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INSTITUTE FOR THE STUDY OF THE USSR
Belorussian Review
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MUNICH
1955
The views expressed in the Review are those of their authors. They are not bound by any single political philosophy nor are they to be construed as representing the point of view of the INSTITUTE.
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Material contained herein may be reproduced, provided reference is made to this publication
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All comments and inquiries are most welcome and should be addressed to:
Institute for the Study of the USSR
Editor, The Belorussian Review Augustenstrasse 46
Munich, Germany
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Verantwortlich fur den Inhalt:
Dr. Stanislau Stankievic
Herausgeber und Verlag: Institut zur Erforschung der UdSSR, e. V., Munchen 37, AugustenstraBe 46, Telefon 5 81 27. Printed in Germany by Buchdruckerei Dr. Peter Belej, Munchen 13, Schleibheimer Strabe 71
FOREWORD
"THE BELORUSSIAN REVIEW" of the Institute for the Study of the USSR publishes works by Belorussian and other scholars whose field of study is the history, theory and practice of Bolshevism in the Soviet Union.
The first issue of the "BELORUSSIAN REVIEW" was published in Belorussian with short summaries in English, German and French. However, since the principal task of the Institute Is to convey the results of its research to the free world, the publishing board and the Belorussian editors now find it more expedient to publish the "BELORUSSIAN REVIEW" in English.
For the use of Belorussian emigres there will be an edition in Belorussian. Only those articles of direct interest to the western reader will appear in the English edition. For example, the article "Protection of Wild Life and Forest Preserves of the BSSR" by A. Jalovic, unquestionably interesting to Belorussian readers, is not perhaps of great value to other readers. For this reason it will be published in the Belorussian edition only. Instead, the English edition will include two articles reprinted from the first issue of the "BELORUSSIAN REVIEW", "The Establishment of the Belorussian SSR" by Jazep Mienski and "Forests of the Belorussian SSR" by A. Jalovic, as students of the Soviet way of life, will certainly recognize the primary importance of their content.
The first two issues of the "BELORUSSIAN REVIEW" were devoted mainly to the question of Bolshevik nationality policy in Belorussia and to the Belorussian national question in the BSSR (articles by J. Mienski, S. Stankievic, H. Niamiha and J. Stankievic). This was done because nationality policy and the national questian are the keys to an understanding of all other problems in the Belorussian SSR. In the future the editors will elucidate not only nationality problems but social, economic and cultural issues. Moreover the REVIEW will include themes touching general Soviet affairs and those of other non-Russian republics.
The editors appeal to all Belorussian scholars in exile and to those of other nationalities who are doing research on Soviet problems, in particular on the Belorussian SSR, to submit their articles to the editorial board for publication in the "BELORUSSIAN REVIEW".
Publishing Board of the Institute
CONTENTS
Foreword
J. Mienski, The Establishment of the Belorussian SSR
H. Niamiha, Education in Belorussia Before the Rout of "National Democracy", 1917—1930
J. Stankievic, The Language Policy of the Bolsheviks in the Belorussian SSR
M. Kulikovic, Belorussian National Art under Soviet Control
Ant. Adamovic, The Sovietization of Belorussian Literature
Jalovic, Forests of the Belorussian SSR
V. Budzimier, Problems of Corn Cultivation in the Belorussian SSR
The Establishment of the Belorussian SSR
J. MIENSKI
Introduction
The problem of the emergence of the Belorussian State from a history of national oppression is the core and center of Bolshevik propaganda in the Belorussian SSR (BSSR).
Thus, for several decades, with greater or less intensity, depending on the political situation, the Bolsheviks in Belorussia have been trying to prove to the people that the BSSR is a voluntary creation of Bolshevik national policy, which, so to speak, has not only constantly proclaimed, bu.1 has put into practice the principle of the free self-determination» of peoples, and of their free national development. Many articles, pamphlets, and even voluminous books have been written on the subject. For some reason this problem acquired particular timeliness and importance after World War II. The fact that so much is being said about "the underground activities" of so-called "bourgeois nationalists" who even now are disturbing the regime is suspect. Perhaps the main reason for endlessly speaking and writing on the subject is that the last war clearly exposed the most dangerous and threatening problem for the regime, namely, the unbridgeable gap between the regime and the people.
Immediately after the war, in 1946, the Belorussian Publishing House in Minsk published a book by N. V. Kamienskaja, Utvarennie Bielaruxkaj SSR (The Creation of the Belorussian SSR). After World War II, L. Canava, Minister of the MVD in the BSSR, also came forward in the role of historian and theoretician of the Belorussian question. His work in two large volumes, Vsenarodnaya partizanskaya voina v Belorussii protiv fashistskikh zakhvatchikov (The All-National Guerilla Warfare in Belorussia against the Fascist Invaders), published in Minsk in 1949—1951, would rank high among similar works by its size alone. The whole nationalist movement after its first contact with the Bolsheviks treated them as an alien phenomenon and entered into irreconcilable conflict with them. This struggle, and the striving of the movement for state self-expression of the national life of the people, are declared by Canava, following the line of other Soviet writers, to be antipopular and the plot of a handful of nationalist intellectuals. The author thinks it appropriate to speak of the loyalty of the Belorussian movement to the tsarist policy, against which, in its struggle for the national liberation of the country, it was directed from its inception.
The basic assertions of Canava are:
1. The Belorussian people for the first time in their history received state independence1 at the hands of the Bolsheviks;
2. Soviet power in Belorussia was the only legal power which was supported by the millions-strong masses of workers and peasants of Belorussia2;
3. As regards the national question, the working people of Belorussia followed the path indicated by the party of Lenin and Stalin3;
4. The idea of regional autonomy, which ensures the strengthening of the union of the Belorussian people with the Russian people, was supported by the broad masses of Belorussians4.
If what Canava asserts were true, then a particularly important conclusion would follow for the regime; that the Soviet form of statehood in Belorussia is at the same time Belorussian national statehood; in other words, Bolshevism and the people are indivisible. This is what the regime tries to prove to the people.
It is characteristic that particularly after World War II the whole Belorussian press, scholarly literature and fiction, and the entire propaganda machinery were mobilized to explain officially the past and present of Belorussia. In this connection it is worth dwelling upon the question of the establishment of the BSSR, how and why it was created, and, as far as the material permits, to revive the historic truth.
The appearance of the national Soviet republics, the BSSR among them, can be explained only in connection with the nationalist movements on the fringes of former tsarist Russia. It was possible to defeat these movements with armed force, but it was impossible to destroy them. The national Soviet republics were artificial creations of the state, and used as a means of appeasing these "fringes in rebellion." The empire was threatened with disintegration, and this was not favorable to the consolidation of the new regime. In order to consolidate the regime and to preserve the empire, the idea of the Soviet Federation of Peoples was invoked under the banner of formal independence. Besides, from the Bolshevik point of view, the establishment of the national Republics had great propaganda value abroad.
The history of the creation of the BSSR indubitably proves that the Bolsheviks decided to establish the Republic under the direct influence of the Belorussian national movement which they called anti-popular. If there had been no such movement there would have been no BSSR.
Before the National Upsurge
The outbreak of World War I on August 1, 1914, was decisive for future political developments on the territory of Belorussia. The country was transformed into the battlefield of an armed struggle between Russia and Germany. Armies millions strong were concentrated there. In the summer of 1915 the front line divided Belorussia into two parts.
As a result of the war more than a million people were expeled from their land. The national movement was disorganized. The Belorussia t weekly Nasa Niva, which was the rallying point of the forces of liberation and the standard-bearer of nationalist ideas among the people, ceased publication in 1915. It seemed that the movement, split by the war, would not have strength even for its own potential self-preservation. However, the national forces were not completely liquidated, only the contact between them was severed. Soon an organized national movement began to take shape, slowly but still consistently in its purposefulness, availing itself of the war chaos. National committees began to appear side by side with committees of refuges. In 1916 in Petersburg the first issues of the Belorussian newspapers Dziannica and Svietac appeared, but their publication was suppressed by the censor after the seventh issue. The Belorussian newspaper Homan, the heir and successor to Nasa Niva, began publication in Vilna. In the same town were established such organizations as the National Committee, the Confederation of the Great Duchy of Lithuania, the Union for Independence and Integrity of Belorussia, and others.
The Belorussians met the February Revolution of 1917 with a great upsurge, in the hope of realizing the ideal of an independent state. The national movement was led by an older organization, Bielaruskaja Sacyjalistycraja Hramada (BSH) (Belorussian Socialist Organization), which was established as early as 1902 as the avant-garde of the most radical political trends. I3SH was transformed into a leading national organization. Zmitra Zylunovic, one of the participants in those events, who later passed into the ranks of the Bolsheviks and perished at their hands, writes about the Hramada:
Strong branches of the Hramada appeared in Petersburg, Moscov, Minsk, Saratov, Vitebsk, Babruisk and various towns of Siberia and the Ukraine, within a period of less than a month. A large number of people joined these branches. Many people left other political parties and joined Hramada. The first meetings in March in Petersburg and Moscow and the demonstrations in Petersburg and Minsk in which many thousands of people took part, demonstrated an unusually great movement of national consciousness among the working masses in Belorussia as well as beyond its borders5.
During this period new organizations and various political parties such as the Belorussian People's Hramada, the Belorussian People's Socialist Party, the Belorussian Autonomists' Union, the Christian Democratic Union, and others were established.
After the February Revolution the Belorussian movement expanded and gained strength with every passing day, transforming itself into a mass movement, acquiring a clear political character, and vigorously following the road to realization and application of the ideal of state independence. The mass character and intensity of the movement, whose aim was clearly the political goal of statehood, found its determined expression in various large conferences, on a scale hitherto unheard of, at which wide strata of the population were represented; this was the main feature of this period of growth and development of national revolution.
A conference of Belorussian organizations and parties was с died on March 25, 1917, in Minsk. The statehood of Belorussia was tie main question discussed at the conference, which created the Belorussian National Committee as a leading national organ entrusted with the task of preparing elections to the National Council. The Bolsheviks treated this Committee as hostile, calling it counter-revolutionary. The Minsk Committee of the Peasants' Union headed by the notorious Frunze and established by the Bolsheviks, even passed a special resolution which pledged a merciless struggle against the "Belorussian nationalists." Thus a hostile relationship existed between the Bolsheviks and the Belorussian movement, which began with the birth of the movement and culminated in the armed intervention of the Bolsheviks in Belorussian affairs.
The conference of Belorussian organizations and parties in Minsk expressed itself in favor of a republican democratic regime which would join the Russian Federal Democratic Republic as an autonomous state. This decision was due to the obvious influence of the Belorussian Socialist Hramada, which for a long period before the February revolution had been demanding autonomy for Belorussia and her own legislative assembly. The Conference elected a delegation entrusted with the task of clarifying the Russian government's attitude toward the question of Belorussian statehood. Now the differences between Russian official circles and Belorussians became immediately apparent. The provisional (Russian) government created by the revolution which had proclaimed freedom for all peoples, through its slowness and lack of courage in the solution of national problems, aroused the suspicion that it would adhere to the old policy in this respect. The fact that at first the Russian government did not even want to talk to the Belorussian delegation, and, when an interview was finally granted, did not give a definite reply, but referred to the convocation of the All-Russian Assembly which was to solve the national question as well, was viewed with suspicion by the Belorussian delegation. This evasiveness in replying to the supreme question of the national future of the people was interpreted as unwillingness to take into consideration national demands which, quite significantly, were at that moment limited to national territorial autonomy.
