Socialist Soviet Republic of Byelorussia

In 1918 the leadership of the Western Oblast regarded Belarus as a territorial unit of the Russian Soviet republic and argued that the Belarusians, still lacking a distinct national consciousness, did not qualify for self-determination. Alexander Chervyakov and Zmicier Zhylunovich of the Belarusian National Commissariat, set up within the People’s Commissariat for Nationalities on 31 January 1918, held instead that a Belarusian Soviet republic was needed, and the Russian-language source notes that the Belarusian People’s Republic’s declaration of independence of 25 March played no small part in shaping that view. A conference of the Belarusian sections of the Russian Communist Party in Moscow on 21–23 December decided to set up the republic, and on 30–31 December the Sixth Conference of the Western Oblast party organisations in Smolensk declared itself the founding congress of the Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of Byelorussia and elected a Provisional Workers’ and Peasants’ Government under Zhylunovich. The republic was proclaimed to comprise the Vitebsk, Grodno, Mogilev, Minsk and Smolensk Governorates, and its government moved to Minsk in early January. On 16 January, however, the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party decided to return the Smolensk, Vitebsk and Mogilev Governorates to Russia and to merge the republic with Soviet Lithuania. The First All-Belarusian Congress of Soviets in Minsk on 2–3 February adopted a constitution and cut the territory to the Minsk and Grodno Governorates; in wartime the government actually controlled only six uyezds of the Minsk Governorate. On 27 February the republic was absorbed into Litbel.

After the Red Army retook Minsk on 11 July 1920, a meeting on 30 July of the Communist Party of Lithuania and Belorussia, Vsevolod Ignatovsky’s Belorussian Communist Organisation and the Bund decided to re-establish the republic and formed the Belorussian Military Revolutionary Committee. The republic was proclaimed again on 31 July, its declaration of independence covering less than six uyezds of the Minsk Governorate. The Union Workers’ and Peasants’ Treaty with the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic of 16 January 1921 recognised the independence and sovereignty of both parties. The Treaty of Riga of 1921 fixed the borders and left Western Belarus to Poland, and in December 1922 the republic signed the treaty on the formation of the USSR together with the Russian, Ukrainian and Transcaucasian republics. The English-language source notes that Soviet historiography has referred to the republic by its later name as a Union republic, the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic, and describes it as a buffer republic in Bolshevik eyes.