Polish Minority in Belarus under threat of Russification

 On Wednesday I met a lady from Grodno (Hrodno in Belarusian) who runs a theatrical group, which now can no longer perform publicly because of Lukaszenka's ban on public use of the Polish language. Now members of her troupe, which includes an orchestra, will only be able to rehearse privately or online.

We talked about the possibility of funding a handful of them to come to London and to perform in POSK for a week or so.

In the meantime I had prepared a report on the situation in Belarus and am looking for a newspaper or magazine that would be interested in publishing it. Hope I find something in the next week. 

Here is the text.

 Polish Minority in Belarus under threat of Russification

With the turmoil and destruction in next door Ukraine hogging the media headlines, we are paying less attention than before to the internal repression now proceeding unchecked in Belarus. There are currently some 1,400 political prisoners in Belarus, many of whom are being beaten during interrogation and kept in unhealthy overcrowded prisons. Some of the prisoners have been dying in unexplained but sinister circumstances. Other members of the opposition, like former presidential candidate, Svietlana Cichanouska, languish abroad. The Belarusian dictator, Aleksandr Lukashenka, has been consolidating his power base following his fraudulent election victory in 2020, and is now assisting Vladimir Putin in seeking to extend the theatre of war to the northern borders of Ukraine and to other neighbouring countries, like Poland.

Lukashenka no longer takes account of the reaction of his western neighbours and is now turning against the national minorities that identify with those countries. In particular, he is persecuting the sizeable Polish minority, which had been settled in the western border territories of Belarus, especially in the Hrodno province, since the fifteenth century. Official questionable Belarusian statistics from the 2009 census indicate the Polish population of Belarus at 295,000. However, 413,000 Poles were recorded under a previous poll held in 1989 by the Soviet authorities and according to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Poland, the number is as high as 1,100,000. It forms the second largest ethnic minority in the country after the Russians, at around 3.1% of the total population. Furthermore, Polish authorities had received more than 162,000 applications for Polish identity cards from Belarusian citizens with Polish roots.

Since 1937 Belarus underwent intense Russification under Soviet rule, which led to the suppression of all non-Russian languages in this territory, including even Belarusian. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990 led to the re-emergence of a Polish self-identity and the opportunity to speak Polish and to let Polish culture flower. Following the Polish-Belarusian treaty, signed in 1992, several independent Polish cultural and social organizations emerged, including the Union of Poles in Belarus (ZPB) with 20,000 members, the Polish Education Society (PMS), the Polish Institute in Minsk, the Mickiewicz Museum in Novogrudok, and Polish cultural centres in Lida, Mohilev and other towns in Belarus. There were more than 200 Roman Catholic parishes in Belarus, often run by Polish speaking priests. Four Polish day schools were set up with funds raised in Poland, including the largest in Hrodno, with 620 pupils, offering them the chance to study afterwards in a Polish university with a Polish scholarship. 

A rich Polish culture extends back in history to when the whole of Belarus was part of the amorphous multi-ethnic and religiously tolerant Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and when Polish was the language of the social elites. For example, a native of Belarus was the leading XIXth century romantic poet, Adam Mickiewicz, who is honoured today as the national poet of Poland, Belarus and Lithuania, even though he wrote only in Polish. This historic tradition, as well as the Polish minority’s distinctly Roman Catholic faith, had always been resented by the Russian-speaking authorities in Belarus, and that includes Lukashenka himself.  

Lukaszenka had earlier tried to divide the Polish community by interfering in the internal elections of the Union of Poles, and confiscating the Union’s property when the “wrong“ Chairman was elected. Nevertheless, the unofficial Union had continued to function under the leadership of a teacher, Andzelika Borys, and had identified itself with the mass democratic movement which challenged the fraudulent presidential election results of 2020.

In March last year following the popular annual celebrations on the feast of St Casimir, a Polish saint, five ZPB local leaders were arrested on trumped charges of organizing illegal gatherings and were even threatened with charges of treason. Three of them were expelled permanently with their families to Poland, but Andzelika Borys, and ZPB vice-chairman, the journalist Andrzej Poczobut, remained in prison. They were charged under article 130 para 3 of the Criminal Code of the Belarusian Republic “for inciting national and religious hatred and furthering discord on the basis of national, religious and linguistic identity, as well as the rehabilitation of Nazism carried out by a group of people”. Andzelika Borys was released from prison in March this year because of her poor health and is currently awaiting trial under house arrest. Her colleague, Andrzej Poczobut, who is also correspondent for the Polish liberal newspaper “Gazeta Wyborcza”, has been languishing in prison for more than 600 days, awaiting trial. According to Philipp Fritz of “Die Welt” he could be facing a ten or twelve year sentence, or perhaps even the death penalty. Apart from accusations of “rehabilitating Nazism”, he is supposed to be guilty of calling for sanctions, “whose aim would be to undermine national security”. He is listed on the Belarus national register of “terrorists”.

