Slutsk uprising

The preliminary peace signed in Riga on 12 October 1920 drew a border that divided the lands of present-day Belarus and Ukraine in two, and its demarcation line assigned the Slutsk district to the Byelorussian Soviet republic. No delegation was invited to the talks either from the Belarusian People’s Republic or from Soviet Byelorussia. That autumn the Belarusian national movement spread through the Minsk Governorate, where the people of some volosts rejected the revolutionary committees appointed from Moscow. In Slutsk Paval Zhavryd’s Belarusian National Committee had been set up in 1918, and most supporters of independence gathered in the Slutsk committee of the Belarusian Party of Socialist Revolutionaries. The Russian-language source explains that the main force of the rising was the peasantry resisting war communism, led by the local intelligentsia and petty gentry. The retreating Polish troops left behind 500 faulty rifles, and the interned remnants of Bułak-Bałachowicz’s force handed over rifles, machine guns and ammunition. On 15 November a congress of 105–132 delegates from Slutsk and 15 volosts proclaimed the authority of the Belarusian People’s Republic in the area, protested against the “Bolshevik occupation” and elected a 17-member Slutsk Rada chaired by the Socialist Revolutionary Uladzimir Prakulevich. The Rada declared a general mobilisation of men aged 16 to 50 and within three days formed the Slutsk Brigade from the 1st Slutsk and 2nd Hrozava regiments. Belarusian historians disagree over whether the Polish command supplied arms and money or whether only Bułak-Bałachowicz gave meagre help.

The Polish troops left Slutsk on 24 November and the brigade withdrew west to Semezhevo. Fighting began on 27 November, and the insurgents beat back the Red Army near Vasilchitsy, but once the Red 8th and 17th Divisions arrived they lost Semezhevo on 7 December. They retook it on the 12th along with large stocks of shells and took Vyzna on the 17th, but fell back from Vyzna on the 19th and from Semezhevo on the 20th. Arms, officers and food ran short, and typhus broke out. On 28 December, out of ammunition, the brigade crossed the Moroch river, now the border, laid down its arms and was interned by Poland. Assessments differ. One view in Belarusian scholarship, cited by the Russian-language source, holds that there could be no uprising because neither the Red Army nor Soviet power was yet present in the land the Poles were evacuating, and the commander Anton Sokal-Kutyloŭski himself wrote that “there was no uprising”. Since perestroika, by contrast, the Belarusian Popular Front and others have marked 27 November as Heroes Day, while Lukashenko’s government does not regard the event as significant. Emigrants raised a monument near Mittenwald in Germany in 1948, and Vasil Bykau’s novel On Black Slash-and-Burn Fields and a 1995 film portrayed the events.