The Rise and Fall of Belarusian Nationalism, 1906–1931

By Per Anders Rudling

Modern Belarusian nationalism emerged in the early twentieth century during a dramatic period that included a mass exodus, multiple occupations, seven years of warfare, and the partition of the Belarusian lands. In this original history, Per Anders Rudling traces the evolution of modern Belarusian nationalism from its origins in late imperial Russia to the early 1930s.

The revolution of 1905 opened a window of opportunity, and debates swirled around definitions of ethnic, racial, or cultural belonging. By March of 1918, a small group of nationalists had declared the formation of a Belarusian People's Republic (BNR), with territories based on ethnographic claims. Less than a year later, the Soviets claimed roughly the same area for a Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic (BSSR). Belarusian statehood was declared no less than six times between 1918 and 1920. In 1921, the treaty of Riga officially divided the Belarusian lands between Poland and the Soviet Union. Polish authorities subjected Western Belarus to policies of assimilation, alienating much of the population. At the same time, the Soviet establishment of Belarusian-language cultural and educational institutions in Eastern Belarus stimulated national activism in Western Belarus. Sporadic partisan warfare against Polish authorities occurred until the mid-1920s, with Lithuanian and Soviet support. On both sides of the border, Belarusian activists engaged in a process of mythmaking and national mobilization. By 1926, Belarusian political activism had peaked, but then waned when coups d'etats brought authoritarian rule to Poland and Lithuania. The year 1927 saw a crackdown on the Western Belarusian national movement, and in Eastern Belarus, Stalin's consolidation of power led to a brutal transformation of society and the uprooting of Belarusian national communists.

As a small group of elites, Belarusian nationalists had been dependent on German, Lithuanian, Polish, and Soviet sponsors since 1915. The geopolitical rivalry provided opportunities, but also liabilities. After 1926, maneuvering this complex and progressively hostile landscape became difficult. Support from Kaunas and Moscow for the Western Belarusian nationalists attracted the interest of the Polish authorities, and the increasingly autonomous republican institutions in Minsk became a concern for the central government in the Kremlin.

As Rudling shows, Belarus was a historic battleground that served as a political tool, borderland, and buffer zone between greater powers. Nationalism arrived late, was limited to a relatively small elite, and was suppressed in its early stages. The tumultuous process, however, established the idea of Belarusian statehood, left behind a modern foundation myth, and bequeathed the institutional framework of a proto-state, all of which resurfaced as building blocks for national consolidation when Belarus gained independence in 1991.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Release date: Feb 27, 2015
• ISBN: 9780822979586

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Pitt Series in Russian

and East European Studies

Jonathan Harris, Editor

THE RISE AND FALL OF BELARUSIAN NATIONALISM, 1906–1931

Per Anders Rudling

UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH PRESS

Published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, Pa., 15260

Copyright © 2014, University of Pittsburgh Press

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Printed on acid-free paper

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

ISBN 10: 0-8229-6308-6

ISBN 13: 978-0-8229-6308-0

Cataloging-in-Publication data is available at the Library of Congress.

ISBN-13: 978-0-8229-7958-6 (electronic)

Till minne av mina föräldrar,

Lars Persson (1945–1994)

och Anikka Rudling (1947–2008).

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Chapter 1. Imagining Belarus

Chapter 2. The Beginnings of Belarusian Nationalism

Chapter 3. Six Declarations of Statehood in Three Years: Origins of a New National Mythology

Chapter 4. Nationalities Policy in Soviet Belarus: Affirmative Action, Belarusization, and Korenizatsiia

Chapter 5. Belarusian Nationalism in the Second Polish Republic

Chapter 6. Opposition to Belarusization

Chapter 7. The Suppression of Belarusian Nationalism in the Second Polish Republic, 1927–1930

Chapter 8. Soviet Repression in the BSSR: The Destruction of Belarusian National Communism

Conclusion

Notes

Works Cited

Index

Acknowledgments

I am indebted to many individuals and institutions who helped me over the years I have been working on this book. First and perhaps foremost is David R. Marples at the University of Alberta, who saw this project through its initial stage. I have benefited greatly from his insightful comments, suggestions, and encouragement throughout the process. A model of a mentor, his enthusiasm, curiosity, and discipline is contagious. Similarly, I have benefited from the insight, clarity of thought, courage, and unfailing support of John-Paul Himka and have been privileged to work with Elena Siemens, Timothy Snyder, Dennis Sweeney, and Frances Swyripa. In addition, I would also like to thank Dominique Arel, Karyn Ball, Elissa Bemporad, Valer Bulhakau, Sofia Grachova, Volha Isakava, Dovid Katz, Andrej Kotljarchuk, Matthew Kott, Kanstantsin Lashkevich, Oleg Łatyszonek, Uladzimir Liakhouski, Eric Lohr, Dorota Michaluk, Odeta Mikštaitė, Aliaksandr Pashkevich, Aleksandr Pershai, Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe, Volha Sasunkevich, Viacheslau Seliamenou, Andrei Vashkevich, Curt Woolhiser, Debby Yalen, Vital Zajka, and Arkadi Zel’tser, who have all helped me with this project at various points along the road.

