Belorussia

Belorussia (belo or byelo, white). Having failed to defend the independence which it had briefly achieved at the end of the First World War, Belorussia found itself divided between a western region that formed part of the Republic of Poland and an eastern region that, as the Belorussian SSR, was part of the USSR. Its ethnically mixed population of eight million consisted of a Belorussian or ‘White Ruthenian’ majority, interspersed with substantial communities of Poles, Jews, and Russians. There were strong contrasts between the primitive countryside, inhabited by peasantry surrounded by huge areas of forest swamp and wilderness, and the cities, such as Minsk, Grodno, Białystok, or Pinsk, where Jewish influences often predominated.

At the outbreak of war in September 1939, the eastern part of the country was still reeling from a decade of mass killings which accompanied Soviet campaigns to eradicate the national movement, to collectivize the peasantry, and to terrorize the population at large. A complex of mass graves at Kuropaty near Minsk which dates from 1938–9 is thought to contain several hundred thousand victims of Stalin's terror.

In September 1939, when western Belorussia was incorporated into the Soviet Union as a result of the Nazi–Soviet Pact and the invasion of Poland (see Polish campaign), the Stalinist terror moved westwards into the newly annexed territories. A stage-managed referendum was held to justify the annexation. Delegates supporting the ‘reunion’ were hand-picked by the Soviet security organs and citizens daring to vote against it were promptly arrested. A police cordon remained in place against movement to the rest of the USSR, whilst mass deportations took place over many months. Anyone connected in any way with Polish state institutions, or with independent Polish, Jewish, and Belorussian organizations, could expect to be eliminated. In addition to land awarded by the Nazi–Soviet Pact, Belorussia was given the district of Białystok bought by the Soviet government for cash (see Map 88).

From June 1941, Belorussia bore the brunt of the German invasion of the USSR (seeBARBAROSSA) and the subsequent German occupation, which lasted for three years, and it formed the largest element of the Reich Commissariat Ostland. Jewish ghettos were established in all the towns and cities, where many of the worst atrocities of the Final Solution occurred. Underground resistance movements were particularly strong in Belorussia's forests; and German fears for their lines of communication to the front line provoked repeated reprisals (see Khatin). Units of the Polish Home Army (see Poland, 4) mingled uneasily in the woods with Jewish refugees and with increasing bands of Soviet partisans who infiltrated behind the German lines. Huge numbers of civilians were killed by military action or by random brutality, or were removed for forced labour in the Reich.

The Soviet reoccupation of Belorussia took place between January and July 1944. From the start, the Soviet authorities assumed that the frontiers of September 1939 would be restored; and they made every effort to complete the sovietization begun in 1939–41. Renewed purges and deportations were launched to destroy all forms of opposition. The Belorussian SSR, though admitted to membership of the United Nations (see San Francisco conference), possessed no independent powers. The ruling Communist Party was run from Moscow, and had been drained of all national sentiment. The Polish community was decimated and the Jewish community had disappeared. Religious and cultural life, including the state-run Russian Orthodox Church (see religion), was completely subordinated to political control.

Belorussia's war losses were usually concealed within the statistics for the USSR as a whole, which rarely made reference to the separate republics and never differentiated between different nationalities or between the victims of Stalinist and Nazi oppression. In all probability, civilian losses approaching two million were similar in absolute numbers to those of Russia; total losses of perhaps 25% stood well above the Soviet average, being similar in percentage terms to those of Ukraine.

Norman Davies