Educational Foundations of the Nation

Uladzimir Liakhouski. School Education in Belarus during the German Occupation (1915–1918). Vilnius – Białystok: Institute of Belarusian Studies – Belarusian Historical Society, 2010. – 340 pp.

Review prepared by Andrei Charniakevich.

In recent years, Belarusian historical scholarship has had serious difficulties with authorities. This does not mean administrative positions, but the actual contribution of a researcher to the study of a particular problem. Instead, historical topics turn into peculiar “sinecures” that are assigned for life to the authors of candidate or doctoral dissertations. It is therefore all the more remarkable when a historian becomes an authority even before defending a dissertation, and immediately on a very broad range of issues. Uladzimir Liakhouski entered scholarship long before he received his official candidate degree. Yet it is one thing to be an encyclopaedist in the full sense of the word, and quite another to produce a synthetic work.

The book under review is an excellent example of the combination of solid knowledge with an authorial concept of how to understand the past. In fact, the work goes far beyond the single issue of Kaiser Germany’s educational policy in the occupied territories. Three essentially very different systems of education pass before us within the same space: the unification policy of the Russian Empire, German militarism, and cultural-national liberalism.

The first chapter surveys the school policy of the Russian government and pro-government institutions in the “North-Western Krai” from the uprising of 1864 to the revolution of 1917, as well as the fate of Russian educational institutions in the front-line zone. At the same time, the author separately examines the origins of “Belarusian positivism” and the creation of the first Belarusian-language educational centres, as well as the development of national education among “non-Russian” ethnic communities.

On the one hand, this takes us somewhat away from the main topic chronologically. On the other hand, it provides a retrospective overview of the entire education system, which makes it possible to assess more deeply the changes that took place in the occupied area itself.

The second chapter deals directly with the formation of a new school system in the western part of Belarus, subordinated to the German military command, and with the legal position of schools in the territories that came under occupation only at the final stage of the war. The difference, however, appears so substantial that one can speak here of two entirely different approaches to implementing the same policy. The last two parts of the book are devoted precisely to analysing these specific features.

The third chapter, entitled “The Activity of Multinational Schooling in the Ober Ost Zone”, focuses on the area of the so-called old “occupation”, which largely covered the Vilnius and Hrodna regions. The author consistently examines Polish schooling, the emergence of Belarusian schooling, the “German school presence”, and Jewish and Lithuanian education in the region.

The most developed section is the final, fourth chapter, devoted to school life in the zone of the “new occupation” of 1918. It includes several essentially independent topics: the Russian school in new geopolitical conditions; the activity of Polish public institutions and private patrons in the field of school education; Jewish education in Yiddish and Hebrew; the beginnings of Tatar schooling; the development of Belarusian schooling before the German occupation; the activity of the Belarusian People’s Republic in the field of schooling under German occupation; and the question of establishing a regional university.

One of the author’s conclusions deserves particular attention. U. Liakhouski is convinced that: “Belarusian schooling was inseparably connected with the process of the formation of Belarusian statehood” (244). We can only add: “The formation of Belarusian statehood depended in many respects on the level of national education”.