A Book about a History That “Did Not Exist”

This review was prepared within the joint “Book Review” project of the Political Sphere Institute “Political Sphere” and the Centre for European Studies in Minsk

Shumski, Jan (2012). The Sovietization of Western Belarus (1944–1953). Propaganda and Education in the Service of Ideology. Białystok-Vilnius: Belarusian Historical Society – Institute of Belarusian Studies, 326 pp.

Review prepared by Andrei Vashkevich.

“Lenin and Stalin twirl their moustaches — give us bread, Belarusians!”

“The road to the kolkhoz is straight,

but out of the kolkhoz it goes askew,

he went into the kolkhoz wearing shoes,

and came back barefoot.”

Post-war folklore of Western Belarus

The theme of the post-war “great break” in the life of Western Belarus has not yet received a thorough treatment either in fiction or in scholarly research. What comes to mind after a brief reflection are H. Dalidovich’s interesting novella “Westerners”, A. Karpiuk’s novel “Roots” and especially his “Farewell to Illusions” (Karpiuk, 2008), as well as several university monographs and articles devoted to post-war anti-Soviet resistance, “repatriation” to Poland (Vialiki, 2005), or economic construction, above all the complete collectivization of 1949–1951 (Kurkou, 2001).

It may therefore be said with confidence that Jan Shumski’s study is innovative and highly significant. In essence, the author is the first in Belarusian and Polish historical scholarship to raise the issue of transforming the Western Belarusian region into a part of the USSR not only territorially, administratively, and economically, but also into a space inhabited by representatives of the so-called Soviet people.

Across all three chapters of the book, on the basis of rich factual material, above all from Soviet archives, the author gives a detailed account of relations between state power and society in Western Belarus during the first post-war years. Religious policy, collectivization, social transformations, repression, departures for the “great construction sites of communism”, the press, and the methods and practice of Soviet agitation are all reflected in Jan Shumski’s book. They lead him to a very logical and well-grounded conclusion: that “the causes of today’s national, cultural, legal, and historical nihilism of the Belarusian people largely go back to targeted Soviet policy and propaganda”.

This genuinely scholarly publication is written in a very good language and reads like a tragic chronicle recorded almost by an eyewitness to the events. In a sense this is true, since J. Shumski was born in the Hrodna region, where stories from 1939–1953 were retold from generation to generation in Soviet times as a kind of apocrypha.

Although the work was written as a doctoral dissertation in Poland and was first published in Polish, the author does not wish to present the Home Army fighters only as victims. He provides rather numerous examples of their killing not only Soviet activists, but also people only indirectly connected with Soviet power and members of their families. In general, the author approaches his conclusions in a very balanced way: for example, he does not categorize the entire Roman Catholic population of Western Belarus as Poles, as most Polish historians often do, but he also refuses to recognize them unambiguously as Belarusians.

The most interesting chapter of the book, in my view, is the last one, “Ideology, Education and Propaganda”. By uncovering the mechanisms of Soviet propaganda and cultural policy, Jan Shumski emphasizes their important features in Western Belarus. For example, he describes the rapid closure of Polish schools, which did not even survive until the end of the 1940s, and the fact that in districts whose population considered itself Polish, Polish schools were replaced not by Belarusian ones but immediately by Russian ones. In other words, Belarusianization was perceived as an already unnecessary stage in the construction of a single socialist society (Connor, 1984).

By the beginning of the 1950s, education in regional towns and district centres had been almost completely Russified. This is additional evidence that in Western Belarus the authorities were experimentally constructing a purely Soviet society, not even one that was “national in form”, as it was then customary to say. An interesting but only weakly touched upon episode in the monograph is the repression of “Trotskyists”, “spies”, and other enemies at the Hrodna Pedagogical Institute and other Western Belarusian higher educational institutions.

Jan Shumski’s study is based mainly on Belarusian, Polish, and Russian archives. The bulk of the material comes from open files of education and press departments and commissioners for religious affairs. Sensations are hard to find in such materials, but it is precisely on their basis that one can create a realistic picture of the situation in Western Belarus and allow readers to feel the spirit of the time. The same can be said about district newspapers of the Stalin era, which certainly could have been used even more widely.

The materials used by the author are far from exhausting the entire source base on the topic. Particular attention should be drawn to the possibility of conducting broad research in oral history on the Sovietization of Western Belarus. Witnesses of mass collectivization, victims of political repression, and those whose relatives fell victim to the undeclared civil war of the late 1940s are still alive. Unfortunately, no one is implementing a systematic research programme in this direction.

The author also refers several times to documents that are probably kept in private archives. From my own experience I know that people in western Belarus still possess quite a large number of such documents: kolkhoz labour books, applications to join collective farms, percentage statements for “fixed assignments” imposed on individual farmers, certificates of release from camps, and even copies of sentences.

Jan Shumski’s book is an excellent and substantial study, and deserves to be regarded as one of the best books on Belarusian history published in 2012. It is a book about events that, as many had already begun to think, would remain only in the memories of old people and would never be taken up by historians.

Literature mentioned in the review

1. Aliaksei Karpiuk (2008). Farewell to Illusions. Essays, stories, diaries. Hrodna-Wrocław: “Hrodna Library”.

2. Anatol Vialiki (2005). At the Crossroads. Belarusians and Poles during Resettlement (1944–1946). Minsk: BSPU named after M. Tank – National Archives of the Republic of Belarus.

3. Ilia Kurkou (2001). People on the Land. An Outline of the History of Agrarian Transformations in the Vileika-Maladzechna Region (1939–1950s), ARCHE, no. 2, 194-239.

4. Walker Connor (1984). The National Question in Marxist-Leninist Theory and Strategy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.