A. Cvikievic, a member of the delegation, wrote the following:
The report of the delegates was heard in a sour mood and without due attention. All conscious Belorassian elements, who after a prolonged period of misery and oppression undertook the beloved task of putting their own country in order, understood painfully after such a reception that the right to political self-determination and a national culture are not granted, but should be simply taken. Further experience with the provisional Russian government of A. Kerensky, and later with the Bolshevik Soviet of People's Commissars, have finally convinced everyone that previously the Belorussian movement had to deal with Russian absolute power, and that now it has to deal with Great Russian imperialism, which proved to be far stronger than expected, and which is common to all Russian politicians, not excluding even those of the extreme Left. Belorussian political opinion is now convinced that a just solution of the national problem in Russia is encountering the hostility, however carefully camouflaged, of the whole Great-Russian population6.
It is just this moment which should be considered a turning point in the development of Belorussian national thought. Liberating itself from "trusting sentimentality,'' the Belorussian national movement took the road of national revolution, which it developed under the banner of victory of the independence line. Thus, the imperialism of their neighbors to the East and to the West had an equally stimulating influence on the further crystallization of national consciousness. This process was to be crowned with the proclamation of the independence of Belorussia.
In 1917 in Minsk there appeared the first issue of the newspaper Volnajo Bielarus (Free Belorussia), edited by Jazep Losik, who returned from Siberian exile to Minsk when the revolution was at its height. The name of the paper illustrates better than anything else its ideological character. From the beginning it was a national platform, a Belorussian anti-Bolshevik fortress which struggled for the realization of the idea of state independence, rallying the most prominent and honest Belorussian leaders. The same character belongs to the newspaper Homan, which appeared in Vilna as early as 1916. The Belorussian movement spread to the army. The same Zylunovic writ is:
In no time at all thousands of Belorussian soldiers became rationality-conscious, and by October there was hardly a large city or army unit on the front which did not have its organization of Belorussian service men National consciousness reached Belorussians in the Far East, in Turkestan, and on the Caucasus front, embracing all ranks and all branches of the service7.
During this period the BSH was transformed into a widespread mass political organization. In the XII-th Army, by the end of July, the BSH organization counted several thousand members. In June a branch of this organization numbering 800 members was created in the Russian Baltic Navy. It should be pointed out that in the beginning of June of that year the Bolsheviks had only 40 members in the Minsk organization of the Russian Social Democratic Workers' Party (RSDRP)8.
The Central Council was elected in July at the conference of Belorussian parties and organizations. Conferences of Belorussian soldiers at the front began to elect executive committees which gave birth to the supreme military executive organ known as the Central Belorussian Military Council. In the conduct of Belorussian national affairs the two councils fused and created the great Belorussian Council. In this way the supreme national political center was established for the purpose of assuming power. Soon afterward, as required by the revolutionary period, a joint all-national front was created. This was admitted even by Canava, when he writes that "Bolsheviks of Belorussia were hindered in their work of conquering the masses for the socialist revolution by a united front of nationalist parties and organizations."9
Seizure of Power by the Bolsheviks
A phenomenon which was most favorable to the rise of the Bolsheviks, and which was characteristic of the Russia of that period, was glaringly apparent on the western Russian front. That phenomenon was the inability of any of the political parties in the ruling (Russian) nation, and particularly the inability of members of the provisional government, to take the initiative in counteracting quickly and with determination the Bolshevik organization, although this latter group was not numerically strong at the time. The dynamic quality of Bolshevism was progressively transformed into a threatening force by means of a demagogical exploitation of the large-scale army unrest, and was opposed only by sterile oratory about "lofty ideals." Speedy action was necessary during that dangerous period when events were rapidly assuming ever increasing proportions, and were rejecting all those who were unable to control them. Fear of breaking with the past, unwillingness to give due weight to the temper of the masses, and hesitation in the face of the real and inevitable struggle did much to assure the success of demagogical Bolshevik propaganda, and hence the disintegration of the whole western front, which in turn played such an important part in later developments throughout Russia.
For a considerable period the Bolsheviks had an insignificant minority in the Minsk Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies which was created on March 6 and played a leading role in the affairs of the whole front. In February 1917, on the western Front, the Bolsheviks still had no party organization of their own; for a long time they did not dare to come into the open, because they were only a handful and, since the military masses were then following other political parties, they had no support. Knowing their own impotence, at the March meeting of the Minsk branch of the RSDRP the Bolsheviks supported a proposal to create a general party organization, the so-called "unification" without affiliation with the Menshevik or Bolshevik central organizations. By applying the tactics of unification with their political collaborators, and using the general social-democratic membership lists for a period of several months, they succeeded in securing an overall majority in the Minsk Soviet over all other political parties combined. At the September elections they received 184 seats out of a total of 337, and the presidium was dominated exclusively by their own candidates. When their organization had been consolidated, the Bolsheviks broke with their policy of unification, liquidated the "united front" as a political tool no longer useful, and created their own organization. In other cities there were no independent Bolshevik organizations; they appeared only after the consolidation of the Bolshevik position in Minsk. The Bolshevik party conference of the front took place on September 1. At this conference the delegates represented 2,530 members. This would seem a very modest figure for the whole front. Nevertheless, and to their own surprise, the Bolsheviks unexpectedly came to power through the skillful and rapid exploitation of the front-line situation.
After learning of the events in Petrograd (Petersburg), on October 26 (November 8) the Bolshevik presidium of the Minsk Soviet proclaimed by decree No. 1 that they were taking the power into their own hands. This coup d'etat by decree took place without a single shot being fired, and was aided by the surprising impotence and inactivity of army opposition to the Bolsheviks, even though the Bolsheviks themselves were helplessly weak; taken unawares the opposition was seemingly paralyzed by a political shock. The High Command of the Western Front accepted Bolshevik commissars, appointed to ensure the political control of the army. The command of the Second Caucasian Division pledged their loyalty to the Bolsheviks. It should be pointed out that at that time the Bolshevik presidium of the Soviet had no army units at their disposal, except for a number of prisoners who were immediately armed after their release.
On October 26 the Military Revolutionary Committee (Revkom) was established as the supreme organ of power for the whole country and the front. However, this power had still to be spread over the country- as the Bolsheviks used to say, because the real power did not as yet exist It was only on October 27, when a statement about the establishment of the Revkom was distributed, that the first signs of common sense began to appear among opponents of the Bolsheviks. The pledges of loyalty were revoked. The Front Committee in command of the struggle against the Revkom now appointed a Committee to Save the Revolution, and its power was immediately streigthened by military units of the Caucasian Division who were determined to put down any opposition. Having no military strength to fight for power, the Revkom immediately decided against armed intervention. It seemed the new power proclaimed by decree would become non-existent. Once again, however, the compromising attitude of their opponents saved the Bolsheviks. In order to avoid the military conflict, which would not have happened my way, since the Bolsheviks had decided to capitulate rather than enter into an armed struggle, the idea of establishing a "united" socialist front was revived. The Bolsheviks proposed to join the Committee to Save the Revolution—tie committee which was intended to save the revolution from these very Bolsheviks. Their proposal was eagerly accepted and, under the protective wing of the Committee, the Bolsheviks with lightning speed applied themselves to the task of finding the indispensable armed force. It was the old familiar tactical maneuver of joining a general organization in order to exploit the opponent for one's own ends.
With the help of "unification" the Bolsheviks had once before seized control of the Minsk Soviet. Now they were using the same tactics in order to recover their power over the whole country, which existed in theory at the moment of its seizure by decree, and had ceased altogether when it became obvious that armed force was necessary to keep that power. On November 2 an armored train arrived to support the Minsk Soviet, and the 60th Siberian Regiment was instructed to come to Minsk. On the same date the Bolsheviks left the Committee to Save the Revolution, declared their opposition to it, and in the evening, at the session of the Minsk Soviet, reiterated the announcement about the coup d'etat. The Front Committee capitulated.
All this was strictly related to the territorial position of Belorussia, where Bolshevism was an import, since the main forces which clashed in the Russian revolution met each other on the territory of Belorussia, through which the front line passed. Under the circumstances it was impossible to expect that at this moment the Belorussian movement, which was in its initial organizational and revolutionary stage, and which had little support in official circles, could produce a destructive opposition against the Bolsheviks' seizure of power. There were no Belorussians in the first organs of Bolshevik administration; the problem of power was decided only by the army, whose supreme command was not in sympathy with the Belorussian Movement. Canava, when he says that, "The Soviet power in Belorussia was the only legal power," although he wants to stress "the assistance of the Russian proletariat" is compelled to admit, with some reservations, that:
. . . the victory of Soviet power in Belorussia was to a considerable extent ensured by the circumstance that large numbers of workers and peasants of the Central Russian regions, in military uniform, were concentrated on the western front, which passed through Belorussia10.
Knoryn, who was for many years Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Belorussia, who made a personal career of the struggle against the Belorussian Movement and reached the Comintern and who, moreover, cannot be suspected of having sympathies with the Belorussian movement, on several occasions expressed the opinion that:
... the founder and creator of the Communist organization was the old Bolshevik guard who came to Belorussia from Leningrad, Moscow and Ivanov because of the war. The history of Communism in Belorussia takes its origins from Russian Bolshevism, from the RSDRP and not from the national-socialist parties11.
It is characteristic that the name of Belorussia is not even mentioned in the list of Bolshevik organizations and organs of administration of the time. Soon afterwards the Bolsheviks began to call their organizations Belorussian for strictly tactical reasons. The people had no influence whatever on the creation of the first organs of the Bolshevik regime. In confirmation we may quote, for instance, the remark of one contemporary eye-witness:
The Soviet of People's Commissars was established in November, 1917, in Minsk, at the Front (Military) Conference, and neither the Belorussian military units nor the Belorussian rank and file of peasants' and workers' deputies took part in the election of these commissars12.
On the Road to National Statehood
The Bolshevik revolution did not satisfy anyone in Belorussia. For a stateless people like the Belorussians every revolution should be a national revolution, but the national question was entirely ignored during the Bolshevik revolution, and afterwards Belorussia still remained the traditional fringe of the old empire, whose color had simply been changed from white to red. This could not fail to produce a reaction in the organized political society of Belorussia.