During my research I benefited from a number of scholarships and fellowships, including a dissertation fellowship, the Andrew Stewart Memorial Graduate Prize, and the Ivan Lysiak Rudnytsky Memorial Doctoral Fellowship in Ukrainian History and Political Thought at the University of Alberta. I am grateful to the Center for Belarusian Studies at Southwestern College (Winfield, Kansas) for funding my participation in the First International Summer School of Belarusian Studies in Hajnówka, Poland. A FLAS Fellowship from the Center of Russian and East European Studies, University of Kansas, allowed me to work with one of the more complete collections of Western Belarusian interwar press in the Vasyl Stefanyk Lviv National Scientific Library of Ukraine. Similarly, the Center for Advanced Holocaust Research at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum generously funded my studies in Yiddish at Indiana University in Bloomington. I have benefited from postdoctoral fellowships at the department of history at the Ernst-Moritz-Arndt-Universität Greifswald, as part of the program Baltic Borderlands—Shifting Boundaries of Mind and Culture in the Borderlands of the Baltic Sea Region, funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, as well as two fruitful years as a postdoctoral research fellow at the department of history at Lund University.

Libraries and archives at which research was carried out include Rutherford Library at the University of Alberta, the Herman B. Wells Library at Indiana University, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Lund University Library, the National Archives of the Republic of Belarus, the Central Archives of Modern Records in Warsaw, the Lithuanian Central State Archives and the Lithuanian Special Archives in Vilnius, as well as the Swedish National Archives in Arninge and Marieberg. I am grateful to the staff and archivists, and perhaps particularly so to Viacheslau Seliamenou at the National Archives of the Republic of Belarus in Minsk.

I benefited also from the extensive and insightful commentaries of two anonymous referees, who helped refine my argument and offered some new perspectives. The encouragement and enthusiasm of Peter Kracht, the patience and attention to detail by Amberle Sherman, Alexander P. Wolfe, Joel Coggins, and Sandra Crooms at the University of Pittsburgh Press made it a pleasure to complete the final manuscript.

This research would have been impossible without a fair amount of travel and the hospitality of a number of people, particularly that of Siarhei, Ludmila, and Andrei Isakau in Minsk, Dorota Michaluk and Oleg Łatyszonek in Podlasie, and Vygandas and Ugnė Mikšta in Vilnius.

My debt to the countless historians whose works I have utilized and the ideas I have appropriated is recorded in the notes and in the bibliography. Needless to say, I am responsible for any errors of fact and interpretation that remain.

Introduction

Belarus is a country that sometimes puzzles outside observers. For much of its existence as an independent state, Belarus has developed quite differently from most of its neighbors. It is a country in which a majority regards Belarusian as its native language but only a relatively small minority actually does speak it as its first language. Nationalism, the hegemonic political current in most of postsocialist Europe, has never been embraced by more than a minority of its population. Rather, it is a society with two rivaling concepts of Belarusianness: against the official one, drawing heavily upon Soviet tradition, stands an unofficial one, associated with the nationalist opposition.¹ The two camps have their own historiographies and competing foundation myths, as well as two seemingly irreconcilable traditions of statehood. Referred to by some as the last European dictatorship, Belarus remains the only country in Europe with a government in exile.

During most of its existence, the Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic (BSSR), allowed for one narrative only. It emphasized Belarus’s historical links to Russia, and to varying degrees presented the outside world as hostile. Alternative narratives existed in West Belarus and among political émigrés in the interwar era, but were counteracted by the Polish authorities. Following the Soviet annexation in 1939 Stalinist rule was extended to all of Belarus. Unlike the neighboring Ukraine, Poland, and Lithuania, Belarus lacked a significant diaspora to work as a repository for political narratives that were alternative to the official Soviet version.² When alternative narratives did appear, they received a mixed reception. The least national of the former Soviet republics,³ the Belarusian public had internalized and identified with the Soviet historical narrative more than any other, and emotional reports of Stalinist atrocities and denunciations of the Soviet past were often met with silence or outright hostility.⁴ In March 1991, 83 percent of the BSSR voters were in favor of retaining the USSR, a higher percentage than in any other republic outside Central Asia.⁵ On August 25, 1991, independence arrived suddenly and unexpectedly, the result of a failed putsch in Moscow rather than a response to popular demand.⁶ In the preceding years glasnost and perestroika had reopened a debate on Belarusian identity and cultural belonging, suppressed since the ascent of Stalin in the late 1920s. Much like in the 1910s and 20s, two main camps formed. One was oriented toward the West, represented by the emerging European Union; the other toward the east, seeking reintegration with Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States. The state that gained independence in 1991 differed significantly from Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland, its neighbors to the north and west, but also from its southern neighbor Ukraine.

The first and, to date, only free elections in the republic brought to power a political leadership drawing heavily on Soviet-era symbolism and historical narratives. Aliaksandr Lukashenka, the only president of Belarus, has skillfully utilized nostalgia for the Soviet past as a means to legitimize his regime and its permanent hold on power. From the mid-1990s, the return to authoritarianism was accompanied by the reintroduction of Soviet Belarusian symbolism.⁷ The Belarusian government invested significant efforts in the instrumentalization of history, something that has turned the tradition of Belarusian statehood and its symbols into contentious issues.⁸ During his first decade in power, Lukashenka was a vocal proponent of the restoration of the Soviet Union and undertook a number of steps in this direction. By the mid-1990s, outside observers described Belarus as a denationalized state or even a state that has a death wish.⁹

Why does the political landscape in Belarus look so different from those of its neighbors? How do we explain the relative weakness of nationalism and the divided historical memory? At the bottom of these issues looms a larger question: why is there today an independent Belarus, and how did this state appear? To be sure, one deeper cause for these divisions can be traced to Belarus’s geographic location as a cultural borderland between eastern and western Christianity. However, much of the divided memory and rivaling identity projects are of a relatively recent date, no older than Belarusian nationalism itself, and dating to the years around World War I.¹⁰

Historical Background

The Belarusian-speaking region in east central Europe was one of the last regions in Europe to have its borders staked; languages and dialects codified; nationalist symbols, rituals, and traditions invented; and its inhabitants categorized, ethnicized, and socialized into identifying with national projects. With the aim of placing Belarusian nationalism in a larger, regional historical context, this book is a study of the invention of Belarus, tracing it from its imagination at the turn of the century through multiple, rivaling declarations of Belarusian statehood to the construction of national traditions, culture, and institutions.

