Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic

• 1. Introduction

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  The Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic spent most of the twentieth century as a place other powers fought over, traded away, and occasionally forgot. At the end of World War II, its losses were staggering: over two million people killed in just three years of German occupation, almost a quarter of the entire population. More than 600 villages, like Khatyn, were totally annihilated. Yet within months of Germany's defeat, this republic that had been nearly bled dry earned a seat in the newly founded United Nations, making it one of only two Soviet republics granted that extraordinary status.

  How did a territory with a population of barely a million and a half people after the Polish-Soviet War become a founding member of both the Soviet Union and the United Nations? What did the name Byelorussia actually mean, and who were the Belarusians in the first place? And why, in a March 1991 referendum, did nearly 84 percent of the population vote to preserve the very union that five months later they would declare independence from? These are the questions this documentary will answer.

• 2. A Name With Many Lives

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  Byelorussia derives from Belaya Rus, meaning White Rus. The origins of that name are genuinely contested. One theory with an ethno-religious basis suggests it described the part of old Ruthenian lands within the Grand Duchy of Lithuania that had been settled primarily by early Christianized Slavs, distinguishing them from Black Ruthenia, a region more heavily populated by pagan Balts.

  The name carried political weight long before the Soviet era. Russian Tsars styled themselves rulers of All the Russias, meaning Great, Little, and White Russia combined. This framing asserted that Belarusians were simply a variant of the Russian people rather than a distinct nation. After the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, the term White Russia created a new and confusing problem: the Bolshevik enemies who fought them in the civil war were called the White forces. A name meant to describe an ancient territory now sounded like a declaration of opposition to the revolution.

  In 1936, the republic's formal name was fixed by the 1936 Soviet Constitution as the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic. When the republic declared independence and renamed itself on the 19th of September 1991, conservative forces within the newly independent state actually opposed the change. They did not support the new name Belarus appearing in the 1991 draft of the Constitution.

• 3. Born From Chaos

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  On the 25th of October 1917, the same day the October Revolution struck Russia, the Minsk Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies seized control of the city. The German military occupation that followed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March 1918 left the Bolsheviks evacuating eastward and the Belarusian nationalist movement scrambling for relevance.

  The nationalists were a thin force. The national parties in Belarus had failed to secure mass support, and the movement was confined to a small, divided intelligentsia. When Minsk and Vilna organizations issued a joint proclamation on the 25th of March 1918 establishing the Belarusian Democratic Republic under German approval, the more radical nationalists who refused to collaborate with Germany simply fled to Russia and joined the communists. The puppet government was given less jurisdiction than the one Germany had set up in Ukraine, and an increase in repression sparked an agrarian revolt.

  When Germany collapsed in November 1918, there was no nationalist organization in Belarus capable of stepping into the vacuum, unlike in Ukraine. The Soviets moved quickly. On the 30th and the 31st of December 1918, the Sixth Western Oblast Party conference in Smolensk proclaimed itself the first congress of the Communist Party of Byelorussia. The very next day, the Soviet Socialist Republic of Byelorussia was proclaimed in Smolensk. On the 7th of January 1919 it relocated to Minsk, with Aleksandr Myasnikyan leading the executive committee and Zmicier Zhylunovich heading the provisional government.

• 4. Pawn Between Empires

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  The Litbel experiment of 1919 shows exactly how expendable Belarus was to its would-be rulers. On the 28th of February 1919, the Bolsheviks merged the Lithuanian and Byelorussian republics into the Lithuanian-Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic, with its capital at Vilna and five governorates. The Vitebsk and Mogilev regions were simply transferred to Russia, and the Belarusian nationalists, led by Zmicier Zhylunovich, resigned in protest.

  Polish forces under General Stanislaw Szeptycki captured Slonim on the 2nd of March 1919, and the Polish offensive gained momentum fast. Litbel's capital moved from Vilna on the 28th of April, then to Minsk, then to Bobruysk on the 19th of May. When Polish forces took Minsk on the 8th of August, the government fled to Smolensk the same day. By late summer, Litbel had ceased to function.

  During the peace negotiations in Riga, the Soviet side offered to hand all of the BSSR to Poland in exchange for concessions in Ukraine. Poland rejected the offer, but the compromise armistice line handed the city of Slutsk to the Bolsheviks. The news prompted a local uprising: on the 24th of November 1920, Polish units withdrew and Slutsk's population organized its own militia, resisting Soviet forces for nearly a month before the Red Army mobilized two divisions to crush the resistance, driving the last Slutsk militia units across the Moroch River into Polish custody.

• 5. A Tiny Republic With Strategic Value

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  After the Treaty of Riga in February 1921, the situation looked grim on paper. Six years of war had produced a rump SSRB of just 52,400 square kilometres with a population of only 1.544 million. Alexander Chervyakov represented Byelorussian communists at seven party congresses in Moscow without once being elected to the party's Central Committee. The republic's geographic and economic insignificance would normally have made it a candidate for absorption into Russia.