In reply to the Bolshevik proclamation of October 26 by the Minsk Soviet, and in reply to the creation of the Bolshevik Revkom, the Great Belorussian Council (Rada) published a "Message to the Belorussian People" on October 27. Addressing itself to "all living forces ... of the Motherland," and counter-opposing itself to the Bolshevik regime, the Rada appealed:
In these days we must show that the Belorussian revolutionary democracy united by suffering will never permit the storm of disorder to engulf our sacred national cause of defense of the freedom and rights of the Belorussian people ... Unite as a single harmonious family around the Great Belorussian Rada, rejecting all slogans which bring discord ...13
The newspaper Volnaja Bielarus published appealing anti-Bolshevik articles, expressing the confidence that Soviet power was only temporary. J. Losik, editor of the newspaper, wrote that "the government of Lenin will disintegrate like a house of cards" and that "the salvation of the country lies in national reconstruction."14 A Belorussian writer of Jewish origin, Biadula-Jasakar, published an article in the same newspaper entitled "Para baranicca" (Time to Defend Ourselves), in which he appealed, "Join the Bel Prussian army and defend your own country from destruction."15
On December 18, 1917, the first All-Belorussian Congress was convened in Minsk for the establishment of a national government. The Congress was attended by 1872 delegates from the Minsk, Mogilev, Vitebsk, Snolensk, Vilna and Grodna provinces. The Congress was named "All-Belo Tussian" because all social strata of the population and all ethnographic groups were represented. It was attended by 716 military deputies, and this testifies to the scope of the Belorussian Movement in the army. This was the most numerous democratic gathering of Belorussians during the revolutionary period. The one-party Bolshevik conferences cannot compare with it and the ten Bolshevik delegates who were sent from Petrograd to attend the Congress had no influence whatever.
The Revolution proclaimed the right of the people to self-determination. In pursuance of this right the Congress rejected the Bolshevik Soviets and passed a resolution establishing a democratic republic. During the right of December 30 the Bolsheviks dispersed the Congress with armed force. On December 31 the delegates gathered again in order to finish their work. On this occasion the deliberations of the Congress proceeded under the protection of the Minsk railwaymen, who put their depot at the disposal of the delegates. The delegates handed over full powers to the elected Council of the Congress (Rada), which proclaimed itself the representative of the sovereign power of the people. The Executive Committee of the Council (Rada) was then established and the leadership of the national movement went underground.
The forcible dispersal of the Congress exposed the utter demagogy of the "Declaration of the Rights of the Peoples of Russia," published on November 3, to which Lenin's signature was affixed. It spoke of the equality and sovereignty of peoples and their rights to far-reaching self-determination, permitting even the existence of independent states with the right of secession. In practice this declaration was only a piece of paper, whose worthlessness was proved by the attitude of the Bolsheviks toward the people's national republics, which were established during the revolutionary period and later liquidated by armed force.
It is surprising that the Belorussian Central Military Council (Rada) had for a certain period a semi-legal status. The situation was exploited for the preparation of an armed uprising. For this purpose the 289th infantry reserve regiment was transferred to Minsk, contacts were established with the anti-Bolshevik military organizations of the Ukrainians and Tatars, and the formation of Belorussian military units was accelerated. Such work was progressing particularly well on the Rumanian front, where there was a considerable number of Belarussians. In accordance with orders given to the armies on the Rumanian Front, the following military units were transferred to the Belorussian Army: The 6 th Tavragensky Frontier Guard Cavalry Regiment, which was renamed the 1st Belorussian National Hussars' Regiment; the 4th Army Corps consisting of the 30th and 40th Infantry Divisions; the 4th Infantry Division, the 26th Armored Detachment. All Belorussian officers and men from the IVth, VIth, VIIIth and IXth Armies were transferred to Belorussian military units16. Efforts were made to transfer these units to Minsk, where the fate of Belorussia was being decided. However, the sabotage of these efforts by the higher non- Belorussian Command, and the pressure of external events, prevented the use of the newly created Belorussian Army. In accordance with the terms of the peace treaty with Germany, Rumania undertook to disarm the Russian army which was stationed on her territory. Thus Belorussian units were also disarmed. When they heard about preparations for a military uprising against them, the Bolsheviks gave orders to arrest and court martial members of the Belorussian Central Military Council (Rada).
The first Belorussian Congress was the rallying point of the Belorussian Movement in 1917. It expressed itself in favor of the establishment of a Belorussian state, and of the immediate creation of a national army (Belorussian soldiers had put forward this demand at their previous conferences) for the conquest and defense of the statehood and integrity of Belorussia, threatened by Bolsheviks, Poles and Germans. The Belorussian public realized that the significance of the Congress lay in its proclamation of national republican statehood. This was a victory over "provincialism," from whatever quarters it might be forthcoming; from the Bolsheviks, or from organizations (such as the Union of Belorussian Democracy in Gomel, the Belorussian National Committee in Mogilev, the Belorussian People's Union in Vitebsk, and others) established in 1917 by former civil servants of the tsarist regime. They were defending Russian influence in the country, trying to reduce it again to the status of a Russian province.
Calling the first Congress the Belorussian Constituent Assembly, and treating it as an expression of the determination to liquidate "the dictatorship of the proletariat," Knoryn, one of the liquidators of the Congress, expressed his surprise at the speed and vigor with which the anti-Bolshevik struggle in Belorussia was developing. He wrote:
It is rather surprising that the Belorussian National Democrats and National Socialists were the first to convoke the Constituent Assembly... This speed is to be envied by the Russian Social-Revolutionaries who achieved their Omsk dictatorship under Kolchak considerably later17.
All the events which took place during the first hundred days of Bolshevik power in Belorussia—the whole trend of the Bolshevik political line, the identification of the entire Belorussian movement with the counter-revolution, and the forcible dispersal of the Congress, which deliberately counter-opposed national statehood to the Bolshevik regime—show that it was a period during which the Bolsheviks completely ignored the Belorussian question. In a demagogic way they were trying to minimize concern with the national problem of formerly oppressed peoples, and to substitute for it slogans about social liberation which had general importance for all peoples. These slogans were meant to camouflage the traditional imperialist denial of national dignity to dependent peoples, who were supposed to follow obediently and unfinchingly the dominating nation, in other words, the standard-bearer of the regime.
In spite of the dispersal of the Congress, this was one of the links in the chain of events which forced the Bolsheviks to revise their attitude toward Belorussia. The period of German invasion in 1918 is very significant in this respect.
Proclamation of Belorussian Independence
After breaking off the peace negotiations in Brest-Litovsk, Germany began an offensive. The Soviet army retreated eastwards. Belorussian military units which the Bolsheviks had not managed to disarm became active again. The Bolshevik authorities left Minsk as early as February 18, one week before the arrival of the Germans. Lander, Chairman of the Soviet People's Committee (Sovnarkom) of the western region, writes the following about his escape:
Belorussians who were preparing an uprising against us became active in the town. There were minor clashes in the streets, and one could bear shots. When Comrade Petrov, Commandant of the Soviet, was accompanying me in the evening from the Soviet premises through the back door, armed gangs broke in through the front door looking for me and my comrades18.
In Minsk and its neighborhood, power was taken over by the Rada of the Belorussian Congress, which had formerly been active in the underground. On February 21, 1918, the Rada published Decree No. 1 on the seizure of power. Addressing the people of Belorussia, the Executive Committee of the Rada appealed as follows:
We should take our fate into our own hands. The Belorussian people should achieve their right to complete self-determination, and the national minorities their right to national autonomy19.
It was decided to call the Constituent Assembly for the achievement of this right. The Provisional Government was then established, which took the name Narodny Sakrataryjat (The People's Secretariat), and stated that its aim was to defend the achievements of the revolution. The First Belorussian Regiment and the city police were created in Minsk.
On February 25 the German Army occupied Minsk. Peace negotiations were renewed in Brest-Litovsk and were concluded with the signing of a treaty between the Germans and the Bolsheviks on March 3, according to which Belorussia was divided between her neighboring states, with the direct participation of the Bolsheviks. Thus the fate of Belorussia was decided, at least for the time being. The guiding principle of Belorussian political life during that time was the determination to fight not only for the preservation of the integrity of Belorussian territory, but also for the establishment of a national state on that territory.
On March 9, when the bargain in Brest-Litovsk had already been struck and confirmed by signature, the Executive Committee of the Rada of the Belorussian Congress published Decree No. 2 which, in conformity with the resolutions of the first Congress, proclaimed the Bielaruskaja Narodnaja Respulіка (BNR) (Belorussian National Republic) over the whole ethnographic territory of Belorussia.
This decree became the basis for the first Constitution of the Belorussian National Republic (BNR). At that time the Rada of the BNR was created. The idea of a national state was crowned and confirmed by the well-known Act of March 25, 1918. The Rada of the BNR declared null and void the peace treaty of Brest-Litovsk and proclaimed the independence of Belorussia in the famous Decree No. 3. In the concluding words of the Decree the following appeal was made to the people:
Proclaiming the independence of the BNR the Rada place all their hopes on the firm conviction that all freedomloving peoples will assist the Belorussian people to achieve fully their political State ideals20.
Immediately afterwards there arose the question of external support for the young republic. The Rada could not count on the support of Soviet Russia or Poland because both claimed Belorussia as part of their territory. Defending the sovereignty of the BNR,, the Rada sent a protest to the Soviet Government against the points of the Brest treaty which concerned Belorussia. Another protest was addressed to the Regent's Council in Warsaw against the abuses of Polish legionaries whose presence on Belorussian territory was considered an act of hostility.
German occupation was not favorable and could not be favorable to the political consolidation of the newly proclaimed BNR. The Germans came as conquerors, not as allies, and this became obvious on the first day of their arrival in Minsk. As frequently happens during the political bargaining of great powers, the smaller countries, and particularly those which have just risen to the status of independent nations, become pawns in their game. This is just what happened to Belorussia in 1918. Nevertheless, and in spite of the unfriendliness of the German military authorities toward Belorussia, the Rada in its search for the necessary external support of an influential power, considered it worth while to request the German government to recognize the independence of the BNR. Apparently it was thought that Germany, which only yesterday fought against the Bolsheviks, might support the BNR as a non-Soviet state. There was obviously no danger of any germanizing influence because the national affinity between Germany and Belorussia was nonexistent.
Three memoranda or requests were sent to the German government. The last memorandum addressed to the Imperial Chancellor of Germany at the end of October, 1918, shows that there had been the following reply to the previous memoranda:
The obstacle to the recognition of the independence of Belorussia is the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk concluded between Germany and the RSFSR, according to the terms of which Germany undertook an obligation not to support any new state creations on the territory of former Russia21.
The third memorandum could not have any success either, since Germany at that time was exclusively preoccupied with her own internal affairs. It was on the eve of the November revolution.