After abolishing the Union of Poles, the regime has turned to eradicating the Polish language in schools. Lukashenka is subverting the Belarusian constitution which allows national minorities to run schools teaching in minority languages. Since September, despite massive protests by parents, all four Polish day schools, in Hrodno, Volkovysk, Mohilev and Brest, have been transformed into Russian speaking schools, following a new Education Code, introduced last year, which prevents the establishment of education centres in Belarus which would teach in minority languages. The headmistress of the school in Brest, Anna Paniszewa, was also arrested in March last year for organizing a meeting with her pupils about wartime ani-Nazi and anti-Soviet partisans. Under the new Code, Polish literature can be taught in the Polish language, but for just one hour in the week, and subject to the permission of the local authority. There would be no more state examinations in the Polish language. In September the Supreme Court decreed the winding up of the Polish Education Society, and confiscated their expensive headquarters in Hrodno. At the same time, the local Polish Cultural Centres in Belarus had been closed down, one by one, and their property, which had been funded by cultural organizations in Poland, was confiscated.

He is also trying to eradicate traces of Poland’s past. The local authorities in Lida are planning to churn up the local Catholic cemetery, first opened in 1797. It includes many historic Polish funerary monuments and the graves of Polish airmen and soldiers killed in the Polish-Soviet war of 1920 and in the wartime resistance movement. In August local authorities destroyed a cemetery with Polish Home Army soldiers at Surkonty, including the grave of legendary one-armed commander, Colonel Maciej Kalenkiewicz. Destruction has taken place in at least ten cemeteries with Polish memorials and gravestones this year. Pavel Latushka, former Belarusian Ambassador to Poland, has blamed a desire for vengeance against Poland as being responsible earlier this year for the destruction of the graves of the Polish Home Army soldiers, citing the example of the cemetery in Mikuliski. 

Polish Catholic churches still remain, as well as the Seminary in Hrodno, but most priests with Polish citizenship have had to leave, and fear of prosecution prevents any independent Polish cultural activities in churches. In September, after a minor fire in a backroom, the iconic XIXth century Catholic “Red Church” in the centre of Minsk (it was called “red” because of its distinctive red brickwork) was closed for an indefinite period. The priests and parishioners were told to clear out all their property by the middle of October, despite an appeal by the Catholic Church hierarchy. The church was used once as a sanctuary for street demonstrators in 2020, and the police had had no hesitation in marching in and carting them off to prison. At one stage the former head of the Catholic Church in Belarus, Archbishop Kondrusiewicz, a Belarusian citizen, had been barred from returning to Belarus from Poland, after he had prayed for political prisoners in Belarus outside the walls of a prison.

During a meeting in London this week with a Polish theatrical producer in Belarus, I was told that Polish cultural activities, like dances and plays, could only take place in private accommodation, and even then, there was the constant fear of being denounced by unsympathetic neighbours.

“Belarus is under Russian occupation, and the authorities in Minsk are fulfilling the ideology of the Kremlin,” says Andrzej Pisalnik, editor of the popular Polish website “znadniemna.pl” and ZPB activist. He had been arrested for subversive activity, along with his wife, and they were facing a heavy prison sentence. They agreed to being forcibly repatriated to Poland after their 10-year-old son was threatened with being sent to a children’s home “For more than a month,” says Pisalnik, “they claim to be “denazifying” Ukraine, and now they want the total elimination of all Polish life in the occupied territory of Belarus”.

The exiled leader of the democratic movement in Belarus, Svietlana Cichanouska, has stated, while in Poland, that the closure of Polish schools in Hrodno province is an act of revenge for the support that Poland has given to the Belarusian opposition, and now against the war in Ukraine. There have been international protests in Poland and Lithuania, but Western countries have shown little interest at this relentless persecution of a national minority, which is overshadowed by the current war in Ukraine.

Not only Polish culture is under threat from Russification. Belarusian democratic leader Aleksandar Milinkievich believes that “Belarus is undergoing the Soviet policy of destroying national identity and ending the teaching in languages other than Russian.” For similar restrictions have led to the closure of two Lithuanian language schools and two Ukrainian ones. Even the Belarusian language is under threat as it may be relegated solely now to the teaching of Belarusian history. Belarusian and Russian are both considered official languages of Belarus, but only 23% of the 9.67m population speaks the former, whereas more than 70.2% per cent speaks the latter. No more than 10% of Belarusians say they communicate in Belarusian in their day-to-day lives, mostly in the country villages. In the academic year 2016-2017 near 128,000 students were taught in Belarusian language (13.3% of total), but many of the village schools are now closing. This year, a number of Belarusian language printing presses and bookshops have been closed down and their owners arrested. 

This official Belarusian/Russian policy of Russification has even wider implications. It is reflected in the attempt by Russia to eliminate all aspects of distinctive Ukrainian culture in Ukraine, as well as its political independence. Ultimately the Russian government would wish to extend this policy of Russification to all its more vulnerable neighbours in Europe and Asia.

Wiktor Moszczynski