Other political latecomers, such as Ukrainian, Lithuanian, and secular Jewish nationalisms, had discernable influences on their Belarusian counterpart. Like the two leading Jewish nationalist movements in the region, Poale Zion¹¹ and the Bund,¹² the early Belarusian nationalists merged class and national awareness into a radical left-wing program. Its similarities with the Bundist movement, which was formed primarily in the mainly Jewish and Polish cities of Belarus, are particularly strong.¹³ The editorial boards of the first Belarusian papers were located only a few blocks away from the headquarters of the Jewish nationalist movements in Vilnius, a city both national movements regarded as their intellectual capital. Their leaders often read the same books, were influenced by the same national currents, and experienced similar social dynamics, many having attended the same universities.

In West Belarus, the leading Belarusian national activists were all bi- or trilingual, having grown up in a Polish- or Russian-speaking environment, and were more comfortable writing in Polish, Russian, and sometimes even Yiddish than in Belarusian. As was the case with national activists in other parts of Europe, they learned to master the Belarusian language only as adults.¹⁴ The historian Barbara Törnquist-Plewa describes the cultural identities in the borderlands as culturally polyvalent, in that the inhabitants could identify with more than one nation, even choosing their national identification. As an example of this she mentions the famous Ivanouski brothers, who lived in Belarus in the early twentieth century and became important activists in three national projects:

The three brothers, who grew up together and were educated in the same manner, chose to identify themselves with three different nations. Wacław considered himself a Belarusian and referred to the ethnic roots of the family. Tadeusz saw himself as a Pole because of the culture: mother tongue, religion, etc. of the family. Jan, on the other hand, identified himself as a Lithuanian, motivating it by territory and history, as the estate and title of nobility of the family were linked to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Thus, all three brothers made different choices and were active in different national movements: the Belarusian, the Polish, and the Lithuanian respectively.¹⁵

This form of cultural polyvalence characterized the Belarusian nationalist intelligentsia at the turn of the century. Some leaned toward regarding Belarusians as a branch of the Russian people; others identified with the local, multinational land, or krai. They were characterized by their search for allies and associates, and the option of independence appeared late, after Lithuanian nationalists opted to establish a Lithuanian nation-state over a federal option that could have included the Belarusians. This search for allies continued also after Belarus had been partitioned between Poland and the Soviets, as the exiled BNR activists rather unsentimentally continued to switch allegiances between the regional power brokers until the late 1920s.

States and Proto-States

The history of Belarusian nationalism is unusual in a number of ways. The period between 1915 and 1927 was conducive to the Belarusian nationalists’ aims. During this period old multiethnic empires collapsed, new states appeared, and various parties fought for power and domination over new polities. During a short time span the Belarusian lands saw a succession of rulers: imperial Russia, imperial Germany, Bolsheviks, Poles, Bolsheviks again. To various degrees, most of these temporary rulers professed themselves committed to the nationalist intellectuals. Indeed, the emergence of Belarusian statehood was, to a significant degree, a result of external actors, less interested in forging a Belarusian nation than guided by the considerations of Realpolitik.

Invoking ethnographic claims and insisting that they acted in the name of the Belarusian nation, a small group of Belarusian nationalists laid claim to enormous territories, from the German border in the west to the cities of Briansk and Viazma and the Volga River in the east, as part of a Belarusian state, which they called the Belarusian People’s Republic (Belaruskaia Narodnaia Respublika, BNR), proclaimed on March 25, 1918. This date is at the core of the national mythology of a non-communist political tradition that is today represented primarily by the opposition and the Belarusian diaspora. The German occupation authorities funded Belarusian nationalist activities as a counterweight to Polish nationalism, and the declaration of the BNR would have been impossible without Berlin’s tacit support. If the BNR never materialized as a state in any sense of the word, the idea of Belarusian statehood appears to have had an impact on the young Soviet government, which soon thereafter, on January 1, 1919, claimed roughly the same territory for a Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic (Savetskaia Satsyialystychnaia Rėspublika Belarus, SSRB; from 1922 Belaruskaia Savetskaia Satsyialystychnaia Rėspublika, BSSR). This first Belarusian Soviet Republic was short-lived: already the following month it was merged with the newly established Soviet Lithuania into one united Soviet republic. In turn, this republic proved equally short-lived and was dissolved during the Soviet–Polish War. As the Soviet forces recaptured the Belarusian lands from the Poles a Soviet Belarusian republic was resurrected, over a much smaller territory, in July 1920. With the exception of the latter, none of these republics lasted more than a few months. Though Belarusian statehood was declared and re-declared no less than six times between 1918 and 1920, the attempts at establishing a united Belarusian state failed, and the Belarusian lands were divided between the Soviets and Poland via the Treaty of Riga in 1921. Yet the successive declarations of statehood strengthened those who argued that Belarusian statehood was a legitimate pursuit. In the 1920s the renewed Soviet Belarus was enlarged eastwards to correspond largely to the ethnographic Belarusian territories under Soviet control, to which the Belarusian nationalists had laid claim.