All these memoranda of the Rada addressed to Germany are treated by Soviet historians as an attempt to transform Belorussia into a German colony and as a betrayal of the people's interests. It should be pointed out that in their memoranda the Belorussian Rada protested against the illegality of the Brest Treaty, and the presence of the German army was termed an occupation of the country. Finally, it named Germany morally responsible for the: future fate of Belorussia if her independence were not recognized. The attitude of Soviet historians towards the above-mentioned documents can be explained by the fact that these documents spoke of the international importance of supporting the independence of Belorussia, which could become an anti-Bolshevik barrier to the West; moreover, the refusal to support the independent state of Belorussia was creating the conditions for a westward expansion of Bolshevism. The assertions of Soviet writers are not in conformity with historical truth, but are based on propagandistic considerations. The telegram addressed to Wilhelm II on April 25 (two months after the arrival of German troops in Minsk) expressing gratitude for the liberation of Belorussia from the Bolsheviks and containing a request to "defend the independence and integrity of the country jointly with the German Empire,"22 was rather a tactical if belated move than an expression of servility. The Rada considered Germany as a protector of Belorussia less dangerous than her neighbors, who had immediately shown a tendency to denationalize (russify or polonize) Belorussia. The Rada did not conduct any of the negotiations concerning the country's submission to Germany, and the Germans did not propose that any of their princes should rule Belorussia.
Other attempts of the Rada to obtain the support of the great West European powers were also unsuccessful. In spite of these misfortunes and set-backs the mere fact that the independence of the BNR had been proclaimed and steps taken to ensure the diplomatic support of this act, had an influence on the attitude of the Bolsheviks towards the Belorussian question. These diplomatic failures did not reduce the importance of the proclaimed independence in the eyes of the people. That this was well understood by the Bolsheviks is borne out by events such as the quick response to the proclamation of independence. The Belorussian public considered this act an event of exceptional importance, if only because of the fact that Belorussia "received . . . the charter of her freedom. .. which she herself wrote, and by so doing obeyed the spirit of the times and the testament of the previous struggle;" that "the people had expressed their supreme will for the establishment of a State, and its sovereignty had already been declared, and when this sovereignty has been expressed and the slogan given, it can be defended and fought for"23 even though it had not yet been consolidated because of external events.
A Compulsory Return to the Belorussian Question
All the above-mentioned events finally convinced the Bolsheviks that the Belorussian question was a very real one, that it could no longer be ignored, and whether they liked it or not they must deal with it. At this particular period the Bolsheviks executed an about-face to this line.
During the NEP period the Communists had permitted themselves the luxury of openly admitting their failures, political mistakes and changes of policy under the influence of events beyond their Party control. Later on such admissions became impossible as a result of the consolidation of the dogma of Party infallibility, and in particular of its "solicitude and care for the national problem of non-Russian peoples." As usually happens in such cases, the accepted dogma excluded even a distant possibility of self-exposure. What it had been possible to say in the 1920's, when at least a small degree of political liberalism was tolerated, became impossible after "the year of the great turning point." The same Knoryn, during the so-called "good period," admitted that the Bolsheviks during their first hundred days in power in Belorussia had mishandled the Belorussian question, that not enough attention had been devoted to it, and that therefore "October 25. 1917, was alien to the wide masses" of Belorussians, and that:
The period of German occupation was at the same time a period of absorption by the masses of the idea of Belorussian independence, to which the Party should have given its attention. Under these circumstances the Party organizations of Moscow and Smolensk became convinced almost simultaneously that the establishment of the Belorussian republic was necessary immediately24.
This is an exceptionally frank admission, even though the need for self-justification renders it somewhat inexact, as if it were only during the German occupation that the people began to absorb the idea of independence. But what does it mean to admit that this idea was absorbed by the masses from the so-called nationalists (since there were no other sources), that under the pressure of this fact, and this fact alone, the Bolsheviks began to talk about the "immediate establishment of the Belorussian republic"? Objectively, this was an admission of the large scale of the national movement. It was an acknowledgement of the initiative of these same "bourgeois nationalists" in regard to this important problem. It was a public admission that the Bolsheviks had ignored the Belorussian question and that the BSSR had not been established as a voluntary expression of Bolshevik policy, but simply that it had been created "in order to secure influence over the masses who were following the bourgeois nationalists."25
In order to prevent the masses from being dominated by the idea of national independence, the Bolsheviks took urgent counter-measures, organized special congresses, conferences and receptions, and encouraged widespread meetings in the eastern part of Belorussia which was under their occupation. Resolutions were passed and appeals made. As a rule these resolutions had two main clauses, calling for non-recognition of the government of the BNR in Minsk, as representing bourgeois and foreign interests and the inclusion of
Belorussia within the framework of Soviet Russia. Instead of speaking of the "Western Region," as the Bolsheviks had called Belorussia during the October revolution, these resolutions referred exclusively to "Belorussia;" it -vas even called "the dear Motherland."
The II Congress of Soviets of the Western Region gave the signal for the development of this campaign. On April 13, 1918, the Congress addressed an appeal to the Belorussian workers and peasants, in which the act declaring the independence of the BNR was referred to as a "diabolic plan." The authors of the appeal were indignant, for, they said, "the bourgeois Rada... is performing works of treason and betrayal of the common Russian socialist interests." The Rada, which was elected by the delegates of the Congress attended by representatives of all ethnographic sections of the Belorussian population, is called "a group of usurpers and not the peopled representatives."26
For several weeks after the session of this Congress, district meetings were held which passed resolutions on the same pattern. On June 17—21, 1918, the All-Russian Congress of Belorussian Refugees took place in Moscow. In their resolution on the current situation it is again stressed that the Government of the BNR is anti-popular, that "freedom will be realized only when the people live in a free state united with the Russian Soviet Federal Republic."27 The aim of the whole campaign of congresses and meetings was to prove that the masses were in favor of the Bolsheviks, that they were supporting only the Soviet government and its policy. In this way public opinion was molded by the Bolsheviks.
During this same period the Bolshevik Party organizations for the first time began to call themselves Belorussian, with the same propaganda ends in view. In the summer of 1918 the Bolsheviks organized their center for the whole territory of Belorussia under German occupation. This center was called the Belorussian Territorial Committee. In this connection Knoryn wrote:
The organization was so named, because during the period of German occupation it was necessary to show the masses, who were unaware of basic Bolshevik slogans about land reform and Soviet power, that, there were good prospects for national order in the country, and that by jettisoning the old administrative name of the Northwest Territory and beginning to call it Belorussia instead, the Party was mobilizing additional cadres against the occupation and in favor of Bolshevik power28.
Therefore, the main Bolshevik slogans had not been absorbed by the Belorussian people, for whom the national ordering of their country was the most important question. This is why the Belorussian question was not only the subject of a large-scale propaganda campaign, but was also a problem toward whose solution a number of steps were actually taken in order to "knock the ground from under the feet of the BNR Rada and place the whole matter of Belorussian nationalism in the hands of the Communist Party29. The establishment of the BSSR was the political order of the day, and it was given special importance by Belorussian Communists, who were perpetually pointing out the danger of: the nationalists. In September, 1918, the Bolsheviks renamed the Eastern Belorussian provinces of Vitebsk, Mogilev and Smolensk which were under their control the "Western Commune," but this name was also unpopular since it was nothing more than an attempt to shelve the national problem of state equality under the shield of internationalism. It should be stressed particularly that the supreme organ of Bolshevik power in Belorussia and the executor of central policy—the Executive Committee of the Western Region (Obliskomzap)—which stubbornly adhered to the policy of regionalism did not recognize Belorussia's right to statehood, but insisted on the inclusion of the country as a region forming part of Soviet Russia. The committee was compelled to change its views during this period because:
It is becoming clear to everyone that the victory of the social revolution, not only in Belorussia but also in the Ukraine and other of fringes of former Russia, is closely connected with the rightful... determination of the national question30.
Stalin, who headed the Commissariat of Nationalities, considered it necessary to receive a delegation from the Belorussian branches of the Russian Communist Party (RKP) and the Obliskomzap for the purpose of discussing the Belorussian question. On December 23, 1918, the Central Committee of the RKP opened a hearing on the question of the establishment of the Belorussian republic. Two days later the first All-Russian conference of the Belorussian branches of RKP opened In Moscow. At this meeting the same question was considered. A very characteristic excerpt from the appeal approved by the Conference states:
Only the Soviet Russia of workers and peasants is stretching out her hand to us with an offer of joint fraternal life, recognizing our right to be a free people and as her equal to march with her along the great road to socialism, Then hasten, Belorussian brothers! But only march together with Soviet Russia31.
With the same propagandists aim Stalin wrote an article entitled "Light from the East" in which he stressed the following:
Soviet Russia has never treated the Western Regions as her property. She has always believed that these regions are unquestionably the property of the working masses of those nationalities who inhabit them, and that these working masses have a full right to the free determination of their political fate32.
Proclamation of the Belorussian SSR
The November revolution in Germany gave wings to the Bolshevik hopes of success in their expansion towards the West. On December 7, 1918, units of the Soviet army entered Minsk. The Minsk Revolutionary Committee ordered the dissolution and arrest of the BNR Rada, This was expected, and the Rada departed for Lithuania just in time.
When the Belorussian question had been processed through all its stages in order to demonstrate the desire of Belorussians to remain in the family of
Soviet peoples, the Sixth Regional Conference of the RKP renamed itself the First Congress of the Belorussian Communist Party in Smolensk on December 30, 1918. On January 1, 1919, the establishment of the BSSR was proclaimed. A manifesto was issued and a government formed. Professor U. Einatouski wrote the following about the conference:
... it became apparent that the Belorussian renaissance had made considerable progress during the revolution and the German occupation. This should be remembered in the future work of the Party. The present situation requires that the Party, aiming to increase its own influence upon the working masses and to bolshevize the Belorussian masses, should take this new factor into consideration, which until now has been neglected. Departing from these considerations and aiming at further success in the struggle for Soviet power in Belorussia, the conference proclaimed itself in favor of the establishment of an independent Belorussian republic33.
The BSSR, proclaimed in Smolensk, consisted of the Provinces of Minsk, Grodno, Mogilev and Smolensk. The inclusion in BSSR territory of nearly the whole of ethnographic Belorussia was only provisional and a tactical maneuver called into being under the direct influence of the BNR, which embraced the entire territory of ethnographic Belorussia. As soon as the Bolsheviks had succeeded in consolidating their power, their "ethnographic" attitude disappeared.
Formally, Moscow behaved as if it had nothing officially to do with the proclamation about the BSSR. The whole matter was put into local hands, so to speak. However, it is true that the first congress of the Belorussian Communist Party was attended by the notorious Y. M. Sverdlov, as an observer and representative of the Moscow line. Even Stalin planned to attend personally. The so-called "popular expression of will" did not sound very convincing, because the Republic was proclaimed by the conference of only one political party, without the election of delegates from all sections of the population and all political groups. Thus, it is absolutely impossible to say that the proclamation of the republic was a popular act. With regard to the government, its composition was prepared in advance. Wishing to stress, as is customary among Soviet writers, the "special solicitude" of the Bolshevik leaders for the Belorussian people, and their special attention to Belorussian national needs, N. V. Kamienskaja stated: "Stalin himself personally selected candidates for the government of the BSSR, and the Central Committee of the Belorussian Communist Party approved them."34 Thus there was no question of elections; candidates were selected in advance by the center and were only approved formally by the Party congress, in accordance with the Soviet pattern. The congress was necessary only as a show-piece of democracy, a demonstration of the alleged non-interference of the center in the domestic affairs of Belorussia and an expression of the principle of self-determination of peoples in accordance with the Bolshevik pattern.
