These administrative and territorial changes determined the emergence of Soviet Belarus during the first post-war decade. From now on, the republic began to be divided into 12 regions; there was no longer a regional division in the BSSR, introduced in 1938, for the entire period of its existence.
After the reunification of the Belarusian lands in 1939, now celebrated in Belarus as the Day of National Unity, there were ten regions: Baranovichi, Bialystok, Brest, Vitebsk, Vileika, Gomel, Minsk, Mogilev, Polesie, Pinsk. The appearance of new regions on the map in 1944 was by no means a Belarusian specificity. For example, in the summer of the same year, the Novgorod, Kaluga, Bryansk, Kostroma, Vladimir, Pskov, Tyumen and Tomsk regions appeared on the map of the RSFSR, and they still exist today. An important direction of the regional policy of the Soviet government at that time was the disaggregation of management entities. In the Belarusian case, the creation of the Bobruisk region with an area of 19.7 thousand square kilometers fits perfectly into this line. This region was created by annexing parts of the districts of Minsk, Mogilev and Polesie regions.
But the creation of the Grodno and Polotsk regions was a consequence of geopolitical changes; their creation was preceded by heated debates at the project level, and everything was finally decided in Stalin’s office. The city of Grodno, which was the center of the province during the Russian Empire, became the regional center of the Bialystok region before the war. The transfer of the regional center to Grodno was a consequence of the loss by Soviet Belarus of most of the Bialystok region with Bialystok itself. These lands were predominantly ethnically Byelorussian, which was scientifically confirmed by the research of the famous ethnographer Moses Greenblat prepared in 1944 at the Institute of History of the Academy of Sciences of the BSSR, which was then sent to the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs of the USSR. USSR. The scientist convincingly proved that the Belarusian ethnographic border included such important settlements as Bialystok, Suwalki and Augustow.
In July 1944, Stalin decided to listen to the requests of the Polish allies of the USSR, whose interests were lobbied by the famous writer Wanda Wasilewska and the head of the National People’s Rada Edward Osubka-Morawski. They signed a letter on the transfer to the future “People’s Poland” of most of the Bialystok region of the BSSR with Bialystok itself. The pro-Soviet Poles called for moving Poland’s borders away from Warsaw, while at the same time hoping that such a decision would increase their authority in the conditions of acute political struggle in their homeland. Stalin, in the context of difficult discussions with the United States and Great Britain over the future of Poland, found these arguments convincing. True, at first the Soviet leader did not agree to give the Poles part of Belovezhskaya Pushcha, but in this matter he eventually agreed.
As early as July 27, 1944, an agreement was signed between the USSR and the Polish Committee of National Liberation, according to which the majority of the Bialystok region was transferred to post-war Poland. These agreements, extremely unfair to the Belarusians, were later confirmed at the Yalta Conference of the Big Three in February 1945 and, with well-known changes to the border line, in the Soviet-Polish Treaty of August 16, 1945. In the new Grodno region of the BSSR, only six districts of the pre-war Bialystok region remained. In the regions transferred to Poland, the Belarusian population was regularly subjected to bandit attacks by the so-called “Cursed Soldiers” – former fighters of the Home Army who are revered as heroes in modern Poland.
In case of transfer of Polotsk to the RSFSR, the city of Vilna would be included in the BSSR.
The history of the creation of the Polotsk region was no less dramatic, as it became known to historians only in the 2010s from declassified archival documents. Former Polotsk, after being included in the Russian Empire, became the center of the province, but already in December 1796, Paul I abolished the Polotsk province. The project of the Polotsk region within the BSSR was promoted during the war years by the Belarusian leader Panteleimon Ponomarenko. He graduated in the field of railway transport and proposed creating a large area along the Bologoe-Sedlec railway, built in the Russian Empire in 1901-1907. Polotsk, Velikiye Luki and Toropets were the most important stations here, and it was planned to include these three cities in the Polotsk region.
Ponomarenko’s ideas were approved by the highest political leadership of the USSR, but with one significant exception for the leader of the BSSR. On July 17, 1944, a draft resolution of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks “On the formation of the Polotsk region within the RSFSR” was submitted to Stalin for consideration. The project was submitted by four comrades of the leader: Georgy Malenkov, Andrey Andreev, Alexander Shcherbakov and Andrey Zhdanov. It was planned to create a large region of 23 districts with an area of 36.5 thousand square kilometers. However, Stalin ultimately did not approve this project. In the event of Polotsk’s transfer to the RSFSR, the city of Vilno, historically closely related to the Belarusian lands, was to be included in the BSSR. Ponomarenko was given the opportunity to choose options. In Stalin’s office on August 14, 1944, he spoke in favor of leaving Polotsk within the borders of the BSSR, which meant both the confirmation of the status of the capital of the Lithuanian SSR beyond Vilnius and the emergence of a new region in the RSFSR with its center in Velikiye Luki.
The Polotsk region as part of the BSSR ultimately consisted of 15 districts with an area of 17.8 thousand square kilometers. The Polotsk and Bobruisk regions, as part of the prevailing trend towards consolidation of regions, were abolished in January 1954, and the Grodno region is now solemnly celebrating its 80th anniversary.
