Youth Sacrificed to Belarus

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

Uladzimir Liakhoŭski (2012). From the Homan Circle to the Gaisaki. The Activity of Belarusian Youth Organisations in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century and the First Half of the Twentieth Century (to 1939). Białystok – Vilnius: Belarusian Historical Society – Institute of Belarusian Studies, 483 pp. 

Review prepared by Andrei Vashkevich.

Uladzimir Liakhoŭski belongs to the group of those inconspicuous devotees on whom the whole of Belarusian historical scholarship rests. His entire life consists of archives, old documents, manuscripts, and photographs. Over the last decade of the twentieth century, in almost every issue of the legendary journal “Spadchyna”, the grateful reader would find another sensational publication by this then still very young historian. And Uladzimir Liakhoŭski never disappointed his reader, honourably carrying out projects each of which would have sufficed for an entire scholarly biography. These included a collection of documents devoted to the Sluck armed action, a film about S. Bułak-Bałachowicz, and the still unpublished multi-volume edition of the BNR collections of the National Archives of the Republic of Belarus. This is not to mention literally hundreds of scholarly articles and document publications.

But a time comes to gather stones and begin summarising what has been done in solid scholarly monographs or larger popular publications. The book “From the Homan Circle to the Gaisaki…” can indeed be regarded as a kind of watershed in the scholarly work of one of the most outstanding specialists on the history of the Belarusian national liberation movement of the first half of the twentieth century.

Youth is a complex sociological category, and often it is quite difficult to say unambiguously who may be considered a representative of youth and who may not. Yet in the Belarusians’ struggle for national liberation, the role of young people is so great that at times one gets the impression that Belarusian national consciousness is a peculiar “virus” that attaches itself only to the young and takes many of them from this world precisely at a young age. Kastuś Kalinoŭski died on the tsarist gallows at the age of 26; Branisłaŭ Taraškievič published the first Belarusian grammar at the same age; Tamaš Hryb, at 25, headed an extensive Belarusian Socialist-Revolutionary organisation; and the Belarusian underground activist Janka Filistovič died in a Stalinist prison at that same age.

Liakhoŭski’s monograph introduces us to the circumstances in which the first Belarusian youth organisations emerged, operated, and evolved ideologically. The book is divided into five parts according to a problem-chronological principle: the Belarusian youth movement under the Russian Empire; the activity of youth organisations in 1914–1921; Belarusian youth activists in the USSR; Western Belarusian youth structures; and the Belarusian student movement in emigration.

In fact, this structure of the book also corresponds to the chronology of the Belarusian national liberation movement proposed by the author. This structure rests more on the chronology of the existence of state formations on the territory of present-day Belarus, but in effect it corresponds to the classic concept of the main phases of a national movement proposed by the Czech historian Miroslav Hroch: phase A – preliminary scholarly activity; phase B – the transition to mass agitation; phase C – a mass national movement (Hroch, 2000).

In the period of development of the Belarusian national movement under the Russian Empire (1795–1914), the author includes both the activity of young student-scholars from Vilnius University in the 1820s, who mainly studied Belarusian culture and history, and the publishers of “Homon” and “Naša Niva”, who worked directly on formulating and propagating the Belarusian national idea. The period of the First World War and the Soviet-Polish wars of 1914–1921 was a time when the Belarusian movement, before it had managed to unfold fully in phase B, was forced to move into the mass phase C, the phase of direct struggle for national statehood. In the following period, 1921–1939, the Belarusian movement, including the youth movement, already existed as a mass movement, although both in the BSSR and in Western Belarus attempts were constantly made to halt its development.

It is important that U. Liakhoŭski identifies the Belarusian national movement not with nationalism, but with a broader phenomenon based on the aspiration toward the cultural renaissance of all the peoples of the region, including Russians, Poles, Tatars, and Jews, who participated quite actively in the work of Belarusian youth organisations of that time. “Belarusian patriotism is identified not only with the Belarusian ethnic group, but with all ethnic communities that have lived together on this land for more than one century. Belarusian patriotism is an inseparable bond with the Belarusian historical and cultural tradition, which was formed under conditions of cultural and religious tolerance. Belarusian patriotism is the desire for freedom; it is the struggle for the freedom of all citizens of the country regardless of their ethnic origin and confession,” U. Liakhoŭski argues.

The author not only provides basic information about numerous Belarusian youth organisations, but also analyses their ideology, or, more precisely, their ideological orientation: the path by which one youth group or another sought to move toward the cherished goals of public education and Belarusian independence. This is especially important because the Belarusian movement of that period, just as today, was not distinguished by particular unity. Yet the author rejects no one and deprives no one of the right to make a historical contribution to the Belarusian movement.

