewritten to show that the Belorussian people had strived to be united with
Russia throughout their history. Political persecutions in the 1930s reached genocidal
proportions, causing population losses as great as would occur during World War II-- more
than 2 million persons. |