" Just prior to the 1939 Invasion of Poland, the Soviet Byelorussia witnessed the genocide of Poles in the Soviet Union resulting in the virtual eradication of Polish minority along the border.[10][11] The state-sanctioned campaign of mass-murder which took place approximately from August 25, 1937 to November 15, 1938,[12] according to archives of the Soviet NKVD, resulted in the killing of 111,091 ethnic Poles (mostly men). Additional 28,744 were sentenced to death-ridden labor camps; amounting to 139,835 Polish victims across the country (10% of the officially persecuted persons during the entire Yezhovshchina period, with confirming NKVD documents)."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poles_in_Belarus
Poles in Belarus
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The
Polish minority in Belarus numbers officially about 294,549 according to 2009 census.
[1] It forms the second largest ethnic minority in the country after
the Russians,
at 3,1% of the total population. An estimated 180,905 Polish
Belarusians live in large agglomerations and 113,644 in smaller
settlements, with the number of women exceeding the number of men by
about 33,000.
[1]
Some estimates by Polish non-governmental sources in the U.S. are
higher, citing the previous poll held in 1989 under the Soviet
authorities with 413,000 Poles recorded.
[2]
Since the
dissolution of the Soviet Union
and the emergence of sovereign Republic of Belarus, the situation of
the Polish minority has been steadily improving. The politics of
Sovietization
pursued by decades of indoctrination, went down in history. Poles in
Belarus began re-establishing the Polish language schools and their
legal right of participating in the religious life. However, the
attitude of new authorities to Polish minority are not very consistent.
The new laws are insufficient, and the local levels of Bielarusian
government are largely unwilling to accept the aspirations of their own
ethnic Poles,
[3] making them into new targets for state-sanctioned intolerance, according to 2005 report by
The Economist.
[4][5]
History
Polish ethnic and cultural presence in modern Belarus are an
intricate part of its history. The lands of modern Belarus are the
birthplace of
Mickiewicz and
Domejko among others.
[6] The proto-Belarusian language, called Ruthenian or Old Belarusian was protected by law in the
Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and used as local vernacular, while both Polish and Latin languages were the
lingua franca
of the throne. "As the 16th century drew to a close" – wrote Andrew
Savchenko about the local nobles, they had to contend with "an
increasingly stark choice: to strengthen their ties with Poland or to
suffer disastrous military defeat and subjugation" by the
Russian Empire,
[7] thus leading to their voluntary
Polonization. Throughout the 19th century, "the mass of unassuming peasants was subjected to active
Russification" by the Tsarist authorities including the abolition of the Uniate Church created by the
Union of Brest, a uniquely Belarusian institution and the cornerstone of the Belarusian nation.
[7]
The territories of the Russian Empire consisting of modern Belarus were divided in 1921 between Poland and the
Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic at the
Treaty of Riga, thus ending the
Polish-Soviet War. Thousands of Poles settled in the area following the peace treaty.
[8] In the
elections of November 1922, a Belarusian party (in the
Blok Mniejszości Narodowych coalition) obtained 14 seats in the Polish
parliament (11 of them in the lower chamber,
Sejm).
[9] In 1923, a new regulation was passed allowing for the
Belarusian language
to be used officially both in courts and in schools. Obligatory
teaching of the Belarusian language was introduced in all Polish
gymnasia in areas inhabited by Belarusians in 1927.
Minsk was home to a Polish-speaking national theatre of Belarus. The Polish community had its organizations there.
Meanwhile, in East Belarus the Soviet authorities liquidated most Polish organizations in early 1930s. In 1937–1938 the Soviet
NKVD and the
Communist Party
attempted to eradicate Poles as a minority group in East Belarus during
the largest ethnic shooting and deportation action of the
Great Terror.
The "Polish operation" of the NKVD
Just prior to the 1939
Invasion of Poland, the Soviet
Byelorussia witnessed
the genocide of Poles in the Soviet Union resulting in the virtual eradication of Polish minority along the border.
[10][11] The
state-sanctioned campaign of mass-murder which took place approximately from August 25, 1937 to November 15, 1938,
[12]
according to archives of the Soviet NKVD, resulted in the killing of
111,091 ethnic Poles (mostly men). Additional 28,744 were sentenced to
death-ridden
labor camps; amounting to 139,835 Polish victims across the country (10% of the officially persecuted persons during the entire
Yezhovshchina
period, with confirming NKVD documents). About 17% of the total number
of victims came from Byelorussia, among them, thousands of peasants,
railway workers, industrial labourers, engineers and similar others,
resulting in near collapse of its economy.
[13] The coordinated actions of the Soviet NKVD and the
Communist Party in 1937-1938 against
Polish minority living in the Soviet Union, representing only 0.4 percent of Soviet citizens, amounted to an
ethnic genocide as defined by the UN convention, concluded historian
Michael Ellman.
[14] His opinion is shared by
Simon Sebag Montefiore,
[15] Prof.
Marek Jan Chodakiewicz,
[16] and Dr
Tomasz Sommer among others.