Partition and Irredentism

The 1921 partition was a serious blow to Belarusian nationalist aspirations. The failure to gain international recognition and the partition of Belarusian lands between Poland and the Soviets also partitioned the nationalist intellectuals, who came to operate under very difficult conditions on their respective sides of the border. At the same time, the 1920s saw a remarkable upswing of Belarusian cultural, political, and intellectual life on both sides of the border. As a means to consolidate Soviet power, the authorities decided to fill the young republic with national content. Between 1921 and 1927 significant efforts went into nationalizing activities: schools, libraries, institutes of higher learning, papers, publishing houses, theaters, administration, and bureaucracy were conducted in the Belarusian language. At the peak of this process, there were serious attempts to establish a military apparatus in the Belarusian language. Despite being designated as a national republic and a national home of the Belarusian people, the titular nationality was quite underrepresented in the highest echelons of power. The Soviet leadership faced an acute shortage of ethnic Belarusian cadres, and during the first twenty-five years of its existence the leadership of the BSSR was dominated by non-Belarusians.¹⁶

The situation for the West Belarusians was different. Having failed to establish a Belarusian nation-state, the Belarusians became a marginalized and increasingly alienated national minority in a political entity that the postwar Polish political establishment had intended as a Polish nation-state. The West Belarusian national activists sought to resist the assimilatory pressure of the Polish government. The situation was further complicated by the existence of a Soviet Belarusian republic east of the border, which made nationalist opposition to Polish rule appear not only irredentist, but a political liability to the Polish authorities. Whether they wanted it or not, the West Belarusian activists were forced to relate to the BSSR, and this came to define them politically. The West Belarusian nationalists split into two rival camps, a pro-Soviet and an anti-Soviet one. The former openly flirted with the idea of unification under Soviet leadership, whereas the anti-Soviet West Belarusian nationalist movement unsuccessfully sought to utilize the local chapters of the Roman Catholic Church as a vehicle to nationalize the population. The options were all laden with significant difficulties. Irredentism risked attracting the attention of the authorities and a crackdown, while working within the Polish institutions would mean a de facto recognition of the division of Belarus and legitimization of a political order that would preclude the establishment of a Belarusian state. For much of the 1920s West Belarusian nationalists cooperated with the Polish authorities without rejecting irredentism.¹⁷

The emergence of the SSRB/BSSR and Lithuania and the return of Poland reduced the Belarusian nationalists’ range of options, but not necessarily their agency. A bitter regional political rivalry between the Soviets, Poland, and Lithuania seemed to open up new opportunities for the Belarusian nationalists. In the early 1920s Kaunas housed and sponsored the BNR government in exile while encouraging Belarusian irredentism in an attempt to foment unrest in the Second Polish Republic. After 1923 the Soviets took over the role as the main sponsor of armed resistance in West Belarus. Belarusian nationalism became a pawn in a larger political game in which its success was dependent on its usefulness to other parties. The 1910s and 1920s allowed the Belarusian nationalists considerable agency. They had been playing along with some rather unseemly co-conspirators for the hearts and minds and bodies of Belarus and, in many cases, became quite skillful at political intrigues and covert action.

Authoritarian Consolidation and Repression

Whereas Moscow, Kaunas, and Warsaw saw the potential in weakening their adversaries by exploiting the Belarusian issue, over the course of the 1920s they also became aware of how this issue could be used against them. Piłsudski’s coup d’état of May 1926 brought authoritarian rule and radically altered the political conditions in Poland. The emergence of a Belarusian civic society, the contours of which were becoming visible by 1926, was halted, its cultural and political institutions dissolved, its leaders arrested and silenced. In December 1926 a putsch did away with democracy in Lithuania. In the BSSR, Stalin’s consolidation of power in 1927 meant a similarly sharp change in political climate. In this new political situation the Belarusian nationalists’ irredentism now appeared as a liability to the regimes with which they had been happy to conspire through much of the decade. The decisions to crack down on organized Belarusian nationalism were made separately by the governments in Moscow and Warsaw, the latter partly aided by a concordat with the Vatican. From 1927 to 1931, the policies were revised and the nationalists repressed as the BSSR embarked on the Stalinist modernizing project. In the BSSR a cautious policy of the linguistic Belarusization of state institutions continued through most of the 1930s, despite the centralization of power in the government in Moscow, the crushing of cultural pluralism, and the stifling of independent political initiative. Belarusian institutions in the BSSR were purged of their former content, but continued to operate. The personal histories of many of the Belarusian nationalists are tragic. Most perished during the Stalinist purges in the late 1930s. Having fought for Belarusian statehood they had agency and a certain influence on the development. During much of the 1920s regional rivalries had allowed—indeed invited—irredentism and clandestine operations. The situation changed in the late 1920s, when the international rivalry, which they had been able to exploit with some success, turned against them. The Belarusian nationalists became victims, but not disinterested victims, of larger processes beyond their control, the scope of which they could not overview or understand at the time.

Essentially, this book is a study of a few hundred nationalist intellectuals and their construction of a new ethnicity east of Poland and west of Russia; it analyzes Belarus as a borderland terrain, social project, and political tool. It surveys not only the development and intellectual history of Belarusian nationalism but also its instrumentalization by various parties, from the nationalists themselves, to imperial Germany and Lithuania, the Second Polish Republic and the Soviets, placing Belarusian nationalism in the context of political rivalry in a contested borderland. It contextualizes Belarusian nationalism into a regional context of German occupation policies, Polish assimilationism, Soviet nationalities policies, and Stalinist political repression.

