Heavy work in progress as can be seen by the utterly shitty second and third eras. Cannot carry pls. Only posting now because I want to have this much up here prior to this school week to give y'all an idea where I'm at and why it's taking so damn long.
Nation: Byelorussian Republic/ Белару́ская Рэспу́бліка/ Bielarúskaja RèspúblìkaLeaders: (Presidium of the Supreme Council of Ministers of the Byelorussian Republic/ Прэзідыум Вярхоўны Савету Міністраў Белару́ская Рэспублікі/ Prèzìdyum Vârhoŭny Savetu Mìnìstraŭ Bielarúskaja Rèspublìkì)
-First Minister of the Byelorussian Republic Uladzìslaŭ Sârgejevìč Zaharka/ Першы Міністэрства Белару́ская Рэспублікі Уладзіслаў Сяргейевіч Захарка/ Peršy Mìnìstèrstva Bielarúskaja Rèspublìkì Uladzìslaŭ Sârgejevìč Zaharka
-Deputy First Minister of the Byelorussian Republic Âzèp Âkaŭlevìč Varonka/ Намеснік Першы Міністэрства Белару́ская Рэспублікі Язэп Якаўлевіч Варонка/ Namesnìk Peršy Mìnìstèrstva Bielarúskaja Rèspublìkì Âzèp Âkaŭlevìč Varonka
Capital: Minsk
Currency: Byelorussian Rubel’
Anthem: Young Byelorussia/ Маладая Белару́с/ Maladaja Bielarús
Population: 12,704,690
-7,150,762 Byelorussians
-1,776,306 Russians
-1,189,623 Byelorussian Jews
-992,681 Germans
-747,508 Lithuanians
-538,881 Poles
-270,169 Ukrainians
-38,760 Others (primarily Romani, Tatars, and various Caucasian immigrants)
History:-The Condominium Era (1916-1926)The history of Byelorussia in its earliest incarnation begins with the 1916 treaty between the German and Russian Empires which ended fighting on the Eastern Front of the Great War. In its haste to negotiate a rapid, simple peace with Berlin, the Russian Empire offered the German monarchy two token concessions to expedite the peace process. The first was a vague assurance of increased autonomy in the Ukrainian governates of Russia, which, as is readily apparent when reviewing Ukrainian history under the Tsardom, amounted essentially to merely an empty promise. The second concession was one that would have a much greater impact on the internal stability of the Russian Empire as well as the political landscape of Eastern Europe as a whole. Known infamously as the 70-30 Compromise, or officially as the Ruthenian Compromise, the Russian Empire ceded and recognized a traditionally unruly and ‘un-Russian’ portion of its westernmost territory, here-to-be known as Byelorussia, as a dually-administrated condominium in conjunction with the German Empire. The new Russo-German Condominium of the Byelorussians comprised half of the Vilna Governate, the Mogilev Governate, half of the Vitebsk Governate, the Minsk Governate, the Grodno Governate, and the northernmost Uyezd of the Zhitomir Governate. These territories were chosen rather arbitrarily by Petrograd as the ‘core’ territories of the Byelorussian peoples, with minor input provided by the ‘Father of the Byelorussian Ethnos’ himself, Yefim Fyodorovich Karsky as per the status of . As can be inferred from the unofficial name of the Compromise, the Russian Empire ‘ceded’ an arbitrary seventy percent of the administration of the Condominium to the German Empire.
In practice, this administrative duality, expanded upon by the April 1917 Minsk Proclamation, assigned economic, cultural, judicial, industrial, and transportation-related affairs to the German administration centered in Pinsk, while taxation, foreign affairs, and civil and legal enforcement were to be administered by the Russian ministry in Minsk. In addition, the Minsk Proclamation declared a rudimentary demilitarization of the Condominium that would officially remain until the dissolution of the entire Russian Empire in 1970, despite the rapid fall of the Condominium itself. The German Minister in Byelorussia was the Saxon intellectual Maximilian Huber, known affectionately as simply ‘Max’. His Russian counterpart was a certain Alexei Trubetsky. Theoretically, this division would yield immense bounty for Petrograd. German industrialists and entrepreneurs arrived in Byelorussia en masse, seeking a more stable, safer base of operations when compared to war-torn Germany. Cheap labour abounded during the first few years of the Condominium, when refugees from Ukraine, ravaged by the Great War, poured into Byelorussia, which remained relatively untouched during the War due to more intense fighting in Poland and Ukraine. Under guidance from these German industrialists, with token monetary support from their Russian counterparts eager to expand on their own fledgling industries in Russia as well, Byelorussian reconstruction proceeded at an incredible pace, with the Condominium regaining its economic traction by March 1918. And while the Russian Empire began its crackdown on the deeply entrenched Bolshevik movement, and the German Empire continued its bloody, readily worsening war, Byelorussia as a whole under the Huber-Trubetsky administration surprisingly flourished. As western German railroads furiously shipped troops, supplies, and armaments to the War’s frontlines, the Königlich Preußische Staatseisenbahnen signed a groundbreaking deal with Minister Huber paving the path for a nascent Byelorussian railroad system. The first Prussian-gauge tracks were laid by May ’18, from the East Prussian border town of Eydtkuhnen, extending the Preußische Ostbahn to the Byelorussian city of Hrodna. By the turn of the decade, the backbone of the Byelorussian Joint-Administered Ministerial Railroad, a nearly 630-km long entirely continuous track from Hrodna, to Minsk, to Homyel’ was complete, and offshoot tracks to important Byelorussian cities, including Mahilioŭ, Pinsk, Orsha, Brest, Mazyr, Pólack, and Vì́cebsk.