  But Leon Trotsky saw Belarus as a future bridgehead for the World Revolution, a prepared jumping-off point once the Soviet advance westward resumed. That strategic logic gave the SSRB the weight it needed. On the 30th of December 1922, Belarus became one of the four founding members of the Soviet Union alongside Russia, Ukraine, and Transcaucasia.

  Once Stalin's policy of Socialism in One Country replaced Trotsky's expansionist vision, the calculus shifted to economics. In March 1924, by decree of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, Russia returned most of the Vitebsk and Mogilev territories and parts of Smolensk. This transfer more than doubled the SSRB's area to 110,600 square kilometres and raised the population to 4.2 million people. A further expansion on the 6th of December 1926 added the Gomel and Rechytsa areas, bringing the total to 126,300 square kilometres.

• 6. Nationalities and the Soviet Experiment

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  In 1925, according to the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, the SSRB was a largely rural country: only 14.5 percent of its 4,342,800 inhabitants lived in cities. The republic initially maintained four official languages: Belarusian, Russian, Yiddish, and Polish, even though Russians and Poles together made up only around 2 percent of the total population.

  The Jewish population of Belarus had a long history of targeted oppression under the Tsars. By 1925 Jews made up nearly 44 percent of the urban population and were active participants in the republic's political and economic life. Between 1928 and 1930, the first secretary of the Communist Party of Byelorussia was Yakov Gamarnik, who was Jewish. The government created a committee called Belkomzet in 1924 to allocate land to Jewish families; in 1926, a total of 32,700 hectares were distributed to 6,860 Jewish families.

  The policy of Korenizatsiya, or nativization, pushed Belarusian language, folklore, and culture to the foreground. This served two purposes simultaneously: it countered the influence of the exiled Belarusian Democratic Republic among the population of western Belarus under Polish control, and it helped prevent a repeat of the Slutsk uprising. At the census of 1920, many Belarusians had identified themselves as Russians to avoid annexation to Poland, which illustrated how weakly developed the national identity was. Korenizatsiya aimed to reverse that.

• 7. Occupation and Catastrophe

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  The 1930s brought Soviet repressions on a scale that dwarfed the experience of other republics. Incomplete calculations put the number of victims of Soviet repressions in Belarus between 1917 and 1953 at about 600,000 people; other estimates reach above 1.4 million. Of those, 250,000 were sentenced by judicial or extrajudicial bodies. More than 250,000 Belarusians were deported as kulaks or members of kulak families to regions outside the republic. Historians have noted that the scale of Soviet terror in Belarus was higher than in Russia or Ukraine, which resulted in a more extensive Russification of the republic.

  In September 1939, following the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the Soviet Union occupied eastern Poland. The former Polish territories known as West Belarus were incorporated into the Byelorussian SSR, with the exception of Vilnius and its surroundings, which went to Lithuania.

  The German invasion in the summer of 1941 turned Belarus into one of the war's most devastated territories. The Nazis deported approximately 380,000 people for slave labour and killed hundreds of thousands of civilians. Around 800,000 Belarusian Jews, about 90 percent of the Jewish population, were killed during the Holocaust. At least 5,295 settlements were destroyed and their inhabitants killed or expelled, out of 9,200 settlements that were burned or otherwise destroyed across Belarus. The total dead across three years of German occupation exceeded two million people. In recognition of those losses, the BSSR was granted a seat in the United Nations General Assembly when the organization was founded on the 24th of October 1945, alongside the Soviet Union and Ukrainian SSR. G.G. Chernushchenko, a Byelorussian, would later serve as President of the United Nations Security Council from January to February 1975.

• 8. The End and What Remained

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  By the late 1980s, the BSSR had become one of the Soviet Union's most economically productive republics. Its advanced manufacturing sector made it a notable producer of consumer electronics, processed agricultural goods, potash, fertilizer, machinery, grain, and military equipment. The republic ranked among the more developed in terms of education and technological expertise.

  The Supreme Soviet of the Byelorussian SSR declared sovereignty over Soviet laws on the 27th of July 1990. Then came the referendum of the 17th of March 1991: nearly 84 percent of the population voted in favor of preserving the USSR. The result held for only five months. On the 25th of August 1991, following the failed coup in Moscow, the republic declared political and economic independence, while still considering itself part of the union. The name changed to the Republic of Belarus on the 19th of September.

  On the 8th of December 1991, Belarus signed the Belovezha Accords alongside Russia and Ukraine, replacing the Soviet Union with the Commonwealth of Independent States. The Soviet Union formally dissolved on the 26th of December 1991. Belarus, however, retained the Constitution of the Republic of Belarus that dated from 1978, carrying the legal framework of the BSSR forward into the new state. The republic's wartime losses had earned it a permanent seat at the United Nations table; that membership, and that legal continuity, are the most direct inheritance from the seventy-one years of the BSSR.