[11][17][18][19] In a typical
Stalinist fashion, the murdered Polish families were accused of "anti-Soviet" activities and state terrorism.
[20][21]
1939 invasion of Poland
Following the Nazi–Soviet
Invasion of Poland in 1939, the Polish anti-German resistance movement
Armia Krajowa
was actively operating on the territory of modern Belarus, although
many ethnic Belarusians also actively participated in the movement.
[22] Soon after the
Soviet invasion of Poland, the former territories of
Kresy were divided between Germany and the Soviet Union in accordance with the
Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact and subsequently, incorporated into the
Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic following
staged elections. The area that became part of the USSR formed the new
West Belarus.
For more details on the annexation of Polish north-eastern voivodeships by the USSR, see
West Belarus.
In their attack, the
Red Army overrun 52.1% of territory of
interwar Poland
with over 13,700,000 inhabitants. The Soviet occupation zone included
also 336,000 new refugees who escaped from Polish lands invaded by
Germany, numbering at around 198,000.
[23] Spreading terror throughout the region, the
Soviet secret police (NKVD) accompanying the Red Army massacred
Polish prisoners of war,
[24][25][26] and in less than two years, deported up to 1.5 million ethnic Poles
to Siberia including Poles and Polish Jews from West Belarus.
[27] Twenty-one months after the Soviet invasion of Poland, during the German
Operation Barbarossa of June 1941, West Belarus was overrun again by the
Wehrmacht followed closely behind by
Einsatzgruppen and the mass executions of Polish Jews commenced.
[28]
Towards the
end of World War II in Europe, at the insistence of Joseph Stalin during the
Tehran Conference of 1943, West Belarus
was formally ceded by the Allies to the Belorussian SSR.
[29] The Polish population was soon
forcibly resettled
as part of the Soviet-Polish population exchange. Many inhabitants of
Belarus who identified themselves as Poles were allowed to go back to
Poland. In exchange, several thousands of Belarusians from parts of the former
Belastok Voblast were resettled to
Belarus.
The remaining Polish minority in Belarus was significantly discriminated against during the times of the Soviet Union.
[3]
Until 1949 all Polish language schools were replaced with the Russian,
and not even a single one remained due to continuing policies of
Sovietization.
All Polish organizations and social clubs were liquidated.
Incidentally, the Poles were the only ethnic group in Belorussian SSR
whose existence was denied by communist administration.
[3]
The situation of the Polish minority started to improve only in the
later years of the Soviet Union prior to its dissolution, but faced
difficulties from the government of
Alexander Lukashenko.
[3]
Current situation
According to 2009 census Polish minority in Belarus numbers officially about 295,000. After the
Russian minority, Poles certainly form the second largest minority group in Belarus.
[1] The majority of Poles live in the Western regions including 230,000 in the
Hrodna voblast. The largest Polish organization in Belarus is the
Union of Poles in Belarus (
Związek Polaków na Białorusi), with over 20,000 members.
As Poland supports the pro-democracy opposition in Belarus,
Polish-Belarusian relations are poor, and representatives of the Polish minority in Belarus often complain about various
repressions,
such as the jailing for 15 days, of the former head of the Union of
Poles, Tadeusz Gawin. He was sentenced on 2 August 2005 for arranging a
meeting between a visiting deputy speaker of the Polish parliament,
Donald Tusk, and the ethnic Polish activists including Veslaw Kewlyak, also sentenced for 15 days.
[30][31][32]
The Lukashenko government launched a campaign against the Polish ethnic
minority claiming that they were trying to destabilise the balance of
power, and that the Polish minority is a
fifth column (see,
earlier Soviet proclamations).
In May and June of that year a Polish diplomat was expelled, a
Polish-language newspaper was closed and the democratically-elected
leadership of a local Polish organisation, the
Union of Poles in Belarus (UPB), had their own nominees forcibly replaced by those sympathetic to Lukashenko.
[33]
The introduction of the
Karta Polaka
(Polish Charter) in 2007 confirming Polish heritage of individuals who
cannot obtain dual citizenship in their own countries, enabled many
thousands of inhabitants of Belarus to formally declare their Polish
identity for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Poland. The introduction
caused protests from Belarusian officials.
[34]
Poles in Belarus have an unusual linguistic situation; a slight majority use
Belarusian, while a majority of ethnic
Belarusians actually use
Russian,
as do the rest of the Poles. This unusual situation arose because the
Poles in Belarus live mostly in the Belarusian-speaking parts of the
country, whereas Russian now dominates in
Minsk and most of eastern Belarus. Very few Belarusian Poles use Polish in everyday life.
Ethnic Poles share in Belarus (Census 2009), district level data, district level cities and Minsk were depicted with circles.
Ethnic Poles distribution in Belarus (Census 2009), district level data, district level cities and Minsk values were summed with the surrounding districts.
Steering Russia and Poland To War
http://continuingcounterreformation.blogspot.com/2010/04/steering-poland-and-russia-to-war.html
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