Socialist Soviet Republic of Lithuania and Belorussia
리투아니아-벨로루시 사회주의 소비에트 공화국
The Soviet republic formed on 27 February 1919 by the merger of Soviet Lithuania and the Socialist Soviet Republic of Byelorussia, known for short as Litbel. Its capital was Vilnius, but the advance of the Polish and, to a lesser extent, the Lithuanian armies stripped it of all its claimed territory by August 1919. It is often described as a puppet state of Soviet Russia, and its end date is disputed; Soviet historiography dated it to 31 July 1920, when the Byelorussian republic was re-established.
In depth
On 16 January 1919 the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party decided to unite Soviet Lithuania and Soviet Belorussia. When Adolph Joffe arrived in Minsk on 22 January as Moscow’s representative, the Belorussian Bolshevik leaders rejected the merger and protested that he was incompetent. At the First All-Belorussian Congress of Soviets on 2–3 February, however, Yakov Sverdlov called for unity against the “White Army-Belorussian-Lithuanian government”, and the Lithuanian Congress of Soviets in Vilnius on 18–20 February, with 220 delegates, also backed the union. A joint meeting of the two Central Executive Committees on 27 February elected Kazimierz Cichowski chairman of the Central Executive Committee and Vincas Kapsukas chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars. The territory under its control had about four million inhabitants. It had five official languages – Russian, Belorussian, Lithuanian, Polish and Yiddish – though Russian predominated in practice. Joffe hand-picked the key ministers, and Lithuanians outnumbered Belorussians in the government, the latter generally confined to second-tier posts. On 4–6 March the two Communist parties merged into the Communist Party of Lithuania and Belorussia, whose decision to turn confiscated estates into state farms instead of dividing them among the peasants soured relations between the peasantry and the party.
When the Polish army took Vilnius on 17–21 April, the government moved via Dvinsk to Minsk on 28 April. A Defence Council of Kapsukas, Iosif Unshlikht and Moisei Kalmanovich was formed on 19 April, and on 30 May the Central Executive Committee signed a treaty handing military and economic affairs to the government of the Russian Soviet republic. The Lithuanian-Belorussian Army, created on 13 March and commanded by Andrei Snesarev until the end of May, became the 16th Army of the Red Army on 9 June. The conscription of men aged 18 to 40 met popular resistance, leaving some 33,000 deserters in the Minsk Governorate by June, and amid war-communist requisitions and pressure to supply food to Russia famine spread in June. On 13 July Joseph Stalin proposed dissolving the Defence Council and the Council of People’s Commissars, and the Defence Council was dissolved on 17 July. Polish forces took Minsk on 8 August and Novoalexandrovsk, the republic’s last town, on 27 August. Historians have called Litbel a puppet state (Piotr Łossowski, David Marples and others) or a “paper state” (Dorota Michaluk), while Soviet historiography presented it as a defensive measure against counter-revolution.