Soviet repressions in Belarus

Soviet repressions in Belarus refers to cases of ungrounded criminal persecution of people in Belarus under Communist rule. This includes persecution of people for the alleged counter-revolutionary activity, as well as deportations of people to other regions of the USSR based on their social, ethnic, religious or other background.

The repressions started in 1917 and have reached their peak during the 1930s and especially during the USSR-wide Great Purge in 1937-1938. Significant executions of notable Belarusian intellectuals and politicians have been made in the night between 29 and 30 October 1937 and related to the fabricated Case of the Union of Liberation of Belarus in 1930. Thousands of ethnic Poles were killed during the Polish Operation of the NKVD (1937–38), their families frequently deported to Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic.

A separate wave of repressions occurred in 1939—1941 in West Belarus after its annexation to the USSR, when thousands of kulaki, priests, social and political leaders, former Polish officials and osadniki were either exterminated or forcibly resettled to Kazakhstan, Siberia and other regions of the USSR.

The repressions have largely stopped after the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953.

The exact number of people who became victims to Soviet repressions in Belarus is hard to determine because the archives of the KGB in Belarus remain inaccessible to researchers.

According to incomplete calculations, about 600,000 people fell victim to Soviet repressions in Belarus between 1917 and 1953. Other estimates put the number at higher than 1.4 million persons., of which 250,000 were sentenced by judicial or executed by extrajudicial bodies (dvoikas, troikas, special commissions of the OGPU, NKVD, MGB). Excluding those sentenced in the 1920s-1930s, over 250,000 Belarusians were deported as kulaks or kulak family members in regions outside the Belarusian Soviet Republic.

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