Looking for shortcomings in works of this kind is a thankless task and, I admit frankly, I found in this book all the Belarusian youth organisations about which I had previously had occasion to read or to see archival materials. But I had not previously read extended essays on many of these structures. Even where the author has only a few facts about youth associations such as student organisations in Puławy, Moscow, Warsaw, Tartu, or the first socialist circles, he has conscientiously systematised them and included them in his monograph. The book may therefore also be regarded as an encyclopaedia of the Belarusian youth movement of that period.

The book mentions more than fifty Belarusian youth organisations from the end of the nineteenth century and the first four decades of the twentieth century. The most significant of them receive substantial essays. These include the Hrodna Circle of Belarusian Youth, the so-called Minsk “Belarusian Hut”, the Belarusian Students’ Union, student organisations of Western Belarusian gymnasiums, the Association of Belarusian Student Organisations, the eastern Belarusian “Maladniak” and “Uzvyšša”, and many others. Many pages are devoted to the student and, more broadly, youth Belarusian press of that period.

Of course, identifying specifically the youth component in the activity of Belarusian organisations is sometimes not easy even for the author himself. It is one thing when the discussion concerns structures that are in principle youth organisations, such as student circles, and another when it turns, for example, to the Society of Belarusian School or the Belarusian Peasant-Workers’ Hramada. Yet when one recalls photographs of members of Society of Belarusian School organisations, where for every moustached older man there were ten young inspired lads, this question to the author disappears by itself.

The author not only describes but also analyses the realities of the time. Particularly interesting in this respect is the subsection “Under Polish Rule: Between the Communists and the Christian Democrats”. Here the author makes important conclusions that the main task of both the Polish and the Soviet propaganda machines was in fact the elimination of the Belarusian national liberation movement, and that Belarusian activists, especially young people, often served in this geopolitical game as bargaining chips. According to U. Liakhoŭski, this was facilitated to a considerable degree by the excessive politicisation of Belarusian circles at the time.

Older Belarusian activists, instead of focusing their main efforts on spreading the national idea, education, and publishing, drew young people into dubious political projects whose real initiators were most often Soviet and Polish intelligence services. This is especially clear in the case of young people who massively joined the ranks of the Belarusian Peasant-Workers’ Hramada and the Communist Party of Western Belarus, then fled to the BSSR, where they were systematically destroyed by the NKVD. Only part of Belarusian youth did not allow itself to be drawn in by Soviet propaganda and instead joined the ranks of the Belarusian Students’ Union, the structures of Belarusian Christian Democracy, and the Belarusian Institute of Economy and Culture.

The book contains no direct references to sources and literature, which the author explains above all by the popular scholarly form of presentation and by the preparation of a separate monograph on the topic, which he plans to publish soon. At the end, however, there is an impressive list of literature and sources. The list alone includes nine archival repositories. A thorough biographical index will also be of great help to readers.

Incidentally, the popular scholarly genre used by the author is not new for Belarusian historical literature. It was especially popular in the first half of the 1990s, during the publication of the journals “Spadchyna”, “Belarusian Past”, and numerous books in the series “Our Famous Compatriots”. The author’s style makes the material easier to perceive, and this is entirely justified, since U. Liakhoŭski considers his main target audience to be not researchers after all, but precisely young people.

A separate word should be said about the concept of the photographs. Here they are not an appendix to the book, but an independent part of it, the result of many years of searching and collecting not only by the author himself but also by numerous friends and colleagues. There are hundreds of photographs in the monograph, dozens of them published for the first time.

The author’s chief creative achievement is the first systematic history of the Belarusian youth movement, written on the basis of the enormous factual material that he himself discovered and processed. The main conclusion of the book is the thesis of the indestructibility of the Belarusian movement, even against the background of that discontinuity, exceptionally specific for European national movements, when a new wave of the Belarusian movement was raised decades later not by the descendants of earlier activists, but by young people who had for a long time been subjected to Polonisation and Russification.

Most of the activists of the Belarusian movement whom we see in the photographs in U. Liakhoŭski’s book left life young. Activists who stood at the head of the national movement in the struggle for independence were not destined for an easy life. It was a life subordinated to sacrificial work. With his monograph, U. Liakhoŭski makes a major contribution not only to the study of Belarusians’ struggle for their statehood, but also, quite clearly and simply, restores the seemingly lost continuity between those who sacrificed themselves for Belarus many years ago and those who suffer for it today. This is his special merit.

 

Literature mentioned in the review

• Miroslav Hroch (2000). Social Preconditions of National Revival in Europe. A Comparative Analysis of Social Composition of Patriotic Groups among the Smaller European Nations. New York, Columbia University Press.