First All-Belarusian Congress
제1차 전벨라루스 대회
The congress of Belarusian political organisations convened in Minsk by the Great Belarusian Rada on 18–31 December 1917 (O.S. 5–18 December). Its 1,872 delegates recognised the Belarusian people’s right to self-determination and a democratic republican form of government, but it was dispersed by the Bolshevik authorities of the Western Oblast after adopting only the first point of its resolution. The council and executive committee it elected carried on underground and in 1918 became the Rada of the Belarusian People’s Republic.
In depth
The idea of a congress had circulated among Belarusian political organisations since the spring of 1917, and in November the Great Belarusian Rada, the Central Belarusian Military Rada and the Belarusian executive committee of the Western Front issued an appeal “To the whole Belarusian people” convening it in Minsk from 5 (18) December. The first session was attended by 1,872 delegates, 1,167 of them with a vote. Regional associations of Minsk, Mogilev, Vitebsk, Grodno, Smolensk and Vilnius, right and left Socialist Revolutionaries, Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, the Hramada, zemstvos and town councils, trade unions, soldiers, refugees and soviets were all represented, and most delegates were of peasant origin. The central question was the relationship with Russia. Right-leaning delegates and many from western Belarus wanted immediate full independence, while left-leaning and eastern delegates proposed staying within a democratic Russian federation. The Russian-language source stresses the clash between the Belarusian Socialist Hramada, which sought broad autonomy or even independence, and the “regionalists”, mostly from the east, who held to union with Russia. The congress elected a 71-member council under Jan Sierada and its executive committee.
At 1:15 a.m. on 18 December (O.S.) a 15-point compromise resolution was read out. It avoided even the word “autonomy”, dealing instead with the government of the region and its link with a Russian federation, and charged a provisional regional authority with convening a Belarusian constituent assembly as soon as possible. The delegates managed to adopt only the first point, unanimously. Bolshevik troops then surrounded the building, and Ludvik Rezavsky, the Western Oblast’s commissar for internal affairs, came in to declare the congress dissolved and its presidium arrested. The delegates built barricades and came to blows, but 27 members of the presidium, Sierada among them, were arrested and the delegates driven out. The council met in secret the next day and on 2 January 1918 (O.S. 20 December 1917) elected a 17-member executive committee. Karl Lander, chairman of the Western Oblast government, gave a badly distorted account of the congress in his telegram to the Sovnarkom and Stalin. The Russian-language source finds the main reason for the dispersal in the Western Oblast authorities’ unwillingness to share power and sees no legal basis for it, and Alexander Chervyakov, Zmicier Zhylunovich and Vilgelm Knorin, who were present, later doubted that it had been necessary. According to Belarusian authors the congress put the Belarusian question on the international agenda, and the Soviet side was criticised for the dispersal at the Brest-Litovsk peace talks. In February 1919 the Bolsheviks held their First All-Belarusian Congress of Soviets, with an almost identical name, in the same building.