January 1, 1919: Temporary Workers' and Peasants' Soviet Government of Belarus
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The book analyzed all available materials on the birth of the republic. Scientists have concluded: “The decision to establish the Belarusian Soviet government was made by the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks). The government was formed in Moscow, and then in Smolensk and Minsk. It includes representatives of two groups. The first was made up of figures of the Belarusian sections of the RCP (b) and the Belarusian National Commissariat - the structural unit of the National Commissariat for the Affairs of Nationalities of the RSFSR. Their leader was Dmitry Zhilunovich, who became the chairman of the government. The other was drawn up by the leaders of the North-Western Regional Committee of the RCP (B) and the Executive Committee of the Soviets of the Western Commune, headed by Alexander Myasnikov, who had previously denied the right of Belarusians to self-determination and fought against Belnatscom and the Belarusian sections of the RCP (b) as a hotbed of nationalism. One of them, Wilhelm Knorin, wrote on October 6, 1918 in the newspaper Zvezda: “We thought that Belarusians were not a nation and that the ethnographic peculiarities that separated them from the rest of the Russians should be eliminated.”