The composition of the first government was unusually significant and characteristic of the Soviet regime in Belorussia for all ensuing periods. The government was composed of representatives of two groups, the Obliskomzap (Executive Committee of the Western Region) and the Belnakom (Belorussian National Commissariat) which consisted of Belorussian Communists. The actual influence of the Belnakom was insignificant and reduced to informing the government in Moscow about the cultural needs of Belorussian refugees. This institution was necessary for external political display. The Belnakom rallied the opposition to the Rada, but at the same time did not agree with Obliskomzap, opposed provincialism, and defended the creation of the Soviet Belorussian republic, even speaking of the latter's full independence. Now it was the turn of this group. They were asked to be present at the proclamation of the Soviet Belorussian republic in order to demonstrate its Belorussian character, and thus to dominate the national consciousness of the people.
Obliskomzap, which refused for a long time to recognize the existence of the Belorussian question, received eleven leading portfolios in the government: Military Affairs, Finance; Food Supplies; National Economy; Agriculture; Internal Affairs; Transport, Post and Telegraph, Commission of State Control (Cheka) and Prisoners' and Refugees' Affairs. The Belnakom received the following commissariats: Education; Labor; Social Insurance; Foreign Affairs; National Affairs; Health; Justice. The government was headed by a Belorussian Communist, Z. Zylunovic, but his post was ephemeral. The roles were distributed in such a way that Obliskomzap representatives were expected "to insure the political line of the Bolshevik Party in the government, as well as to introduce the principles of internationalism and inviolability of the dictatorship of the proletariat."35 In other words, all the power was in their hands. National cultural problems were dealt with by Communists from the Belnakom, so that this group could be exploited as a sort of "conveyor belt" between the Bolshevik center and the Belorussian people. By distributing parts in this way the Central Committee of the RKP expressed its distrust of local Communists and kept the whole policy of Belorussia in their own hands. The Party line was never entrusted to local Communists. They were given a secondary role for fear that they would attempt to isolate themselves from the center and achieve the maximum of local independence, a tendency which nowadays could be called Titoism. The center was compelled to take into account the reality of these tendencies, which found their expression in the first congress of the Belorussian Communist Party. The festivity and sparkling speeches of this gathering far from demonstrated the political harmony so necessary at such a solemn moment. The national Communist tendency emerged clearly at this congress. Taking advantage of the occasion of the proclamation of the BSSR, which even the organizers of the congress referred to as an independent state, Zylunovic proposed that the congress create an independent Belorussian Communist organization, and that Belorussian branches should be incorporated in the general Party organizations. Thus Zylunovic raised his voice against inviolable centralism. He had his followers, but his demands were immediately evaluated as hostile and nationalist. This is why, regardless of demands for party independence, the congress in their telegram to the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party (RKP) demonstratively stressed their unity with this supreme organ:
In proclaiming the Party of the Belorussian Republic, the congress reasserts its inviolable ideological, tactical, and organizational unity with the RKP, which was created by long years of common effort. The congress confirms that the
Communists of Belorussia will in the future follow the directives of the Central Committee of the RKP, regarding it as their supreme Party organ36.
The reason for this lack of confidence in local Communists lay in the fact that they had only recently become Party members. For a long period, they had belonged to non-Communist nationalist organizations which aimed a: transforming a Belorussia without national rights into a national state. For them the national question was all-embracing and decisive, because the national revolution from their point of view automatically solved the problem of foreign political and social domination. The Belorussian Communists, who at that time were not very numerous, also gave the national question top priority. In their convictions they tried to combine national liberation with Conmunist ideology, which was officially acceptable only in the Bolshevik style; they tried to combine national creativeness with "proletarian internationalism" which, for the Bolshevik politicians of an old independent nation, was only a camouflage for their imperialism, and for this reason the national movements of subjugated peoples proclaimed in advance bourgeois movements with counter-revolutionary aims. It is not accidental, therefore, that later, all these people were declared to be enemies of the people and were liquidated for their "counter-revolutionary nationalism."
On January 5, 1919, the government formed in Smolensk was transferred to Minsk, which henceforth was called the capital of the republic. On February 1 the first All-Belorussian conference of Soviets was convened for the "ratification" of the act proclaiming the BSSR. The constitution -was also approved, in which it was stated that "the Belorussian Republic is a free socialist association of all the working people of Belorussia."37
In the manifesto on the proclamation of the BSSR the republic was called free and independent. In the constitution approved by the VII All-Belorussian Congress of Soviets held April 11, 1927, there is not even a hint about independence. This document states without sentimentality that "the Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic is a socialist state of the dictatorship of tie proletariat."38
The first Congress approved a special resolution calling for immediate negotiations with Soviet Russia for the establishment of federal relations and a memorandum was addressed to all governments requesting the recognition of an independent Soviet Belorussia. The memorandum stated:
The Congress invites all peoples and their governments to establish direct diplomatic relations with the Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic without delay.39
Y. M. Sverdlov, Chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, who attended the congress, announced the committee's decision concerning recognition of the independence of the BSSR. This hypocritical game of independence in which no one believed provided a reason for Stalin to write; `The Belorussian Soviet Republic which was recently recognized as independent Proclaims today, at the congress of its Soviets, its alliance with the Russian republic."40 However, one fact formally disrupts the artificial loftiness of the solemn negotiations: Miasnikov was appointed head of the Belorussian government, and several Belorussian Communists were expelled from it for nationalist deviationism.
Lithuania-Belorussia instead of the BSSR
The entire period which followed close on the heels of this event testifies to the fact that the BSSR was created by a foreign policy which was forced upon the nation at the moment of its emergence as an independent state. The political situation in the West at the end of 1918 gave the Bolsheviks hopes. They began to plan the invasion of new territories. In their plans the leading role was given to the so-called national states which it was decided to promote. The BSSR, then considered the western outpost of Soviet power, was transformed into the center of the USSR's territorial expansion. It should be pointed out that such considerations were one of the most decisive factors in the establishment of the BSSR and other national republics. They were meant to be used as a very important political weapon in the international arena in order to bring peoples who had previously been deprived of their national rights into the Soviet orbit, under their direct influence, and to serve as a bait to ensure the support of these peoples in the territorial expansion of Bolshevism. The aims of Soviet policy were expressed in a plan to establish a united Lithuanian-Belorussian Republic (Litbel). As early as December 8, 1918, in Dvinsk, the Bolsheviks appointed a Lithuanian government which eight days later issued a manifesto proclaiming the establishment of the Lithuanian Soviet Republic. The experiment failed in this case but it is a stratagem widely applied even today in implementing aggressive plans. A large number of such governments without peoples have been and are being created on foreign territory, waiting for a propitious moment to speak on behalf of their peoples.
Only twenty-five days had passed since the date of the first All-Belorussian Congress of Soviets, which approved the constitution of the BSSR when, on February 27, 1919, the Litbel was proclaimed in Vilna. A joint government and Central Committee of the Party were established. This time the government was headed by a Lithuanian Communist, probably because Lithuania was now included in the outpost. Polish Communists were also introduced into the government. The participation of Lithuanians and Poles in the government was allegedly an advancement of the proletariat in these countries. With the establishment of Litbel, the territory of the Belorussian republic was reduced. It now consisted only of the provinces of Minsk and Vilna, and the participation of Belorussians in the government was limited to one person. Therefore it was not surprising that Litbel was particularly unpopular in Belorussia; it was even opposed by the Belorussian Communists who took part in the establishment of the BSSR.
What was the reason for this unexpected and hasty liquidation of the BSSR less than two months after the solemn proclamation of the republic? The Bolsheviks were trying to take away from the BSSR her ethnographic eastern territory, which was annexed by the RSFSR; the Soviets alleged it would be easier to defend this territory in case expansionist plans failed. Thus Litbel was used for the territorial expansion of the RSFSR; without any attempt to obtain the agreement of the neighboring republic, despite solemn declarations by the first Congress of Soviets to respect its sovereignty.
Was there any guarantee of the success of these expansionist plans? The Bolsheviks expected success, that is why they established Litbel. However, at that time they did not have the necessary well-armed and reliable troops in their western region. Therefore it had to be admitted that the whole BSSR territory might conceivably be lost, and that the BNR might be restored over their entire ethnographic region of Belorussia. This possibility was most desirable for Belorussian public opinion. Even during the retreat of the Soviet army the Belorussian Social Revolutionaries demanded the inclusion of the entire ethnographic Belorussian territory in the BSSR. Their idea was that if the Soviet army was forced to retreat further, the problem of Soviet power would be solved for Belorussia, while her territorial integrity was preserved. If the Belorussian lands were annexed by the RSFSR as its own territory, and the western offensive failed, the Bolsheviks would be creating for themselves the diplomatic possibility that in any official bargaining this territory would be considered Russian. That is why, when preparing their attack, they decided to reduce Belorussian territory by taking away all her eastern part which had not been under the "poisonous influence of nationalism" during the period of German occupation, and which was considered more reliable than the Minsk region. The latter had been the center of the national movement since the first days of the revolution. There are grounds for believing that the Bolsheviks did not embrace the idea of Litbel by accident. Why, for instance, was there no combination of Belorussia with Latvia? There were no conditions for such a combination. In creating Litbel the Bolsheviks showed no originality. Their intention was only exploit for their own ends the historical past and the present Belorussian situation. Formerly the Belorussian and Lithuanian peoples had lived together in the Great Duchy of Lithuania. Leaders of the Belorussian renaissance movement frequently referred to this past, proving the legitimacy and indeed inevitability of the people's struggle for the renewal of their lost statehood. The idea of resuscitating the state union of these two peoples was fostered by individual Belorussian leaders during World War I. There was even an organization entitled the Confederation of the Great Duchy of Lithuania, which was established in Vilna in 1915. Finally, a mutual aid agreement was concluded between the BNR government and the Lithuanian state in 1918. All this was taken into account when Litbel was established, but the political gambling in the creation of this union was too obvious. Litbel did not play an important role; it had only a transient existence about which today even its founders speak unwillingly, since it exposes all the duplicity of Bolshevik national policy and shows the hypocrisy of their declarations about the national right to self-determination, which has in fact never been respected by the Bolsheviks.
Polish Occupation
The armed conflict against Poland developed unfavorably for the Bolsheviks and revealed from the start the unwillingness of the Belorussian peasantry to fight for the Soviets. This, however, did not mean that they were
sympathetic toward the Poles, whose legions left behind very unpleasant memories. It was rather the reply of the Belorussian peasantry to Bolshevik policy on the agrarian question. The October revolution did not give land to the Belorussian peasants. Estates belonging to the landlords were hardly touched during the initial phase of Soviet power, because it was planned to form them ultimately into agricultural communes. Besides, crops were being requisitioned and all peasants who had more than five hectares of land were deprived of the right to vote. All this could not help but intensify hostility toward the new regime.
