ABSTRACT
Until recently, the First World War in Eastern Europe remained in the shadows of the battles and trench warfare of the Western Front and the revolutionary period of 1917 in Russia. For a long time, Norman Stone’s account of the military operations on the Eastern Front, dating back to the 1970s, was one of the few studies which addressed this aspect of the Great War. 1 Yet, with the advent of the war’s centennial, the historiography of the First World War in Eastern Europe experienced rapid growth. Along with the traditional topics of military, 2 diplomatic, 3 economic, and social history, 4 recent historiography has also addressed the cultural aspects of the Great War and the experiences of the civilian populations and soldiers on the Eastern Front. 5 Finally, new methodological approaches of transnational and entangled histories have concentrated on the implications of the First World War for the process of imperial collapse, decolonization, and the radicalization of violence in the region. 6 In this regard, a focus on the Belarusian dimension within these larger narratives allows one to contextualize the impact of this major military conflict on the conditions for nation-building.