Organization and Previous Studies

This study is organized chronologically in chapters that cover the eventful quarter-century between 1906 and 1931, which marks the invention of a Belarusian nation, the beginning of Belarusian nationalism—and the establishment of Belarus as a political unit—but also the division of the Belarusian-speaking lands between two antagonistic states. It surveys assimilationist policies in the Second Polish Republic as well as Soviet nation-building in the BSSR, Belarusization, affirmative action programs, and the Belarusian cultural renaissance of the 1920s. It covers political activism and a significant political mobilization in West Belarus in 1926. In other words, it is a study of the rise and fall of organized Belarusian nationalism, ending with its suppression following Poland and Lithuania’s descent into authoritarianism and the onset of Stalinist transformation of the Soviet Union.

The experiences of the 1920s were long overshadowed by the political terror of the Stalinist 1930s and the devastation of World War II, both of which fundamentally reshaped Belarusian society and determined the political environment for the next sixty years. The nationalist ideologues were repressed, their ideas largely uprooted, and living memory was broken. For decades, scholars paid little attention to the Belarusization of the 1920s, which came to be seen as little more than a brief historical parenthesis. The topic of Belarusian nationalism received little more scholarly attention.¹⁸ Furthermore, the existing literature was polarized. Soviet historiography insisted that the national question had been resolved, and that Soviet Belarus was an example of a peaceful and harmonious flourishing of national cultures.¹⁹ In the West, much of the research on Belarus was colored by the politics of the Cold War.²⁰ The highly charged language of the bilingual Belarusian Review/Belaruski zbornik, published by the CIA-funded Munich Institute for the Study of the USSR, describes Soviet rule in Belarus as the harshest instrument to suppress the freedom [of the Belarusians]. The end goal of this policy is the extermination of the Belarusian people as a nation. To this end, the Kremlin uses different dreadful methods and manners, beginning with the destruction of the Belarusian culture, systematic Russification, massive persecution and resettlements, and finally harsh physical terror and genocide.²¹

Only with glasnost, perestroika, and independence was there again a renewed interest in this period. In the past twenty years a number of works have provided a more nuanced and multifaceted picture, not only of the Soviet nationalities policies, but also of the emergence of modern Belarus. The literature includes important works on the experimental Soviet policies of multilingualism in the BSSR, on the role of religion and language to the West Belarusian national activists, and on Belarusian nationalism.²² Pathbreaking works have appeared on the role of ethnography, race, and affirmative action policies in the USSR, works that have changed our understanding of the Soviet nationalities polices and which partly cover Belarus.²³ In addition, we have seen important works on national minorities in the BSSR.²⁴

The complicated international relations during the period between 1915 and 1928 hold much of the answer to the question as to why there today exists an independent Republic of Belarus, why the borders run where they do, and why its development differs significantly from its immediate neighbors.

Material and Methodology

The main source base for the chapters on West Belarus under Poland consists of the West Belarusian press from the 1920s and 1930s, particularly that which was published between 1925 and 1931. Belaruskaia Krynitsa was an influential intellectual venue with a significant impact on the intellectual development of West Belarusian nationalism.²⁵ While it was the paper of the Belarusian Christian Democratic Party (BKhD), it aspired to be the leading paper of West Belarus and provided considerable intellectual diversity on its pages.²⁶ The Polish authorities regarded it as subversive, and it was regularly subjected to censorship, and many issues did not appear at all, particularly at the time of elections and other periods of increased political activism. The chapters on language, identity, and the politics of West Belarus in the 1920s are based upon a survey of the 633 volumes of Belaruskaia Krynitsa published between 1925 and 1937. Of particular interest for this study is the self-image of the West Belarusian intellectuals, their reactions to the Belarusization in the BSSR, and their positioning in the rivalry between Moscow, Warsaw, and Kaunas.

Other than Belaruskaia Krynitsa and the highly influential prewar paper Nasha Niva, the number of Belarusian-language newspapers, journals, and publications in West Belarus were rather limited. To the extent it is possible, the views of Belaruskaia Krynitsa are juxtaposed to those articulated by the pro-Soviet and left-wing Belarusian Peasants’ and Workers’ Hramada (BSRH), the largest and most successful Belarusian nationalist organization of the interwar era. As the Polish authorities feared the radical leftist West Belarusian parties more than they feared the Belarusian Christian Democrats, the press of the BSRH faced even more significant obstacles. Most of its papers were banned, and fewer volumes of its papers have been preserved. The perspective of the West Belarusian left is represented by a number of short-lived publications of radical Belarusian papers and bulletins of the BSRH and the so-called Zmahan’ne factions in the Polish Sejm and Senate. The source base of the West Belarusian press is complemented by records from Polish intelligence services, kept in the Central Archives of Modern Records in Warsaw (Archiwum Akt Nowych, AAN), and newly released legal records from the 1927 trial against the BSRH in Vilnius, kept in the Lithuanian Central State Archives (Lietuvos Centrinis Valstybės Archyvas, LCVA). If the West Belarusian press reflects the public debates, the records of the Polish police, courts, and intelligence service provide an insight to the often conspiratorial and underground activities of Belarusian activists but also to the increasingly repressive political climate in which they operated. These materials are accompanied by quarterly reports from the Swedish embassy in Warsaw to the government in Stockholm. A neutral power, Sweden was assigned by the League of Nations to assess claims of abuse and unfair treatment of minorities at the hands of the Polish government and therefore monitored the interethnic relations in Poland quite closely.²⁷ The chapters on nation building in the BSSR rely mainly on key policy documents, orders, meeting minutes, and reports by control commissions and local leaders, kept in the National Archives of the Republic of Belarus (Natsional’nyi arkhiv Respubliki Belarus, NARB), but also postwar accounts and personal recollections by émigrés.²⁸