Once the ‘core’, so to say, of the Byelorussian rail system was completed, the German Imperial government in Berlin took far greater interest in Huber’s projects in Byelorussia. The terminus of the Joint-Administered Ministerial Railroad was the small town of Šarpilaŭka, just a ways down the Sozh River from Homyel’. Just across the Byelorussian ‘border’ was the Russian territory of Ukraine, one of the most prolific iron-producing regions in the entire world at the time. For a nation in a very costly, incredibly painstaking war, heavily blockaded by a combined Allied fleet, this bountiful, relatively cheap source of iron and other minerals was a sweet, sweet, prize. If Germany could somehow sign a deal with the cautious, hostile Russians, to purchase Ukrainian iron en masse, the German war machine could be rescued from its state of materiel starvation and would once more be able to operate at full efficiency. And in order to facilitate this immense transfer of war-bound material between two formerly hostile nations, the German government would need a huge loophole, a plan to net as much Ukrainian iron as possible. And here, this loophole, is where the Russo-German Condominium of the Byelorussians came into play, in the inner workings of a plan schemed up by Byelorussia’s very own Minister Maximilian Huber. When a message from Berlin arrived in Pinsk, informing Huber about the German aspirations on Ukrainian iron, the Minister immediately informed the German envoy of a plausible plan to bypass the Russian restrictions on German trade. According to the Minsk Proclamation, Byelorussian Condominium merchants and corporations were allowed to operate without any sort of extraterritorial restriction in Ukrainian, Lithuanian, and Livonian markets as were applied to Germany. Using this clause, the German Empire, with assistance from Huber, was able to establish a proxy corporation in Byelorussia to purchase mass amounts of Ukrainian iron. The new AAJ Byelorussian Steel Works, centered in the railroad town of Žlobin, halfway between Homyel’ and Minsk, was established on August 12th, 1920. Headed by German government-sympathizing industrialist immigrants, the AAJ Byelorussian Steel Works ‘purchased and started operations in’ a steelworks in the German industrial center of Essen, and legally employed a mere ten Byelorussian denizens to maintain its corporate status. Despite the fact that in its August 1920 form, the AAJ Byelorussian Steel Works would have been perfectly capable, legally and practically, of purchasing and transferring Ukrainian iron to German steelworks, Minister Huber, perhaps out of the good intentions in his heart to the Byelorussian people, perhaps to satiate the Russian Empire, perhaps for his own economic benefit, submitted a request to the German Empire that the AAJ Byelorussian Steel Works be authorized to hire and train ethnic Byelorussians and Ukrainians, and that it be allowed to construct its own Byelorussian facililties in Žlobin. In this way, the Byelorussian steel industry, one of the centerpieces to the Byelorussian economy, was conceived, and on September 27th, 1920, the AAJ Byelorussian Steel Works signed a breakthrough deal with Ukrainian mining magnate Nikolai Leonid, offering to buy per annum one million tonnes of unrefined iron ore at a price higher than Leonid had ever been offered before, but still lower than the price of Swedish iron, magnificently inflated due to the perils of crossing the Baltic and the Swedish monopoly over German iron imports. It is arguably the case that this much-needed supply of iron to the German state is what extended the Great War into its stalemated nature in the 1920’s. Needless to say, both sides of the deal were quite pleased. Even the Russian Empire was not particularly upset, their tempers having been satiated by the plethora of railroad tariffs implemented along the lucrative Hrodna-Minsk-Homyel’ line.
