Bolsheviks take Minsk

On 10 December 1918 units of the Red Army entered Minsk, which the Germans had held since February. The city was taken practically without a fight. No one was in a position to defend it: the Germans were just withdrawing from it, and neither the authorities of the Belarusian People’s Republic nor the local Poles had any troops.

The end of the war opened the way west for the Bolsheviks. On 13 November, two days after the armistice at Compiègne, Lenin’s government annulled the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, and the Red Army was ordered to move into the lands the Germans now had to leave. In the Belarusian direction the Western Army operated, formed in mid-November and commanded by a former tsarist general, Andrei Snesarev. During the night of 16–17 November its units crossed the demarcation line and moved off in the wake of the withdrawing Germans, meeting almost no resistance. According to Russian studies, they took Polotsk on 21 November, Bobruisk on 28 November, Borisov on 3 December, Slutsk on 8 December and Ihumen on 9 December. Minsk was entered by units of the Western Rifle Division, formed in Russia from Poles serving in the Red Army, with the Revolutionary Red Warsaw Regiment as its nucleus.

For the Belarusian national activists this was the end of their hopes for a state in Minsk. The Rada of the Belarusian People’s Republic had not managed to create any armed units, and the Germans, who since the spring had not allowed it to form an army, were now withdrawing. Most of the republic’s activists moved in December to Grodno, which was still occupied by the Germans. The Poles of the Minsk region did form their own self-defence, one of the Self-Defence of the Borderlands units, but it was too weak to stand up to regular troops.

Minsk soon became the capital of Soviet Belarus. On 1 January 1919 in Smolensk the Bolsheviks proclaimed the Socialist Soviet Republic of Byelorussia, whose government moved to Minsk in the first days of January. The Red Army pushed on west: in mid-December it took Vileyka, and on 18 December Molodechno. Some historians, following Norman Davies, call this operation “Target Vistula”, but the name rarely appears in Polish and Russian sources. Most historians believe that the Bolsheviks wanted to take as much as possible of the land the Germans were leaving before new states could establish themselves there.

In the Vilna and Grodno regions they clashed with Polish aspirations. On 5 January 1919 the Western Division took Vilna, driving out the Polish self-defence, and in February, when the Germans let units of the Polish Army through to the east, the first Polish–Bolshevik clashes took place. The capture of Minsk was one of the first steps towards the Polish–Soviet War.