On May 20, 1919, an extraordinary session of the Sovnarkom, the central executive committee of Litbel and the Minsk Soviet took place in Minsk, attended by trade union representatives. The conference approved the resolution "On the Mobilization of the Forces of the Party and of the Whole People for the Repulsion of the Enemy." It also approved an appeal to the peasants for the appointment of twenty people from each community for the army. The regime did not dare resort to mobilization. Perhaps this fact disproves best of all the official version about the continuous support of the Bolsheviks by the Belorussian peasantry and about the people's unity with the Soviet regime. Even now the days of the Red Army's disorderly retreat are well remembered; how the Belorussian peasant soldiers, throwing away their weapons, or even without disarming, left the highways and crossed the fields to their villages. The authorities were powerless to prevent mass desertion, which created much trouble during the several years of struggle with so-called "gangsterism"—in reality, armed peasant opposition.
In August, 1919, the Polish forces occupied Minsk. The occupation of a considerable part of Belorussia by the Polish army was marked by two appeals of Pilsudski to the population, in which he gave assurances that the Belorussians would be allowed to solve their national problems themselves without any pressure from Poland. It is true that in the beginning Pilsudski's appeals gave hopes to certain restricted circles. However, it soon became clear that the arrival of the Polish army in Belorussia was nothing but an occupation.
In December, 1919, a session of the Belorussian Rada was convoked with the permission of the Polish authorities, but it refused to support the Polish occupation. V. Lastouski, who had always defended Belorussia's independence against her neighbors to the East and West, and whose hostile attitude toward Polish imperialism had long been well known, was elected Prime Minister. The Poles arrested Lastouski and several members of his cabinet. The Belorussian government went into exile in the Lithuanian town of Kaunas. Several Rada members of pro-Polish orientation tried to form the semblance of a government in Minsk, but this attempt was neither successful nor popular. During this period a widespread guerilla movement against foreign occupation, led by the Belorussian peasants and school teachers, became active. Tamas Hryb, a well known figure in contemporary events, points out that the guerilla movement, headed by a committee in Minsk, developed under the slogan "away with Polish landlords and Moscow commissars."41 That the movement was nationalist in tendency is borne out by the fact that its participants were later named "enemies of the people" by the Bolsheviks and were liquidated as the standard-bearers of counter-revolution.
Military defeats in the war against the Poles had compelled the leaders of the Soviet regime to try to establish contact with the Belorussiar government, which they had previously outlawed. Lenin decided to begin negotiations with this government for the purpose of establishing a Moscow controlled Belorussian buffer state between Poland and Soviet Russia. Through the services of the Latvian government in June, 1920, representatives of the Belorussian Rada were invited to Moscow. It became known in Belorussian circles that negotiations were in progress and some hopes were raised. Janka Kupala, the bard of the Belorussian renaissance (whom the Bolsheviks first named "the knight of the nationalist counter-revolution" and who committed suicide in 1942) said in Minsk at the celebration of the XV anniversary of his work as a poet:
Fifteen years ago it was dangerous even to think about independence, but. today our stronger neighbors on their own initiative discuss it with us in a statesman-like manner and treat us as a people deserving this and spendence in accordance with human and divine law42.
However, this consideration for human and divine law lasted only for a moment. Inspired by the temporary success of their offensive against Warsaw, the Bolsheviks broke off negotiations.
The Second Proclamation of the BSSR
Military operations came to an end. Soviet Russia retained Minsk and the whole eastern part of Belorussia. According to the Riga Treaty, which represented the greatest of injustices to the people of Belorussia, the country was split into two. Litbel did not have the expected results and lost its timeliness even for the Bolsheviks. Therefore it became necessary to create a new Belorussian government. Encountering constant opposition and feeling their own weakness, the Communists began negotiations with left-wing Belorussian Social Revolutionaries for the establishment of a coalition government, which incidentally was considered more popular because at that time there were very few Communists among the Beloruasians. The Social Revolutionaries gave their consent, but proposed to amend the manifesto by changing the definition of the government. Instead of the Bolshevik formula of the government of "workers and peasants" they preferred the government of "peasants and workers." This proposal was not accepted because the Bolsheviks were afraid that the democratic government of peasants might be substituted for the "dictatorship of the proletariat." Negotiations were discontinued, and the coalition, meant to be a figleaf for the dictatorship, was not realized.
In August, 1920, on orders from Moscow, the BSSR was proclaimed for a second time, but this time only on the territory of the six districts of the Minsk Province. The six-district BSSR exposed the shamelessness and hypocrisy of Stalin's words when he said that: "the nation alone has the right to decide its own fate, and no one has a right to interfere by use of violence in the life of a nation."43.
For some reason or other it is not customary to discuss the second proclamation of the BSSR; perhaps because the fact itself is unpleasant, or because the republic was so small that the mere mention of this proclamation which resulted in such unexpected territorial changes causes unpleasant embarrassment. The comparison is not favorable to the regime, and it exposes the utter deception of the official slogan on the free self-determination of peoples. That is why only July 11, 1920, is mentioned as the date of the liberation of Belorussia from Polish, occupation. August 1 is officially forgotten.
The assertion of Canava, expressing the official point of view that the "Party of Lenin and Stalin, taking into consideration the proposals of the working people of Belorussia as expressed in 1917, soon after the victory of the socialist revolution, assisted by all the means in its power the establishment of a national state in Belorussia,"44 has nothing in common with the truth. This "assistance," as already known, was first reflected in a complete denial to the Belorussian people of the rights of nationhood, then in a purely formal proclamation of the Belorussian state, and later in various experiments with the transformation of the BSSR, Finally, Belorussia was deprived of her eastern ethnographic territories, which had been included initially in the republic.
In December, 1920, the second Congress of the BSSR Soviets was convened. In accordance with tradition, an appeal to the people was again approved. The document stated that the session was called for the purpose of consolidating the independence of the country, despite the fact that only six districts were left to it. All these perpetual manifestos stressing independence were simply a maneuver required by the current situation. The proclamation of the BNR; negotiations with its government when the Bolsheviks were experiencing serious difficulties; the guerilla movement and negotiations with the Social Revolutionaries regarding their participation in the coalition government were still fresh in the people's memory. That is why it was necessary to emphasize the slogan of independence in their propaganda. Perhaps someone would get the impression that there was no difference between the BNR and the BSSR as far as independence was concerned, and that the difference lay only in the Soviet form of the regime. Simultaneously the people's devotion to the Soviet regime was stressed. This sounded like a warning and reminder to all those who did not agree with the regime, in other words, a warning to the whole people.
On January 16, 1921, the time had come for an official formalization of relations between the BSSR and the RSFSR, which was demonstrated by an agreement concluded between the governments of the two republics on the basis of mutual recognition of their respective "independence and sovereignty."45 The agreement contained six points. The first said that the BSSR and the RSFSR "were establishing a military and economic alliance." The following joint commissariats were established, allegedly to accelerate the realization of this alliance, but really to subordinate the "fringes" to the central government: Military and Naval Affairs; National Economy; Foreign Trade; Finance; Labor; Transport; Post and Telegraph. There were two original agreements, one in Belorussian and the other in Russian. As is customary, it contained a clause that the "treaty should be ratified by the respective legislative organs of the two republics."
The final act of formal recognition of the BSSR's state sovereignty took place on December 30, 1922, when the BSSR joined the newly established Union of Soviet Socialist Republics with the rights of a union republic, and Belorussian was recognized as one of the official languages of the USSR. Thus, through force of circumstances, the territory which was initially planned as a region or province from the formal and legal viewpoints was transformed into a sovereign state which ostensibly had the right to conclude treaties with its neighbors. The whole history of Belorussian sovereignty was impregnated with show and propaganda and its independence was limited to this external demonstration, for the central government did not tolerate any deviationism.
From the moment the Soviet regime appeared in Belorussia until the present day, the official allegation has been continuously stressed, that the BSSR was established by the Belorussian workers and peasants themselves, with the added remark, however, that it was achieved under the leadership of the Communist Party. To confirm this, regular reference is made to the fact that the RSFSR government passed no decrees concerning the establishment of Soviet power or of a Soviet republic in Belorussia and therefore no external pressure was exerted. However, not a .single Soviet writer dares to ask what expression of free will was reflected in the proclamation of the republic made on a territory which was so ridiculously small. Nor is it asked why, on the occasion of the second proclamation of the BSSR did the manifesto contain the provision that the western frontiers of the republic should coincide with the Belorussian ethnographic frontiers, while in the East these frontiers should be adjusted together with the RSFSR government.
The Opposition and Expansion of the BSSR
A republic of six districts could not satisfy anyone in Belorussia. The opposition to the central government which appeared at the first Congress of the Belorussian Communist Party was not eliminated either by the expulsion of deviationists from the government or by the execution of Fabijan Santyr who, as Commissar of National Affairs, did not agree to transform the national cause into a political gamble for the purpose of strengthening the regime. After these events the opposition became even sharper. The opinion that the proclamation of the BSSR was simply a paper formality became widespread. It was true that the republic was Belorussian only in name, and that it had no other national attributes. For example, the first constitution of the BSSR ignored the very important question of official languages of the republic, including Belorussian. The latter question was particularly important in the development of a national culture and in giving the republic at any rate the external appearance of a nation.
In this situation, internal party opposition had decisive significance, both in itself and in the reaction it produced among the Belorussian population, which was far from having pro-Bolshevik opinions and seized the slightest opportunity for creative national work. This does not mean that party opposition assumed the leadership of the anti-Bolshevik movement. Occasionally this opposition supported public opinion, which was hostile to Bolshevism, and where aspirations towards national self-determination were not destroyed despite the Soviet regime's consolidation.
In 1921 a group of national-Communists officially declared tieir disapproval of the slowness, or perhaps even abandonment, of national development. The urgency of the problem concerning inclusion of the Belorussian ethnographic territories in the BSSR, necessary for the republic's economic and political life, became manifest. The first attempts to achieve this were made as early as 1920, but without result, since the question was struck from the agenda by the republican party executive. The question was again raised in 1921 and 1923, at the X and XII conferences of the Belorussian Communist Party. The Council of People's Commissars of Belorussia (Sovnarkom-l appealed in this question to the Council of Labor and Defense of the RSESR. The Belorussian republican party organization and the Vitebsk and Gomel regional party organizations, which at that time were directly subordinate to the Russian Communist Party, submitted detailed memoranda on the subject to the latter's Central Committee. The question was discussed at Party conferences in Vitebsk, Gomel and Smolensk, and these conferences approved resolutions pledging endeavors to achieve the inclusion of Belorussian ethnographic districts in the BSSR. All this was possible at the time only because a certan degree of internal Party democracy was still tolerated and the Party line was influenced by the wide-spread dissatisfaction of the Belorussian people.
Only after three years of continuous demands for a solution to this problem was Moscow roused from its apathy, and a special commission composed of representatives of the BSSR, the RSFSR and the USSR was appointed to investigate the problem on the spot. In February, 1924, the Central Executive Committee of the USSR approved a decision which resulted in the first so-called expansion of the BSSR, whose territory was increased by the inclusion of a number of districts in the Vitebsk, Gomel and Smolensk regions. With this addition the republic's territory doubled and the number of inhabitants trebled. In December, 1926, two more districts of the Gomel region were added. The number of inhabitants now reached five million, as opposed to 1,500,000 at the second proclamation of the republic. Even after all these increases, however, large Belorussian ethnographic territories still remained outside the borders of the BSSR. Western Belorussia, under Polish occupation, was incorporated into the BSSR only in 1939.