A Note on Transliteration

During the period of this study, several Belarusian orthographies were in use. This book uses the Library of Congress (LOC) transliteration of the Belarusian originals throughout. That means that even texts in łacinka, the Belarusian version of the Latin alphabet, have been transliterated according to the LOC system. Thus, for instance, Biełaruskaja Krynica is transliterated as Belaruskaia Krynitsa. Belarusian names of persons and places, even though they may be better known in their Russian, Polish, or Lithuanian forms, are given in Belarusian. The reader will therefore encounter Lukashenka, Ihnatouski, and Masherau, not Lukashenko, Ignatovskii, and Masherov.

Chapter 1

Imagining Belarus

The manufacturing of a Belarusian consciousness took place within a context of the ideological historicizing of the past, a deliberate attempt by Belarusian intellectuals to break the Russocentric approach of the tsarist historiography of Vasilii Kliuchevskii (1841–1911), Pavel Miliukov (1859–1943), Sergei Solov’ev (1820–1879), and others. Belarusian national activists sought to establish an alternative narrative, intended to demonstrate a historical continuity of Belarusian statehood dating back to the Middle Ages. As the Belarusians had long lacked a political and cultural elite of its own, the task of constructing a continuous national history was daunting for the nationalist pioneers. They imagined a continuity in the Belarusian principality of Polatsk and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. In particular, they stressed the flourishing of the Grand Duchy in the sixteenth century as a golden age of Belarusian culture.¹ Yet only with difficulty can the principality of Polatsk and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania be described as Belarusian polities in the nationalists’ sense of the word. The Belarusian nationalists’ claim to the legacy of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was generally regarded as weaker than that of their Lithuanian counterparts, and unlike the Ukrainians, they lacked a Cossack proto-state tradition to which they could lay claim. Nationalist historiography tended to solve these issues by excluding or minimizing the experiences of others, and to ethnicize historical figures that they regarded positively and to appropriate them as heroes and integrate them as part of the national project. The Belarusian nationalists had to share many of their historical myths, saints, heroes, and cultural figures with neighboring peoples, particularly the Lithuanians.²

All societies and cultures have been influenced by interactions with their neighbors. Ideas, politics, music, literature, not to mention the phenomenon of nationalism itself, are international occurrences, results of human interactions, which do not stop at ethnic or political borders. Yet the writing of history has primarily been in the service of empires, states, and ruling elites. This is true even for states that have long vanished. Karl Marx famously observed this relationship, pointing out that the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas: i.e., the class, which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class, which has the means of material production at its disposal, consequently also controls the means of mental production, so that the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are on the whole subject to it.³

The Belarusian nationalists faced the same issues as other nationalists. Like other regional state projects, such as Muscovy, Lithuania, and Latvia, theirs was contested, and success was by no means given. The Latvian polity, for instance, was united only in 1919, and that for the first time in history. For the Belarusian nationalists it was a problem that theirs was the youngest of the nationalisms in the region. When national, or ethnic, consciousness reached this area, rival ethnic groups had already staked their claims to many of the same territories the Belarusian nationalists intended for their state. Unlike the weak and poorly organized Belarusian nationalists, Polish, Lithuanian, and even Latvian national activists could all argue and bargain their land claims from a position of strength. And unlike the claims of the Belarusian nationalists, theirs were recognized by the Western delegations at the Paris peace conference. The Belarusian nationalists failed in their objective, and Belarus came to develop in a manner different from its western neighbors. It would be many decades until the nationalists’ imagination of Belarus gained a more general acceptance.

The existence of a Belarusian nation is still contested. In the 1990s, authoritative Western historians and political scientists, including Hélène Carrère d’Encausse and Kristian Gerner, questioned the existence of a Belarusian nationality or dismissed it as an artificial construct, a result of arbitrary decisions by Soviet bureaucratic planners.⁴ Over the past two decades, such statements have become increasingly rare. During nearly a quarter-century of independence, the idea of the existence of a separate Belarusian nationality appears to have gained popular acceptance. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger famously claimed that the nation itself was the greatest of all invented traditions. All states and national consciousnesses are constructed and a result of political or economic processes. If Belarus is an invented tradition or artificial construction, so by necessity are its neighbors.⁵

State, Nation, Identity: Central Concepts

A primary focus of this book is the perceptions of the concept of the nation. The word has traditionally been used in two main ways: in an ethnic and a civic sense. Ethnic nationalism describes a community of people with common origin and a common culture. Civic nationalism establishes a group of people who populate a more or less well-defined territory, recognizing the same government and obeying the same laws. The former is cultural and equivalent to ethnic groups, the latter political and describes the inhabitants in a state.⁶

