Kingdoms of Eastern Europe - Belarus / Belarussian Soviet Socialist Republic

The history of Belarus is tied closely to that of Lithuania and Poland. Formerly known as Byelorussia or Belorussia, its prehistory essentially begins in the seventh millennium BC, through the Dnieper-Donets culture and a series of successors. One of the first waves of migrants of the Yamnaya horizon to settle outside of their traditional steppe environment in Europe formed the Corded Ware culture from about 2900 BC.

Initially (and in part) this witnessed settlement along the Vistula and up to the Baltic coast to form populations which would later become the basis for Belarusians, Latvians, Lithuanians, and Prussians. These populations appear to have included a range of ethnicities, however, rather than being purely Indo-European, making the Corded Ware very much a melting-pot culture.

The proto-Slavs were generally incubated in forest territory well above the northern coast of the Black Sea (largely falling within modern northern Ukraine, plus the southern edge of Russia and modern Belarus), between the rivers Bug and Dnieper (the latter of which runs through Belarus and Kyiv before draining into the Black Sea). However, providing a more precise location for the proto-Slavic homeland would be little more than conjecture. Prior to Slavic outwards expansion, the higher Dnieper basin which encroaches into southern Belarus from Ukraine was occupied by the Dnieper Balts (see feature link).

Further populations of Balts could be found to the north of this until Slavic expansion absorbed them between the fifth and tenth centuries AD. Roman sources localise the Neuri - more Balts - at the headwaters of the River Dnieper (in Belarus). This region was within a broad band of territory along the northern edge of Scythian-dominated lands during a large part of the first millennium BC. Precise levels of Scythian control here are largely impossible to calculate.

From around 250 BC, Germanic expansion and migration from the southern Baltic coast continued a slow progression into modern Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine, principally driven by the Ostrogoths. This eastwards and southwards extension allowed them to dominate the Venedi who already occupied a great swathe of territory between eastern Prussia and modern Kaliningrad to western Belarus and western Ukraine.

The Chernyakhiv culture which subsequently formed across southern Belarus, western Ukraine, and in Moldava and Romania was a fusion of previous cultures (including the Zarubintsy) and the newly-arrived Gothic influence.

Various steppe empires subsequently dominated much of Eastern Europe, including those of the Huns and Avars. The Kievan Rus then emerged to dominate the Volhynian territories which included south-western Belarus, but the arrival of the Mongols largely destroyed this state. As it faded, so the grand duchy of Lithuania was able to vastly extend the size of its own state into the east and south.

It quickly took command in Belarusian territories, followed by Polotsk (south-eastern Belarus), Vitebsk, and the Volhynian half of Galicia-Volhynia, before extending to the north coast of the Black Sea, and east to Smolensk.

That vast Slavic area of the Lithuanian duchy became known as Ruthenia, from a Latinisation of 'Rus'. 'Black Ruthenia' came to be used for lands which were inhabited by Balts, and 'White Ruthenia' for the Slavs of Belarus ('belaya', or 'white' Rus - although other origin theories for 'white Rus' are also available). The Slavic ancestors of the Belarusians had already borrowed many words from the Balts they came to dominate, and now the process was renewed from Lithuania's peasant vocabulary. Many of the loan words remain in use today.

In 1397 the principality of Polotsk was abolished and became an administrative division of Lithuania, known as the Polotsk voivodeship. It shared Lithuania's fate as the grand duchy was united within a commonwealth which was led by the kingdom of Poland. This was eventually partitioned into extinction in 1795. Today the city of Polotsk forms part of Belarus.

It was during this latter period that Russia began to administer an area of the former commonwealth known as the Pale of Settlement. Initially this was small, but it increased greatly from 1793 after the 'Second Partition' of the former Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth. By the mid-nineteenth century it incorporated Belarus (eastern Poland at the time), eastern Latvia, Lithuania, the province of Bessarabia (modern Moldova), and western Ukraine. Having formerly been citizens of the commonwealth, the Jewish Diaspora population of the 'Pale' (mainly Ashkenazi Jews) was restricted from moving eastwards into Russia proper.

The territory which formed Belarus remained a province of the Russian empire until the collapse of all three of the central and eastern great powers at the end of the First World War. The Polish people united to declare a free and independent Poland on 7 November 1918, incorporating Galicia & Lodomeria and Pomerania into their new state. This, though, was not a stable and secure Poland. It had to fight off German irregular troops in the west, and had to fight for its life against Bolshevik Russian troops in the east during the Russo-Polish War, as it tried to push its borders as far east as historical claims would allow.

That push saw it occupy areas of western Ukraine and all of Belarus, which also ended the short-lived independent Belarusian People's Republic. In the end, those borders went too far. Under the terms of the 1921 settlement, White Russia, or Belarus, was partitioned between the Belarussian Soviet Socialist Republic and Poland.

European Kingdoms

Eastern Europe

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