Attempts to Dissolve the Bada of the Belorussian National Republic (BNR)
The attitude of the Bolsheviks toward the government of the Belorussian National Republic in exile after the establishment of the Soviet regime was the culmination of the whole history of the establishment of the BSSR.
The most dramatic expression of the anti-Bolshevik struggle organized by the BNR Rada was the armed opposition to the Soviet army known as the Uprising of 1920, in which more than ten thousand peasants in the Sluck region (called the Belorussian granary) participated. It would seem that after the consolidation of the Soviet regime in Belorussia the exiled BNR government in Czechoslovakia would pass into oblivion. But this was not the case.
From the moment the national movement appeared in western Belorussia the Bolsheviks tried to exploit it for their own ends. The united Belorussian front was created across the border in western Belorussia, and this became known in the BSSR, where it added its weight to the general opposition to the Soviet regime. The mere fact that the BNR Rada existed actually strengthened the idea of complete independence and abolition of the occupation regimes, regardless of their political color. Besides, the BNR Rada had normal diplomatic relations with more than ten sovereign countries, which recognized it either "de jure" or "de facto." The Rada maintained diplomatic missions and consulates and kept in touch with the League of Nations, frequently sending memoranda to West European governments complaining of the very difficult situation in both occupied parts of Belorussia. All this activity attracted the attention of the Bolsheviks. One Soviet writer says:
It was necessary... to split the united emigre front and to destroy the BNR which can always be used by capitalist governments for their own ends in cases of preparation for a further intervention46.
As the above quotation shows, the Bolsheviks attached special importance to the BNR Rada. Internally, too, its dissolution would have been beneficial, in order to show the people that no more Belorussian centers remained which did not recognize the Soviet government and that the existing regime was viewed by everyone as an expression of the people's national aspirations. If the Rada had been dissolved, all creative elements which vacillated or were not in agreement with the regime would have had to join the general stream of activity initiated by the regime. The latter, particularly at that time, needed the cultural forces of the so-called petty bourgeois intellectuals, because they did not possess their own intelligentsia. To achieve this particular aim even such a luxury as political liberalism might be permitted temporarily. Although in 1918 the Bolsheviks called the BNR Rada a gang of usurpers, they knew that it was created by the people of the first Congress, to which Belorussia sent nearly 2,000 of her authorized representatives from various sections of the population. This meant that the Rada had a mandate from the whole people. To deprive it of its mandate was a tempting and desirable political act. The execution of the plan was entrusted to local Communists, especially to those v/ho had been known previously for their pro-nationalist sympathies. They sent their representatives to Berlin, and on October 12—16, 1925, they organized a conference with several retired members of the BNR Government. They approved a resolution calling for the self-dissolution of the BNR Government, the recognition of the Soviet government of Minsk as the only center of national construction. In the Soviet press this private "discussion" was called the second conference of Belorussian political emigres. It was held for the purpose of giving the necessary weight to the approved resolutions, which allegedly expressed the voice of the entire body of emigres and their political capitulation to the Soviet regime. Soviet writers do not mention that the conference was called on the initiative of the Bolsheviks and was conducted under their supervision. This silence aimed at suggesting that the BNR Rada had liquidated itself. Canava writes: "In October, 1925, in Berlin, the `Government of the BNR' officially declared its dissolution."47 There was no dissolution whatsoever, and this is proved by declarations and protests of a number of Belorussian political organizations in exile against the "discussion."48 Its resolutions were considered a provocation aimed at the destruction of the whole Belorussian movement by giving the Polish and Latvian governments grounds for an official persecution of the movement on their territories as being Communist controlled from the East. P. Kreceuski, then President of the BNR Rada referred to the "discussion" as adventurism and forgery because its participants were no longer government members at the time and therefore had no right to "issue on behalf of the government a penitent resolution and recognition of the Soviet government." Kreceuski declared:
The Presidium of the Rada calls this deed treason to the independence of Belorussia, and disclaims all responsibility for this act, completely rejecting the legal validity of such a declaration. In accordance with the decision of the Rada of the republic on December 13, 1919, the supreme power on the territory of ethnographic Belorussia belongs exclusively to the presidium of the Rada49.
It follows that the BNR Rada did not hand over their mandate to anyone. This mandate remains in the hands of the Rada until such time as the Constituent Assembly of Belorussia will be called under free conditions. The so-called Berlin Conference was conclusive and meant to legalize Soviet power in Belorussia. However, it was not successful in its endeavor and a gap remains even in this strictly formal matter, far-reaching in its political aims. The BNR's tradition is unbroken.
In conclusion, it is appropriate to mention the opinion of certain emigre circles that the Bolsheviks allegedly unleashed the "demons" of nationalism. However, national demands revealed their existence without regard for the wishes of the leaders of the new regime, who anyway were compelled to take them into consideration. The revolution made holes in the carefully guarded "mono-national" imperial construction. The Bolsheviks would have liked to repair these holes in order to preserve the structure in its previous form, but they were not strong enough and for this reason they decided to establish the national republics. Though these republics have not achieved national independence and possess none of its attributes, their existence alone is a reminder of independence and leaves inevitably certain sentiments in the consciousness of the people who have not lost faith in the attainment of national statehood. This fact is not unimportant for the future.
Education in Belorassia Before the Rout of "National Democracy" 1917—1930
H. NIAMIHA
1. The State of Education in Belorassia on the Eve of the Revolution of 1917
In the pre-revolutionary administrative system of the Russian empire, Belorussia was known as the "Northwest Territory". It included the Minsk, "Vitebsk, Smolensk, Mogilev, Grodno and Vilna Governorships (Provinces). The center of this territory was Vilna, where government, military, educational, post and telegraph departments had their regional offices.
The majority of the population were peasants, most of whom spoke Belorussian. There were other nationalities—Poles, Russians and Tartars—but, compared with the Belorussian group they were a small minority, particularly the Russians, who nearly all belonged to the civil servant class. Despite the nationality composition of the territory, the only schools were Russian, and up to 1905 the publication of anything in Belorussian was strictly prohibited.
Belorussia before its annexation by Russia was rich in schools. All cities and even some small towns had their publishing houses, where the development of printing was proceeding well. Dounar-Zapolski in his work Rossia (Russia), Vol.9, p. 108, says that the Russian Government of Nicholas I was frightened by the increase in the number of local schools in Belorussia and began to close them down without replacing them by Russian schools. In 1834 the number of schools in Belorussia was reduced by half. Belorussia education at that time was concentrated in the monasteries and Uniate churches …50
The Uniate Church was then destroyed in Belorussia, a number of monasteries were shut down, and with them the Belorussian schools. During 1832 alone 191 monasteries were closed. Finally the compulsory transformation of everything on the Russian model began. The people, who had always been used to their own way of life, were very antagonistic to these innovations.
When Russian schools were opened in Belorussia, particularly after 1861, they were met with hostility by the Belorussians despite their strong desire for education.
In his daily life the peasant realized that it was impossible to dispense with education, and it became common for the so-called "principals" to hold classes in reading and writing in the homes of each of their pupils. Such a method of education had, of course, serious drawbacks, for the principals themselves were not sufficiently educated, and consequently the people had to reconcile themselves with an alien system. Eventually it became apparent that there were not enough of these schools to satisfy educational requirements. There was no organization to implement the opening of new schools in Belorussia. In Russia proper this was done by the Zemstva (rural self-government bodies) but:
In Belorussian governorships (provinces) there were no Zemstva, and the whole task of primary education was entrusted to the organs of the Ministry of National Education, that is, primary school boards established in 1863. But, while the Zemstva were spending considerable sums on primary education (up to 30% of their budget) the sums allocated by the Treasury for education were very small, and the development of schools in governorships with no Zemstva progressed very slowly. In 1880, in all six governorships in the Northwest Territory, there were 1,370 rural schools of the Ministry of National Education. In twenty years about 1,000 new schools were opened, or on average of 8—9 in each governorship annually, and two thirds of them were maintained at the expense of the local rural communities. But even this insignificant increase in Ministry schools was arrested by the reaction of the 1880's. Between 1880 and 1894 the number of primary schools of the Ministry of National Education actually decreased from 1,370 to 1.361.51
Dounar-Zapolski reports in his work Rossia, Vol. 9, p. 121, that on January 1, 1900, the total number of schools in Belorussia was only 8,266, or one school for every 855 inhabitants.
The campaign for the russification of Belorussia which started during the reign of Nicholas I was considerably intensified after the uprising of 1863.
The first teachers' college was established in Maladecna (in the province of Vilna). Only children of Greek Orthodox parents were admitted to this institution. They were educated at government expense in the Russian spirit; everything Belorussian was despised and the most innocent preference for the Belorussian way of life was punished—one student was expelled from the college and his parents were told to pay the arrears of his educational and living expenses. After four years of indoctrination and training, the college produced a satisfactory "russifier" who was appointed to a primary school. When the experiment with the Maladecna teachers' college proved a success, similar colleges were opened in Niasviz (Minsk province) and in Svislac (Grodno province). There were also teacher's institutes or colleges in Vilna, Hluchau and later in Mogilev for the training of teaching personnel for urban and country public schools. Suitable primary school teachers were selected to attend these institutes, where further indoctrination took place, also at government expense. Russification was very intensive in public schools and in the seminaries52.
The town dwellers were able somehow to give their children a primary, public, and occasionally even higher education. The latter was acquired outside Belorussia, which did not have any higher schools. Some among those with a public school education occasionally succeeded in obtaining better junior office positions as copyists, accountants, or even more important posts.
There was also a greater variety of schools in the towns. This situation was a strong incentive to» the spread of literacy. But the country people were much worse off in this respect, even though overpopulation and shortage of land were reasons enough why the peasants should want to ensure a better future for their children. However the teachers' colleges, which became popular with the peasants' children were unable to admit all those who wanted to study. Even the rural primary schools were not attended by all children of school age because: 1) instruction was in an alien language, 2) practically speaking, the schools did not provide opportunities for their graduates to improve their economic situation, 3) pupils were taken away from productive farm work for a prolonged period. In order to achieve at least, some semblance of literacy, most of the peasant boys (there were very few girls at school) attended school for several winters. As a rule the boys left school as soon as it became warmer, because they were compelled to help their parents on the farm or to earn their living as shepherds, and this work lasted until late in the autumn. It is therefore not surprising that before the revolution, 82% of the Belorussian population was illiterate, even though, according to statistics, there were on Belorussian territory on January, 1914:
1) 56 public educational establishments of various types with 17,753 students,
2) 83 higher, educational establishments with 12,245 students, 3) 3,583 primary schools with 4,192 teachers and 225,751 pupils. Only 43.9% of the children of school age attended school between the ages of 8 and 12 years.53
The war of 1914 seriously disrupted even this sorry state of elementary education in Belorussia. During the school year 1914—1915, the primary school system was thrown into disorder by the draft of teachers of military age, to whom the laws of that time did not grant deferments. The school system ceased to function as an organic entity and existed only on paper in the department of education. The educational system was disrupted even more by refugees. The population of the Grodno region and western parts of the Minsk region was forcibly evacuated by the Cossaks and sent deep into Russia. Their villages were burned down before the advancing Germans. From 1914—1917 there was really no organized education whatever in those parts of Belorussia directly affected by military operations. The few schools that still remained had a very difficult time, and their work was very haphazard.
