A Not Entirely New Publication about Grodno in September 1939

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

Malyshevsky, Nikolai. The Battle for Grodno in September 1939 through the Eyes of Participants and Eyewitnesses. Minsk: A. N. Varaksin Publishing House, 2012. 140 pp.

Review prepared by Andrei Vashkevich

The very fact that a new book devoted to the history of Grodno has appeared cannot but be welcome. This is especially true when the work is written by a Belarusian historian rather than a Polish or Russian one. Yet joy over a new publication often disappears quickly after even a superficial acquaintance with the book.

In the case of M. Malyshevsky’s book, it is enough to look at the cover to understand that something is wrong. Instead of a Grodno landscape from seventy years ago, it displays a photograph of the failed Canadian landing at Dieppe in August 1942: a burning landing craft, an abandoned Churchill tank. How is this connected with the city on the Neman?

A number of questions are raised by the book’s title itself. The inscription on the cover differs from the title elsewhere and reads: “The Battle for Grodno on 19 September 1939 through the Eyes of Participants and Eyewitnesses”. What does 19 September have to do with it, when the fighting for Grodno took place precisely on 20-21 September 1939?

It gets worse. The annotation claims that the publication is based on Polish sources and shows events as “they were perceived and seen by Polish participants and are interpreted by contemporary Polish historians”. Meanwhile, the number and volume of quotations from the works of Belarusian writers and historians and from the memoirs of Soviet military personnel are in no way inferior to quotations from Polish sources. In general, quotations make up about 70 percent of the book and are often simply enormous. For example, a quotation from the memoirs of Soviet corps commander Andrei Yeryomenko takes up 21 continuous pages of this small 130-page book and covers the events of 16-19 September 1939, that is, it has no relation to the battles for Grodno, which began only on 21 September 1939.

The book has no clear structure. In fact, three main parts can be distinguished: the situation in Grodno and Western Belarus in general at the beginning of September 1939; the Soviet-Polish battles for the city on 21-22 September 1939; and a brief conclusion. From time to time events “overlap”, but this does not make the information presented difficult to perceive.

The author has built the book itself logically, recounting events according to a chronological principle. He noticeably avoids evaluative judgments both regarding the actions of Grodno’s Polish defenders and the actions of Red Army soldiers. This applies both to Polish repressions against supporters of Soviet power who tried to seize control in Grodno already on 17-18 September, and to Soviet executions of Grodno’s defenders on 21-22 September. The only place where the author’s ideological orientation can be noticed is in his reflections on the impossibility of tying a boy to the armour of a Soviet tank, although before that he conscientiously quotes all existing witness statements on this matter.

A separate topic for reflection is the use of photographs and images in the book. One gets the impression that they were selected by someone completely unfamiliar with the subject. The caption under the photograph on p. 5 states: “Polish tankers pose near their tank. Poland, 1939.” In fact, the photograph shows a group of German tankers sitting near their Czech-made tank. On p. 8 an obviously staged photograph of Polish uhlans is turned into a German photograph of Polish cavalry attacking German tanks. The Soviet soldiers in the photograph on p. 16 have nothing to do with the events of 1939, since all of them have shoulder boards, which, as is well known, were introduced only in 1943. The posters on pp. 17 and 33 were not issued in 1939, as the captions claim, but back in 1920.

On p. 48 the caption “Poles surrender to Soviet captivity” accompanies a photograph of a huge column of well-armed Red Army soldiers. On p. 107 the caption “The German army enters Grodno” accompanies the famous photograph of the joint parade of the Red Army and the Wehrmacht in Brest. The presence of this photograph in the book is not entirely clear, since the author quite rightly passes over in silence the topic of the mythical Soviet-German parade in Grodno in 1939. These are only some of the comments that could be made about the concept of the illustrations in the publication.

The bibliography contains 34 items. One item, for some reason, is repeated twice (numbers 19 and 24). The list includes most of the literature on the events of September 1939, but there are almost no references to it in the book itself. Of the 67 references in the text, more than 30 are to one popular book by Czesław Grzelak, Grodno, Vilnius, Kodziowce (Grzelak, 2002). The author almost never refers to other publications by Grzelak, or not only by him, so it is not entirely clear whether the author used the bibliography while writing the text or whether it is merely a recommended reading list. In general, the list is formatted rather carelessly: for example, the Belarusian letter “ў” is missing in Belarusian publications, while Polish book titles and authors’ surnames are very often given incorrectly.

Unfortunately, Nikolai Malyshevsky’s book cannot be called a new word in the study of the Grodno events of September 1939, or even a successful popular compilation of existing texts.

The only thing for which the author deserves thanks is that he did not turn his book into propaganda, as Soviet authors constantly did and as Polish authors sometimes do today. He was not afraid to give the first word to eyewitnesses regardless of their nationality and political views: Poles, Belarusians, Jews and Soviet soldiers. He also made this material accessible to the Russian-speaking reader. For him, the battle for Grodno in September 1939 is not simply the victorious march of the Red Army, but a bloody civil confrontation that cost both sides many victims. This reveals the author’s humane approach, and therefore the book can be read at least for a superficial acquaintance with the topic.

Literature mentioned in the review:

Grzelak, Czesław (2002). Wilno-Grodno-Kodziowce 1939. Bellona, 183 pp.