Incorporation into the Soviet Union
The Belarusian National Committee (“Rada”) formed after the overthrow of the Russian Tsar in 1917 under the leadership of the “Hramada” was temporarily ousted by a “Military Revolutionary Committee” of the Bolsheviks after the October Revolution of 1917; Under German occupation, the “Rada” met again and on March 25, 1918 proclaimed an independent “People’s Republic” (not recognized by the German occupying power).
After the withdrawal of the German troops (November 1918) the Bolsheviks finally prevailed and on January 1, 1919 proclaimed the »Belarusian Socialist Soviet Republic«, which was merged with Lithuania in February 1920 to form the short-lived Lithuanian-Belarusian Soviet Republic (abbreviation Litbel). In the Peace of Riga (March 18, 1921), which ended the Polish-Soviet War (1920/21), Belarus had to cede its western territories to Poland (in this strong polonization of public life). On December 30, 1922, the Belarusian SSR was one of the founding members of the USSR. In 1924 and 1926, its territory was enlarged by some areas previously belonging to Russia (RSFSR) (mainly Vitebsk and Gomel and a district of the Smolensk Region). In the period after the First World War, there was a strong urbanization of the previously rural Belarusian territory. The recruitment of party and state administrative cadres as well as cultural life were initially focused on the Belarusian “titular nation” (for the first time Belarusian was made the national language, in which, for example, around 82% of all book production appeared in 1928; literacy). Under the Soviet auspices, there was a stronger identification with Belarusian territory and the beginning of a Belarusian nation-building (»Belarusisazyja« [Belarusification]). The recruitment of party and state administrative cadres as well as cultural life were initially focused on the Belarusian “titular nation” (for the first time Belarusian was made the national language, in which, for example, around 82% of all book production appeared in 1928; literacy). Under the Soviet auspices, there was a stronger identification with Belarusian territory and the beginning of a Belarusian nation-building (»Belarusisazyja« [Belarusification]). The recruitment of party and state administrative cadres as well as cultural life were initially focused on the Belarusian “titular nation” (for the first time Belarusian was made the national language, in which, for example, around 82% of all book production appeared in 1928; literacy). Under the Soviet auspices, there was a stronger identification with Belarusian territory and the beginning of a Belarusian nation-building (»Belarusisazyja« [Belarusification]).
Stalinism and German Occupation
As in other Union republics, the repression of the Stalinist dictatorship against the national intelligentsia (including at the Academy of Sciences and the Belarusian State University according to intershippingrates) and against the peasantry began at the end of the 1920s. Between 1937 and 1941, Stalin had many Belarusians shot by the NKVD (according to the latest estimates, around 250,000 in the forests of Kuropaty near Minsk; in 1988 the mass graves there were discovered); Overall, between 600,000 and 2 million people are said to have fallen victim to the Stalinist terror in Belarus (according to widely differing figures).
After the military collapse of Poland at the beginning of the Second World War and the Soviet occupation of Eastern Poland (September 1939), the USSR reintegrated the Belarusian territories ceded to Poland in 1921 into the Belarusian SSR on the basis of the Hitler-Stalin Pact in November 1939 (thus almost territorial duplication).
1941-44 Belarus was occupied by German troops (as the general district of Belarus, part of the Reichskommissariat Ostland). As a result of the effects of the war and the National Socialist terror, around 2.2 million people (i.e. a quarter of the population of Belarus at that time) lost their lives between 1941 and 1943; Most of the Jewish population, insofar as they had not been able to flee to the unoccupied part of the Soviet Union, were initially crowded together in ghettos (including in Minsk, Mogiljow, Vitebsk) and later murdered by SS Einsatzgruppen. A very strong partisan movement in Belarus was directed against the brutal German occupation policy (from mid-1942 about 300,000 members in over 200 groups; Wehrmacht); SS and Wehrmacht units reacted with cruel “retaliatory actions” (including the destruction of several hundred villages and their residents; Chatyn, north of Minsk, became a symbolic memorial for these erased places). On their retreat, the German troops systematically destroyed the country.
The Belarusian SSR 1945–91
After the end of the war, a Polish-Soviet treaty (August 16, 1945) established the Curzon Line with minor deviations (return of the Białystok area to Poland) as a common border; as a result, around 1.5 million Poles were resettled from the former Polish territory to the former German areas of today’s Poland, and vice versa, around 500,000 Belarusians and Ukrainians left the Polish territory. In 1945 Belarus became a founding member of the UN.
In the post-war decades Belarus went through a phase of industrialization and lost its agrarian character (peak of economic modernization 1965-80 under the Belarusian party leader Petr Mascherau [* 1918, † 1980]); In 1970-84 Belarus even had the greatest economic growth of all Union republics. This was accompanied by an increased Russification of Belarus (numerous high party and administrative offices were filled by Russians, the Belarusian language was pushed out of public life, especially from schools and the media); Belarus became the union republic with the highest level of knowledge of Russian. Correspondingly, nationally ambitious and dissident activities were limited to a very small group; Until the collapse of the Soviet Union, Belarus was regarded as a largely “quiet” Soviet republic. However, the reactor accident in the Ukrainian Chernobyl of April 26, 1986, which had far more devastating effects in Belarus than in the neighboring republic, mobilized large parts of the Belarusian population against the Soviet central government, v. a. because of their trivializing information policy and the serious failures in coping with the consequences of the disaster (it was not until 1989 that extensive measures were introduced to decontaminate the contaminated areas and to evacuate the people affected).
In 1988 the “Adradschennje” (German rebirth) movement was formed in Belarus – initially understood as support for the perestroika policy, but it also pursued the goal of reawakening national self-confidence and coming to terms with the Stalinist terror in Belarus. Hindered by the state authorities, it had to hold its official founding congress in 1989 in Vilnius, Lithuania (initially classified as unconstitutional in Belarus, until 1991 refused to register); it was faced with a strong Orthodox-Communist group, which the reforms of the CPSU General Secretary M. S. Gorbachev refused. In the elections to the Belarusian Supreme Soviet in March 1991, the Belarusian Communist Party still won 86% of the seats, while representatives of the Adradschennje were only able to win 32 of the 320 seats. The declaration of sovereignty vis-à-vis the USSR on July 27, 1990 was only made formally, at the same time the Belarusian leadership supported efforts to conclude a new union treaty.