The state of rural schools in the regions of Belorussia not directly affected by military operations during this period is illustrated by the following table54 (the statistics refer to the territory which was initially included in the Belorussian SSR):
District
Babrujsk
Barysau
Minsk
Mazyr
Sluck
Cerviensk
Total
(1915)
Сhildren aged 8—12 No. of Schools No. of Pupils
27,780 197 7,880
22,210 208 8,320
14,740 208 8,320
16,780 152 6,080
17,660 225 9,000
22,960 183 7,320
122,130 1,173 46,920
(1917)
Children aged 8-12 No. of Schools No. of Pupils
28,720 148 5,920
22,930 168 6,720
15,220 153 6,120
17,330 118 4,720
18,250 158 6,320
23,720 138 5,520
126,170 883 35,320
2. Education in Belorussia 1917—1923
After the February revolution of 1917 the territory of Belorussia remained until 1921, the arena of a struggle between various opposing forces and trends. During this period of the preparation and holding of the first All-Belorussian Congress and the Rada of the Belorussian National Republic (February, 1917— March, 1918), the national independence movement was clearly revealed. The same period saw the first clashes of young, inexperienced and poorly armed national independence forces with the newly born but already organized Bolshevik troops. Besides Germans, other alien forces—Bolsheviks and units of the Polish corps of General Dovbor-Musnicki, were fighting on Belorussian soil. This does not mean that there were no schools, but these appeared spasmodically and worked in an unorganized way.
From March to December 12, 1918, the whole of Belorussian territory was under German occupation. In the western part, which had been, occupied by the Germans even before this period, the first 100 Belorussian primary schools, one Belorussian teacher's college, and several teacher's courses were opened. From December 12, 1918, to August 8, 1919, Belorussia was occupied by the Bolsheviks, who organized the Belorussian SSR and took education into their own hands. It is true that by the end of 1917 the municipal Department of National Education had been organized in Minsk. It had Russian, Polish and Jewish branches. The Belorussian section had not yet been organized.
At the beginning of 1917 there was no one to begin organizing Belorussian national education. Belorussian teachers were taught in Russian. There were still no courses in Belorussian studies, and nowhere could one learn literary Belorussian. There were hardly any textbooks for the use of public or even Primary schools.
During the German occupation, Belorussian national leaders succeeded in organizing the first Belorussian teacher's courses in Minsk, which bore fruit during the Polish occupation (from August 8, 1919, to July 11, 1920). Schools in Minsk whose teaching staff attended these courses began their work in Belorussian. There was even a high school organized in Minsk; similar Centers were organized in other localities, notably the Sluck Belorussian high school.
To satisfy the urgent need for Belorussian teachers, on the initiative of Prof. Usievalad Ihnatouski, the Minsk Teaching College was reorganized into the Pedagogical Institute in 1919. The student body of 160 were taught by highly qualified lecturers, such as Academician Karski.
At that time there were in Minsk, capital of the Belorussian SSR, 9 Belorussian public schools. There were also special teachers' courses and courses of Belorussian studies at the Pedagogical Institute. In the same year, 1919, the Minsk provincial Department of National Education published in Russian the first periodical dealing with educational matters, entitled Shkola i Kultura Sovetskoi Belorussii (The School and Culture of Soviet Belorussia). This periodical published official Soviet government decrees on education. The most important among them was the "Decree of the All-Russian Executive Committee on the Unified Workers' School in the RSFSR", according to which: 1) the division into primary, public, high, professional, technical and commercial schools, was abolished; 2) the "Unified Workers' School" was established and subdivided into: a) the 1st degree, with a five year course of instruction for children 8 to 12 years old, and b) the 2nd degree with a four year course of instruction for the 13 to 17 age group.
A kindergarten was added for children 6 to 8 years old. The point of this decree which caused an almost complete disruption of discipline and of the normal functioning of the school were the following articles: Article 17. Compulsory homework is inadmissible, Article 18. All kinds of punishment at school are prohibited, and Article 19. Entry and final examinations are abolished.
Although this decree was published in the RSFSR, it was also compulsory for the organs of national education in Belorussia, since the budget of the People's Commissariat of Education for the first half of 1919 already took into consideration the new educational system, and in accordance with the decree, provided for: 1) existing schools of the 1st degree (3800) and 560 new schools; 2) existing schools of the 2nd degree (210) and 121 new schools.
From this it appears that Belorussia had 4691 schools in the 1919/1920 school year, but no doubt the actual number was much smaller, for in August, 1919, Belorussia was under Polish occupation, and the People's Commissariat of Education had been unable to implement its program.
The period from the beginning of the revolution to the 1922/1923 school year was marked by the spontaneous though stormy expansion of the network of cultural and educational establishments in Belorussia. The planned cultural development of the so-called Belorussian SSR actually did not begin until the end of the Polish occupation, three years after the RSFSR. Most of the schools at this period were started by the people themselves. At that time it was customary to assemble children of school age, to find as a teacher someone with at least some education, often a youth of 16—18 years, but without suitable premises or equipment. This was nevertheless an indication of the great desire of the people for education. At the end of 1921 there were about 1500 of these schools. Such establishments could not be considered schools in the full sense of the word. They almost resembled prerevolutionary tuition in reading and writing by the already mentioned itinerant "principals". But during this period even schools housed in genuine school premises spared by the war hardly differed in their program from amateur tuition. With an acute shortage of any kind of equipment, textbooks or paper it was difficult to do more than teach a little reading, writing and arithmetic.
Moreover the material and moral position of a teacher at the time of so-called militant Communism was very uncertain. During the 1Э20-—1921 school year educational workers were given starvation rations consisting of 20 lbs. of flour per month. Nos. 1—2 of the periodical School and Culture of Soviet Belorussia, for 1921, report complaints of teachers about their difficulties: "... the present-day teacher is to be pitied. He is not an educational worker and teacher of working people, but a beggar. What sort of moral satisfaction can he have if there is no material compensation?"
Statistics from questionnaires on the situation of the village teacher in the Minsk province in 1919 show that 63% of the teachers had only one hot meal a day; 36% had dinners consisting of one meager dish only; 70% lived in very cramped quarters, 49% in damp rooms; 42% used wood splinters for lighting, and 15% had no lighting at all. The words of the questionnaire: "... the old school has been destroyed, and the new one has not been built; one is forced to wander aimlessly in the darkness and to hope for a better future," clearly illustrate the moral state of a village teacher at that time. A decree of the Soviet authorities was published in May, 1919, which reads: "... persons who desire to be employed as teachers, tutors, or school doctors should file their applications with the branches of the national education at the local Sovdeps (local council of Soviet deputies), but not with pedagogical Soviets, and teachers should be elected. The first general elections [of teachers] is to take place not later than the August, 1919, and after that there shall be one election every three years." This decree did no1 provide much incentive for teachers under the circumstances.
Probably this law was never fully put into effect, for on August 8, 1919, Belorussia was occupied by the Poles, and the matter was dropped. However, in spite of these unfavorable conditions, the people were still striving to improve their education; more and more self-sacrificing workers became teachers.
At that time the Bolsheviks had not yet time to train devoted and fanatical executors of their will in all spheres of national life, so that they were compelled temporarily to make some use of cultural forces trained and educated under entirely different circumstances, which were not always loyal to the regime. They were progressively replaced by faithful followers of the Communist Party. The same thing happened in education, where Party penetration was always very insignificant. In the beginning even members of other political parties were tolerated. This is illustrated by the composition of delegates to the Minsk province conference of educational and cultural workers, which was held on January 9—13, 1921. Among the 125 participants from all districts of Belorussia there were: 18 Communists, 9 Communist sympathizers, 3 Belorussian Social Revolutionaries, 3 Independent Social Democrats, 5 from the Communist Bund, 1 from the Bund, 14 who did not state their affiliations, and 75 independents55.
The Communist Party program on the people's education formulated the ideal thus:
... during the period of the dictatorship of the proletariat, i. e. while conditions are being created in which a complete realization of Communism is possible, the school should be not only the standard-bearer of the principles of Communism in general, but also the leader as regards the ideological, organizational and educational influence of the working people, with the aim of educating a generation able finally to establish Communism...
It is quite understandable that unless they could dominate education in Belorussia, this ideal would become an empty slogan. So, too, would the ideal of the "working people's school," which was widely advertised after the establishment of Bolshevik power in Belorussia.
It was impossible to create such a school by means of the publication of a decree on the unified working people's school alone. For the establishment of this kind of school, certain conditions were necessary, such as the material base, not only for education itself, but for the whole national economy, a clear definition of this type of school, a well trained or reoriented body of teachers, stabilized programs and textbooks, and professional, well-planned aids to teaching, such as pedagogical publications. With few exceptions these requirements were unfulfilled. It was impossible to treat as a useful aid in the practical life of the school the following deliberations:
... the new school should teach, not just grammar, arithmetic, history, geography, and so on, but rather the understanding of life in a broad sense, i. e., the above subjects of instruction should not be an end in themselves but only a means to the general end of producing an actively creative individual…56
The idea of the "working people's school" was interpreted by some as a handicraft, by others as a self-service. During the initial period from 1919 to 1921, Belorussian schools frequently utilized this new educational concept as a help-yourself service. Pupils were required to wash floors, split firewood, and to other odd jobs.
It was clear to everyone that the pre-revolutionary school was an institution divorced from real life, which did not satisfy the needs of the population, and therefore could not exist much longer without reforms, but hardly anyone, even the People's Commissariat of Education of the Belorussian SRR, knew how to reestablish education in the face of general postwar disorganization, starvation, lack of fuel and of the most indispensable aids, and also particularly at a time when the new requirements of the regime were not very clear.
But all this is not surprising, since it was, and is, a peculiarity of the Soviet Bolshevik system that it plays with all sorts of new "progressive" methods, without giving the necessary consideration to the possibilities of applying these methods under real conditions. This is what happened with the idea of the working people's school, about which, much later, in 1929, the Commission of the People's Commissariat of Education of the Belorussian SSR on the "Study of the Contemporary Situation in our Education" said:
... the most feeble sector of our education is the working people's school.
It might even be said that there is a complete vacuum there is hardly a single four-year school which has a workshop, there is hardly a school which has any sort of agricultural equipment... our school remains without labor experiments ... there is just verbal tuition ...57
The same happened with the complicated system of the Dalton. plan, so fashionable in its time. The Bolshev