The October Revolution and the Competing Projects of Soviet State-Building on the Western Border (Ukraine and Belarus)

The February Revolution marked the starting point of a complicated social, political and economic transformation across the former Russian Empire. The subsequent October revolution and Russian civil war put different projects of national state-building on trial. The rivalry between these different forms of statehood became especially severe at the Western margins of the former Empire, divided by the front lines of the First World War. In Belarus, partly occupied by the German Army since mid-1915, national activism was weak and often supported by external forces: the German administration, the Bolsheviks and later the Second Polish Republic. With an underdeveloped grassroots national movement, neither the Belarusian People's Republic (BNR), first declared on 25 March 1918, nor the Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic (BSSR), established on 1 January 1919, could claim to fully represent the population of Belarus. Contrarily, in Ukraine local actors became the most ardent promoters of self-rule and state independence. The first post-revolutionary years were thus defined by the rivalry between the Ukrainian People's Republic (UNR), formed on 7 November 1917, and the Soviet Republic in Ukraine that had existed under various names since December 1917. The period 1917-1920 was to be, by far, the most turbulent in the political history of these two republics.