Hans Kohn defines nationalism as a state of mind, in which the supreme loyalty of the individual is felt to be due to the nation-state.⁷ The phenomenon nation is complicated and notoriously hard to define.⁸ Ernest Renan (1823–1892) suggested cynically, A nation is a group of people united by a mistaken view about the past and a hatred of their neighbors.⁹ Indeed, it is useful to keep in mind the evolving, developing nature of the concept of the nation, and that it indeed is a social construct. Ross Poole, rather than taking primordial nationalist claims at face value, states that "a more empirically adequate account of the nation would not emphasize sameness of culture, but the existence of a common will: a nation is a group which—for whatever reason—wants to be treated as politically sovereign.¹⁰ The Czech historian Miroslav Hroch stressed, One must not determine the objective character of the nation with a fixed collection of features and attributes given once and for all, just as it is not possible to view the nation as an everlasting category, standing outside concrete social relations.¹¹ One definition, which is sometimes used and which takes this aspect into account, is that of the young Josef Stalin, who in one of his earliest scholarly endeavors defined a nation as a historically evolved, stable community based on a common language, territory, economic life, and psychological disposition, manifested in a community of culture.¹² This definition takes into account the temporal nature of the nation. Benedict Anderson has expanded our understanding of the nation by emphasizing it as an imagined political community—and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.¹³ In covering the period when Belarusian intellectual elites began to imagine the Belarusian-speaking population as a nation," this book uses Kohn’s and Stalin’s definitions of nation and nationalism as working theories.

The term state is easier to define. Max Weber (1864–1920) defines the state as "a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory."¹⁴ The formation of a nation-state would mean that the political unit would correspond with the national unit. While the creation of such a unit would be almost impossible in practice, it is the aim of the nationalist imagination. Following Thomas Hylland Eriksen, this book defines nation building as the creation and consolidation of political cohesion and national identity.¹⁵ In this fundamental aspect—the desire to establish a Belarusian nation-state—the Belarusian activists, regardless of their political belonging in other matters, were nationalists. Anderson has pointed out that nationalism does not represent one coherent ideology, but appears in a number of forms: Part of the difficulty is that one tends unconsciously to hypostasize the existence of Nationalism-with-a-big-N and then to classify ‘it’ as an ideology. It would, I think, make things easier if one treated it as if it belonged with ‘kinship’ and ‘religion,’ rather than with ‘liberalism’ or ‘fascism.’¹⁶ We are reminded of Elie Kedourie’s observation that it is a misunderstanding to ask whether nationalism is politics of the right or the left. It is neither.¹⁷ Thus, unless otherwise noted, when the term Belarusian nationalist is used, it is applied in this general understanding of the term, meaning someone dedicated to the idea of establishing a Belarusian nation-state.

Miroslav Hroch introduced the concept of a three-stage periodization and a division of the intensity of the process of national activity. Hroch refers to these stages as phases A, B, and C. He describes phase A as signified by a heightened awareness of the cultural and national distinctiveness among the intellectual elite, whereas phase B corresponds to the introduction of nationalism as a political program and patriotic agitation. Phase C, the mobilization of the masses into a national movement, constitutes the third step in this process, when the nationalist agenda has a chance to materialize.¹⁸ Based on this methodology, this book is a study of the first two stages of national mobilization. Phase A covered the period roughly from 1906 to 1915; phase B roughly 1915–1926. The interrelated German occupation and the February Revolution became catalysts for Belarusian nationalism and made it possible to disseminate the message to a mass audience. This book is mainly a focus on phase B of Belarusian national activity: the efforts of nationalists on both sides of the border to root a national consciousness among the masses. Their success was limited, and indeed Hroch himself lists the Belarusians along with peoples like the Lusatian Sorbs and the Bretons as examples of nationalities that did not manage to form themselves fully into modern nations.¹⁹

In Europe nationalists often belonged to the emerging middle class, but their social background varied from country to country. While Czech, Slovak, Finnish, and Norwegian nationalists often came from the bourgeoisie or petit bourgeoisie, the case was different for their Estonian, Lithuanian, and Belarusian counterparts, who were overwhelmingly rural. In the Lithuanian case, less than 5 percent came from cities.²⁰ Like the Lithuanians, the Belarusians were peasants, not workers, and overwhelmingly rural. As Andrew Wilson has noted, Belarus had middling peasant strata, but hardly any middle class.²¹ Indeed, in 1897, only 1 percent of Belarusians lived in cities with a population of over twenty thousand.²² Very few lived in Vil’nia (today Vilnius, Lithuania), which the national movement regarded as their historical and spiritual capital. According to the official Polish census of 1931, the Belarusian share of that city’s population was only 0.7 or 0.9 percent, whereas in the surrounding areas Belarusians made up over 50 percent of the population.²³ In Minsk, the nationalists’ second choice for Belarusian capital, the Belarusians made up 9 percent of the population in 1897. The absolute majority, 51.2 percent of the residents of Minsk, spoke Yiddish.²⁴ Yet it was urban life that awoke the Belarusian national consciousness, as it was in the cities that the Belarusians encountered Jews, Poles, and Russians. Having left their Belarusian-speaking villages for the city, where they contrasted their culture and language against those of others, a small group of intellectuals started to define themselves as a distinct national group. This emerging national identity had a clear class component, as the Belarusian was also identified as a muzhyk, or peasant, as opposed to a pan, or gentleman, which often meant an ethnic Pole, or a Polonized Belarusian or Lithuanian.

By 1926 the predominant Belarusian political organization appeared on the verge of turning into a mass movement. Combined with the significant successes of the Belarusian national communists in the BSSR, it could be argued that Belarus was indeed entering phase C of Hroch’s model. The years 1924–1930 constituted the peak years of Belarusian national, political, and social activism. Between 1924 and 1927 Belarusian nationalists forced the Belarusian question onto the agenda of a number of successive Polish minority governments, uncertain how to deal with the new phenomenon.²⁵ The Second Polish Republic’s ineptitude in handling national minorities contributed to the discrediting of the Grabski government and built momentum for Piłsudski’s coup in 1926. Piłsudski’s return to power marked the beginning not only of a new political system but also of a different approach to the national question. The years 1927–1930 saw a government crackdown on the emerging Belarusian movement in Poland. Whereas government agencies and commissions created state symbols, national holidays, and celebrations in the BSSR, on the other side of the border, in the absence of a Belarusian government or even cultural autonomy, the invention of a national mythology had the character of a grassroots project, articulated on the pages of rather limited West Belarusian publications.

