Гістарычны шлях нацыі і дзяржавы
Радзім Гарэцкі, Міхась Біч, Уладзімір Конан
Выдавец: Беларускі кнігазбор
Памер: 348с.
Мінск 2001
Later on practically the entire area of Belorussia was occupied by the German Army. In the second half of 1919 Belorussia became the scene of a devastating Soviet-Polish war. Military operations did not cease until November 1920. The peace treaty between the RSFSR and Poland was signed on March 18, 1921, in Riga. No representatives of the Belorussian people were allowed to take part either in the treaty negotiations or in the signing of the peace treaty.
After the conclusion of the peace treaty with Poland, the Belorussian nation was divided into three parts. The Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic was organized out of six districts in Minsk Province. Four million Belorussians were handed over to Poland. The Vitebsk, Mogilev, Smolensk, and Gomel Provinces were included in the RSFSR. It was not until much later, in 1924—26, that parts of these provinces were allotted to the Belorussian SSR.
After the end of the Soviet-Polish war, the Belorussian people strove to preserve their independence by armed uprising. A revolt organized by the Rada of the BPR flared up in Slutsk District in November 1920. More than 10,000 persons took part. The uprising was suppressed by overwhelming forces of the Red Army. The insurgents, split into small detachments, dispersed into forests where they continued to struggle against the Soviet regime. The inhabitants of areas affected by the uprising, were subjected to repression and insurgents who were captured were dealt with harshly. Repression was on the scale of genocide.
Under the Soviet regime, the surviving Belorussian national leaders attempted to revive the national culture and economy of ruined Belorussia by combined efforts. At the end of 1929 cultural and economic restoration of Belorussia was suddenly interrupted. The organizers and leaders of the restoration were charged with organizing a Belorussian national democratic movement and conducting counterrevolutionary sabotage aimed at the withdrawal of Belorussia from the Soviet Union.
Beginning on the basis of these accusations, repression actually had the ultimate arm of destroying the Belorussian intelligentsia. The first victim was the President of the Belorussian Academy of Sciences, Professor U. Ihnatouski, who committed suicide after interrogation by the GPU. The People’s Commissar for Agriculture of the BSSR, D. Pryscepau, his deputy A. Adamovic, and persons who had closely collaborated in the land reform in Belorussia, including Academician A. Smolic, and others, were removed from their posts and arrested. The People’s Commissar for Education of the BSSR, A. Balicki, and a number of senior officials of the Commissariat were also arrested. Repression extended to writers, poets, archeologists, composers, and students of local lore.
Among those who fell victim to the operations for the elimination of the national intelligentsia were the Rector of the Belorussian University, U. Piceta; Academician S. Niekrasevic; the writers and poets U. Zylka, U. Dubouka, and A. Dudar; and the critics U. Dziarzynski and A. Babareka.
After the arrests have been made by the GPU, the Communist authorities began to call the activity of the Belorussian nationalist leaders a counter-revolutionary National Democratic Movement and the land reform «Pryscepaiiscyna» after Prysccpah, author of the land reform in Soviet Belorussia.
The Belorussian National Democratic Movement was accused of taking its origin from the historic past of Belorussia. We have every reason to state that National Democracy as a definite ideological system began to be organized in the second and third pre-revolutionary decades. Some ideas are met with in the work of E Bahuscvic and J. Niasluchouski which later became part of the armory of National Democracy.
Among the numerous charges, brought against the National Democrats, was the accusation that they had deviated from the class struggle. This indictment was formulated as follows, «From the earliest moments of the formation of the National Democratic ideology until 1930, the National Democrats did not cease to assert that we need to work constructively, without party dissension, for the formation of an independent Belorussia.» The leaders of the Belorussian National Democratic movement were also charged with having seized the most important posts in the cultural arena and having squeezed out the Communist Party. The Communists wrote:
After the Red Army had expelled the White Poles and bandits from the BPR, a number of ministers, such as Losik and others who were members of the Rada, remained in Minsk. They began their «work» with the aid of lackeys of the French general, Bartel, — Balicki, and Niekrasevic — who had arrived from Odessa. When, as a result of the victory of the working class under the guidance of the Communist Party, the idea arose of organizing a scientific research institute in the BSSR (the Institute of Belorussian Culture), the National Democrats at one time exerted considerable activity in an effort to capture the institute and utilize it for anti-proletarian ends.