Another result of the German influence in Byelorussia was one that would arguably have even more far-reaching influences on the future Byelorussian state. A secret, illicit plot of weakening, perhaps even annihilating Russian influence in Byelorussia, a plot that would ensure a culturally distinct, racially unique buffer state between the German and Russian Empires. Indeed, the German Empire in Berlin, through their Minister in Byelorussia Maximilian Huber, administrated, in virtual darkness from the Russian Empire, a gradual de-Russification of the Byelorussian territories. Or, due to the implementation of the German strategy and the eventual Russian countering to their de-Russification, this plan would more aptly be titled a Byelorussification. The initial phases of the Byelorussification were seemingly harmless, and logically valid to the Russian administration under Trubetsky. Internal reforms such as the implementation of Latin alphabet signs in major trade towns along the Hrodna-Minsk-Homyel’ and increased school and church constructions went mostly unhindered by the Russian administration, seeing these as tangible improvements to the old Byelorussia, particularly the emphasis on education, which brought to mind the astoundingly low literacy rate in the Empire for such a world-rate power. But what was under the surface, unseen to the Russians who were so focused on eradicating the Bolsheviks back home, was what these schools were teaching. While the Imperial Russian Army marched to crush the soviets in Petrograd, the new Huber administration-funded primary and secondary schools were training all urban and some rural Byelorussian youths in subjects akin to those taught in Prussian gymnasia. Education was facilitated through the Byelorussian language, and Byelorussian children were schooled in both the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets. Generally, the more urban secondary schools would offer a smattering of foreign language training, German, Lithuanian, Polish, Ukrainian, and Russian among those (the latter three being extensively emphasized as separate, distinct languages from Byelorussian). Huber sponsored the writing and manufacturing of new, Byelorussian-centered pro-German textbooks. This time, it was the German attaché who hired Karsky and his colleague Mitrofan Viktorovich Dovnar-Zapol'skiy to draft a revisionist history of the Byelorussians. Needless to say, the two historiographers were more than happy to accept. And while these illicit, secret dealings (for it was, as Huber himself stated in an address to the Byelorussian Scholastic Committee in 1921, “imperative that you [the schoolmasters and teachers of these new Gymnasia] would take the utmost care to not let a single instance, a single inkling of your noble Byelorussian teachings slip into the vicious grasp of the Russian Empire… Such an occurrence would be most unfortunate for the future of the Byelorussian peoples, for my own future, and obviously for your own”) were happening, Russian Minister Alexei Trubetsky, moved by the advancement of Byelorussian education and blissfully unaware of the anti-Russian implications sprouting in his very own condominium, announced his full backing for the construction of a Condominium-supported, Russo-German joint funded post-secondary institution in Byelorussia on May 7th, 1922. While the Great War was growing in horribleness and amplitude, Byelorussians, Germans, and Russians alike contributed to the construction and foundation of an institution that would cement the rise and formation of the culturally distinct Byelorussian ethnos. And on January 10th, 1923, the Byelorussian State University was official established. It was a grand occasion. The great Byelorussian poet Yanka Kupala was invited to take the position of Chancellor of the University, and rising Byelorussian composer Naum Izrailevich Luria also took up residence in the University, much to the success publicity-wise of the joint-administered institution.
The two years leading up to 1925 were more or less uneventful for the Byelorussian Condominium. While the devastating Great War wound to its close to the west, and whilst the Bolshevik movement in Russia was breathing its last breaths, the nascent Byelorussian steel industry quietly and slowly expanded. The gymnasia and University operated more or less untouched, and a steady trickle of Poles, Germans, and Ukrainians continued to enter Byelorussian borders. However, with the 1925 end of the Great War, and the subsequent split between Prussia and Bavaria (and thusly the destruction of the German Empire), came the demise of the Condominium, as per the 1916 and 1917 terms assigned by the Ruthenian Compromise and the Minsk Proclamation, which were signed solely with the German Empire and its plenipotentiaries. Petrograd took this chance to send a miniscule contingent of the Imperial Russian Army to Byelorussia, booting out former Minister Maximilian Huber, who fled to his hometown in Dresden. Seeking an opportunity to consolidate Russian power in Byelorussia, but lacking the resources or support to directly reannex and readminister the region, due to more pressing concerns regarding the Bolsheviks and anti-Russian sentiments in Ukraine and the Baltic regions, the Imperial administration welcomed the Byelorussian territories in the simplest way it could: creating an arbitrarily defined, vaguely Russian-controlled client state.
As such, on February 6th, 1926, former Russian Minister in Byelorussia, a nearly decade long resident in Minsk, Alexei Trubetsky was crowned, in a rushed, barebones ceremony in Petrograd, by Russian Tsar Nicholas II, to be the First Prince of Byelorussia.
The Condominium and its Ministers have fallen. Long reign the Prince and His Principality.
-The Golden Era (1926-1970)Nominally remaining under the Russian Empire, the now-called Principality of Byelorussia got really really better. Population exploded, industry was strengthened, became really nice and friendly to neighbours despite officially being Russian, maintained Byelorussian identity for some so-far unknown reason, maintained the freedoms of its people, shining beacon of liberty, et cetera, et cetera.
Then Russia died and all became not well.
-The Republican Era (1970-Present)Byelorussia really sucks right now. The Mafiya overrunning the east and north, floods of poor, antagonistic Russian refugees pouring into Homyel’ and Vicebsk, a declining steel industry, and a western Ukraino-Polish superstate neighbor increasingly indifferent to Byelorussian woes but increasingly interested in Byelorussian internal affairs are all contributing factors.