Ethnic and Civic Nationalism

The principle that the nation should constitute the basis for internationalism has been part of the classic liberal tradition since Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832). Universalist values and international organizations appeared at the same time as modern nationalisms had their breakthrough in Western Europe.²⁶ Yet European nationalisms fall into two categories, each with their own intellectual traditions. The tradition that has been predominant in Eastern and Central Europe is based upon language and ethnicity. Following Kohn, many studies of nationalism have made a distinction between an inclusive, Western democratic civic nationalism and an exclusive, Eastern ethnic authoritarianism based upon blood and ethnicity.²⁷ Kohn saw the enlightenment version of nationalism as part of the liberal, inclusive, and universalistic tradition of the French and American revolutions, based upon the idea of the sovereignty of the nation, as opposed to the sovereignty of autocrats. This he juxtaposed with ethnic particularism, authoritarianism, and conservatism, which originated from the Romantic tradition and in opposition to the Napoleonic occupation and the multiethnic empires of Central and Eastern Europe.

According to this model, Western European nationalism was inclusive and non-ethnic, whereas Central and Eastern European nationalism centered on the issue of self-determination, which was to be obtained when all ethnic groups achieved independence to create their own nation-states, that is, when the geographic distribution of the ethnic boundaries of the nations coincided with their political borders. Thus, the eastern model of nationalism would aspire to popular sovereignty and self-determination through the establishment of ethnically based nation-states, which in the West had been accomplished through the creation of representative governments. The fact that many Western European countries contained substantial national minorities was seen as being of little relevance.²⁸

Kohn saw these two traditions as mutually exclusive, or bound to stand in opposition to one other. Yet, there are many cases of these two traditions coexisting. Most European nationalisms contained a combination of the two forms. Belarusian nationalism as well as the official Soviet patriotism, established as official ideology in 1934, both combined aspects from the two traditions.²⁹ On the one hand, Soviet planners relied on ethnic particularism and linguistic distribution when drawing internal political boundaries. On the other hand, Soviet patriotism was based not on ethnicity but on a political ideology, which in theory was internationalist and ethnically inclusive.³⁰ In an ambiguous concept of nationality, the Soviet government developed a definition that was based on assumptions of the primordialism of nations while at the same time assuming that the state could intervene to construct modern nations and build a national consciousness with the stated aim of creating a national communism.³¹

Therefore, Kohn’s binary between Eastern and Western forms of nationalism is an oversimplification; it is not applicable to many of the left-wing Slavic ethnonationalist movements such as those of the liberal and socialist left in the Czech lands, Ukraine, and Belarus. Despite its roots in the French and American revolutions, Western civic nationalism was compatible with slavery, segregation, and genocidal policies toward native populations, such as the case of the United States; or imperial expansion, as in the case of France.³² In the case of Brazil, it was also combined with political authoritarianism. At the same time, the Eastern ethnic nationalism of Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814), and Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805) could be both radical and democratic. The key aspects of the ethnonationalist projects were, at least until the mid-1800s, liberal, progressive, and peaceful.³³ Democratic demands were articulated in the name of the ethnic community, and the nation was seen as the legitimate arena for political activism. In the words of David Arim Kaiser, In Romantic discourse, both literary and political, this principle is expressed in narratives of beings striving after and developing their own particular genius by following the call of their own inward rules. The difference between liberalism and cultural nationalism is that for liberalism the being striving to obtain autonomy is an individual, while for cultural nationalism it is a whole people.³⁴ While early twentieth-century Belarusian nationalism belonged in Kohn’s category of Eastern nationalism, it was mostly democratic, socialist leaning, and anticolonial, employing ethnicity, language, and culture as vehicles for agency and political empowerment.

Collective Memory and National Identity

Maurice Halbwachs (1877–1945) introduced the concept of collective memory, which he viewed as a phenomenon socially constructed by groups and institutions. Halbwachs argued that human memory can function only within a collective context. Such a context can be evoked by the erection of war memorials and the celebration of socially significant anniversaries, which link a community of people together. A certain amount of shared collective memories is necessary for a community to function. It is a flexible and changing phenomenon, expressed by separate individuals who remember and recollect individually, but whose recollections are determined by a group context, shared by members of this community.³⁵ James Wertsch developed this concept further, emphasizing that collective memory differs within members of the community. Wertsch distinguishes between three kinds of collective memories: homogenous, complementary, and contested. Whereas the first category means the simplest version of memory distribution, by complementary collective memory, Wertsch means events that are remembered differently by various members of the community and which supplement each other. Contested memories are the most complicated, and constitute situations in which members of a group or community remember things differently, and the interpretations of the past contradict and exclude each other.³⁶ At the same time, collective memory can be characterized by a set of characteristics, one of which is the inclination to create a simple and clear version of an event. Collective memory is remarkably flexible and constantly developing. Its content can be kept or forgotten, consciously and unconsciously distorted, manipulated, and appropriated by various groups. The recollections of the past can also be rejuvenated and woken up to life again, and adjusted in accordance with the political and social