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Soviet Union [USSR] Belorussians
The ancestors of present-day Belorussians were among those East
Slavic tribes that settled the northwestern part of Kievan Rus'
territory, mixing with and assimilating the indigenous Baltic
tribes. After the Mongol invasion in the thirteenth century and the
collapse of Kievan Rus', Belorussian lands, together with the
greater part of Ukraine, became part of the Grand Duchy of
Lithuania. When in 1569 the Grand Duchy of Lithuania joined in
dynastic union with Poland to form the Polish-Lithuanian
Commonwealth, Belorussians shared with Poles and Lithuanians a
common king and parliament. For the next two centuries, Polish
influence in Belorussia was dominant. Belorussian nobles, seeking
the same privileges as their Polish counterparts, became Polonized
and converted from Orthodoxy to Catholicism. Only the peasants
retained their Belorussian national culture and Orthodox religion.
With the partitions of Poland at the end of the eighteenth
century, Belorussian lands passed to the Russian Empire. The
tsarist government viewed Belorussians as simply backward, somewhat
Polonized, Russians. It persecuted those Belorussians who had
become Uniates in 1596 and forced them to reconvert to Orthodoxy
(see Soviet Union USSR - Catholic
, this ch.). Nevertheless, in the second half of the
nineteenth century Belorussians experienced a national and
political revival and developed a renewed awareness of their
separateness from both the Poles and the Russians. The fledgling
Belorussian political movement at the turn of the century reached
its zenith during the February Revolution in 1917 and culminated in
the establishment of the Belorussian Democratic Republic in March
1918. The newly created republic had its independence guaranteed by
the German military. But when Germany collapsed, the new republic
was unable to resist Belorussian Bolsheviks, who were supported by
the Bolshevik government in Russia. On January 1, 1919, the
Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic was established and was
subsequently incorporated into the Soviet Union. The western
portion of Belorussia was ceded to Poland. At the end of World War
II, that territory was incorporated into the Soviet Union.
Numerically the smallest of the three East Slavic
nationalities, Belorussians in 1989 numbered about 10 million
people and constituted about 3.5 percent of the Soviet Union's
total population, making them the fourth largest nationality in the
country. Although most of them lived in the Belorussian Republic,
over 1.2 million Belorussians lived in the Russian Republic, with
sizable Belorussian minorities in the Ukrainian, Kazakh, and
Latvian republics. Belorussians, like Russians and Ukrainians,
speak an East Slavic language. Prior to 1917, both Latin and
Cyrillic (see Glossary) alphabets were used, but subsequently
Cyrillic became the official alphabet. In 1989 about 71 percent of
Belorussians in the Soviet Union considered the Belorussian
language their first language, while the remainder considered
Russian their native tongue.
In the late 1980s, the Belorussian Republic was the third most
urbanized in the Soviet Union, with 64 percent of the republic's
population residing in urban areas in 1987--a jump of 33 percent
from 1959. Of the Belorussian population in the Soviet Union, about
half lived in urban areas. This apparent anomaly was caused chiefly
by the large number of Russians residing in the republic's cities.
The capital and largest city in the Belorussian Republic, Minsk,
had a population of almost 1.6 million people in 1989. Other major
cities were Gomel', Mogilev, Vitebsk, Grodno, and Brest, all of
which had populations of fewer than 500,000.
Although Belorussians were the fourth most prevalent
nationality in the Soviet Union, they ranked only fifteenth in the
number of students in higher education institutions and tenth in
the number of scientific workers in the Soviet Union. They have
fared much better in terms of sharing political power, however.
Between 1970 and 1989, Belorussian membership in the CPSU has been
fairly representative of their share of the population. In the CPSU
Central Committee, Belorussians have actually held a somewhat
higher percentage of full-member seats than warranted by their
share of population. Paradoxically, they have not fared so well in
their own republic. Although Belorussians made up 78.7 percent of
the population of the republic in 1989, they had only 70 percent of
the party membership in the Belorussian Republic. Russians,
however, with only 12 percent of the population of the republic,
constituted about 19 percent of the party membership.
Data as of May 1989
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