Territorialisation in the Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic. Shifts of borderlines and measures for area penetration from 1918 to 1941

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Thomas Bohn
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: from 2020 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 454283236

(a) In historiography, territorialization refers to both the production and penetration of areas and to their re-scaling and redistribution by states and other powers. Under this premise, experiments on a Belarusian statehood at the end of the First World War as well as the establishment of a Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic (BSSR) with its external and internal borders call for a critical analysis, one that can provide empirical building blocks to a theory of territoriality. Significantly, it can be seen how a barely outlined area in 1917 was reconstructed to a Moscow-legitimated subject of international law in 1920/21, which advanced in three steps (in 1924, 1926 and 1939) to a greatly enlarged, ethnicized Soviet republic. (b) The establishment of the Soviet Union was conceptualized on the drawing-board as a union of territorial-ethnic administrative units in 1922 by actors who thought not only in an ethnicistic, but also in a ‒ as yet barely considered ‒ geographistic way. In this case it referred to a Republic characterized by rural areas whose population was ambivalent towards ethnic, national and even geographical identities. The political structures of the BSSR found themselves in a field of tension between containment and exclusion, between visibility and invisibility, between a nation state and a simple administrative unit. (c) The project aims to investigate in a monograph how and why the internal and external borders of the BSSR have been readjusted, what specific decisions were made by the players at Union level regarding this republic, and what impact this had on the titular nation an the minorities. At the demarcation, the signatories of the Polish-Soviet Treaty in 1921 did not take into account linguistic and ethnic criteria, whereas in 1939 the Soviet Union, using ethnic argumentation, successfully realized territorialist policy in the annexation of the Eastern provinces of the Republic of Poland following the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. In this sense, the project focuses on decision-makers' geographism, a way of thinking that has to be regarded as a complementary ideologeme to culturalism and biologism. Geographism does not represent a pure geographic-irredentist spelling out of nationalism or ethnicism, rather it sees geographic areas as a given thing, as something solid and of long duration, whereas our project regards territories and territoriality as constructed, as entities that have been created from outside and from inside.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants