The first person who attempted to define the ethnographic boundaries of the Belarusian people’s settlement was A. F. Rittikh. As a result of his research, the Ethnographic Map of European Russia was compiled and published in 1875 in St. Petersburg, where the ethnographic boundaries of the Belarusian national space were delineated for the first time. At the beginning of the 20th century, Yaukhim Karsky developed the Ethnographic Map of the Belarusian Tribe, which was included in Volume I of his work Belarusians.
When in 1917-1920 — during the era of the All-Belarusian Congress and the creation of the Belarusian People’s Republic — Belarusian politicians and statesmen faced the concrete task of defining the state borders of the BNR, they relied on previously published materials and maps. The Ethnographic Map of the Belarusian People’s Republic printed in 1919 essentially covered the space indicated on the maps of Rittikh and Karsky. There were several corrections on it. The most significant concerned the southwestern area. The Brest and Pinsk regions were included within the borders of Belarus — areas that, due to Ukrainian linguistic influences, had been left outside the Belarusian ethnographic space.
The ethnographic borders of Belarus were discussed on the pages of such Belarusian emigre publications as: Abyadnanne, Batskaushchyna, Belaruskaya Dumka, Veda, Zapisy, Kryvich, Naviny z Belarusi. The following were interested in this question: M. Ahniavida, A. Bahrovich, U. Hlybinny, I. Kasiak, R. Maksimovich, A. Matach, Ya. Stankevich, V. Siankevich, Chuly Naziralnk, Licwin-Hudas-Krews.
The London journal Abyadnanne reported that the Belarusian language was widespread far to the east. On the map of East Slavic dialects developed by the Moscow Dialectological Commission, Belarusian dialects extend across almost all of the Smolensk region and most of Kaluga Province. Belarusian influences on Russian dialects are noted on this map in almost the entire Pskov Province and in the southwestern part of Tver Province (Belarusians, in: Abyadnanne, No. 7 (16), London, July 1949, pp. 6-10; p. 7).
M. Ahniavida cites a whole series of authors who did not dare to classify the transitional Belarusian-Russian dialects of the Pskov region as belonging to the Russian linguistic area. These include, among others, R. I. Avanesov (Sketches of Russian Dialectology, Part I, Moscow 1949), P. S. Kuznetsov (Russian Dialectology, Moscow 1954), P. Ya. Chernykh (Historical Grammar of the Russian Language, Moscow 1954), W. Kuraszkiewicz (Outline of East Slavic Dialectology, Warsaw 1954), T. Lehr-Splawinski, W. Kuraszkiewicz, F. Slawski (Survey and Description of Slavic Languages, Warsaw 1954) (M. Ahniavida, The Ethnographic Space of Belarus, in: Batskaushchyna, Nos. 24-25 (410-411), Munich, June 29, 1958, pp. 6-7).
Taking into account all linguogeographic studies, Andrei Bahrovich noted on the pages of the New York journal Zapisy that:
“On the ethnographic and linguistic maps of Russian scholars, starting from the ‘Ethnographic Map of European Russia’ by Rittikh of 1875 (A. F. Rittikh, Ethnographic Map of European Russia, St. Petersburg 1875), Smolensk and the Smolensk region, western Bryansk region, the Nevel area and the southern parts of the Pskov region are marked as territories that are unquestionably Belarusian. This is the case on the maps of Karsky from 1903 (Ye. F. Karsky, Belarusians, Vol. I, Warsaw 1903), 1917 and other years (Ye. F. Karsky, Ethnographic Map of the Belarusian Tribe. Works of the Commission for the Study of the Tribal Composition of Russia’s Population, Petrograd 1917. This map was reprinted in 1918, 1920, 1921), on the map of the Moscow Dialectological Commission of 1915 (N. N. Durnovo, N. N. Sokolov, D. N. Ushakov, An Attempt at a Dialectological Map of the Russian Language in Europe, with an Appended Sketch of Russian Dialectology. Works of the Moscow Dialectological Commission, Part V, Moscow 1915), on the postwar contemporary maps of Russian linguists: Avanesov from 1949 (R. I. Avanesov, Sketches of Russian Dialectology, Part I, Moscow 1949), Chernykh (P. Ya. Chernykh, Historical Grammar of the Russian Language, Moscow 1954) and Kuznetsov from 1954 and later years (P. S. Kuznetsov, Russian Dialectology, Moscow 1954, 1960). These territories were also designated as Belarusian by the resolution of the 1st Congress of the Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of Belarus on December 30, 1918 regarding the borders of the Belarusian Soviet Republic. Paragraph 4 of this resolution states that the Belarusian Republic is to include the Smolensk ‘region’ together with the sub-regions of Smolensk, Belsky, Dukhovshchinsky, Poretsky (Demidovsky), Dorogobuzh, Yelninsky, Krasinsky, and Roslavl; the Gomel ‘region’ with the sub-regions of Surazh, Mglin, and Starodub; the Vitebsk ‘region’ with the sub-regions of Velizh, Nevel, and Sebezh (From the History of the Establishment of Soviet Power in Belarus and the Formation of the BSSR. Documents and Materials on the History of Belarus, Vol. IV, Minsk 1954, pp. 446-447). So all these ‘sub-regions’ of their own ‘union’ Belarusian Republic were later taken by Moscow and annexed to the Russian SFSR” (Andrei Bahrovich, The Population of the Belarusian SSR in Light of the 1959 Census, in: Zapisy, Book 1, Munich 1962, pp. 75-76).
A. Bahrovich emphasized that:
“despite numerous historical, ethnographic, and linguistic confirmations by Russian scholars of the Belarusian character of these territories, especially in terms of language, and contrary to the fact that the territorial mass of the population of these areas speaks Belarusian to this day, during all Russian censuses — of 1897, 1926, 1939, and 1959 — the inhabitants of these territories were always and universally recorded as Russian, both by Russian tsarist and Russian Soviet census-takers, not only by nationality but also by language” (ibid., p. 76).
Nina Barshchewskaya