The National Democrats were considered particularly culpable because they strove to make use of works on ethnography, studies of local areas, and the activity of museums in order to prove the «individuality» of Belorussian culture by tracing its roots far back into the country’s history. The National Democrats were also considered guilty of taking energetic steps to preserve the sacred writings, cherished by the people of Belorussia and avoiding unrestrained and unpopular anti-religious propaganda. The accusers of the National Democrats wrote, «The whole of the ethnographic work of the National Democrats is harmful, politically hostile to the dictatorship of the proletariat... The work of museums has consisted exclusively of showing the individuality of local culture and digging up ancient relics.»
The land reform, which was aimed at strengthening the small peasant farms and developing the economy of the district, was also included in the categoiy of counter-revolutionary actions. Meanwhile, Pryscepau’s work had had a beneficial effect on the lives of the poorest peasantry. During collectivization, the poorest peasants, as a result of having benefited from Pryscepau’s land reform, in many cases were included in the category of kulaks, robbed, and deported to the north. The essence of Pryscepau’s land reform was decribed by the investigators as follows:
National Democracy is the instigator and leader of the small-farm land policy, which backed the kulaks and strove to direct the agriculture of the BSSR along
the road of capitalist development. Armed with the traditional arguments about national individuality, the ideological weapon-bearers of Pryscepaii’s have demanded a local Belorussian agricultural economy. This National Democratic Belorussian agricultural economy is expressed in such documents as the notorious Plan for the Development of the National Economy of the BSSR, in the works of Kislakou, Harecki, Smolic, Zdanovic, Jarascuk, and others.
All these persons had been arrested by the CPU.
The activists of the Institute of Philosophy, headed by Volfson, also condemned the local forms of address used by Belorussians. The following charges against the National Democrats are to be found in its 3-volume work:
When the Soviets arrived, the National Democrats authoritatively declared that the word comrade does not accord with Belorussian usage. As a result the word comrade, which is filled with revolutionary emotion, has given way to the courteously patriarchal dziadzka (uncle) and ciotka (aunt).
In 1930 the national leaders were imprisoned. They were persons who had been in the forefront of the revival of national culture. According to figures which are far from complete, in the capital of Minsk alone up to 300 of the highly educated Belorussian intellectuals were arrested during this period, including 13 full members of the Belorussian Academy of Sciences, 72 leading scientists and professors, 60 writers and poets, and a large number of the senior clergy, engineers, economists, composers, artists, and others. This list does not include those arrested in other cities, or the large number of rural intellectuals and advanced peasants suspected of National Democracy.
However, punitive action against the Belorussian intellectuals was not confined to the repression of 1930. Communist propagandists strove to incite the masses against the intellectuals, and to make «ideological preparations», as the saying went, for a new wave of terror, which began on a mass scale in 1933. It embrased the entire territory of Belorussia and affected not only the cities, but also the villages. While in 1930 the GPU’s victims had been mainly members of the older generation, whose ideology had been formed during the pre-revolutionary years, in 1933 repression was directed mainly against Belorussians who were graduates of Soviet educational institutes: lecturers, post-graduate students, young writers and poets, critics, teachers, scientists, economists, organizers, and students of local lore in the provinces. Such people were arrested and dispatched to concentration camps without trial or investigation.
In 1933 a group of Western Belorussian representatives to the Polish Sejm were arrested and deported. The background of this action was as follows: these representatives had been deprived of parliamentary immunity and sentenced by a Polish court to long terms of imprisonment for taking part in the organization of the Belorussian Peasants’ and Workers’ Hramada in Western Belorussia. In 1932 the Soviet Union, by agreement with the Polish government, exchanged these representatives for Roman Catholic clergy who had been arrested in the USSR. On their arrival in Minsk they were appointed to various cultural institutions as deputies. A year later all were arrested on a charge of counter-revolutionary Belorussian nationalism and espionage on behalf of Poland. Eventually, they perished in Solovki and other concentration camps.
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