Nina Barshchewskaya
Very few publications in the emigration press were devoted to the Polish-Belarusian borderland. Andrei Bagrovich, in a publication titled The Population of the Belarusian SSR in Light of the 1959 Census, published in the journal “Zapisy” (Book 1, Munich 1962, pp. 9-88), wrote that: “outside the BSSR and the USSR, but within the borders of modern Poland, there is Bialystok with the Bialystok region and Belarusian Padlyashsha. There now exist more than a hundred Belarusian primary schools and schools with Belarusian as a subject, three secondary schools, more than a hundred circles of the Belarusian cultural-educational organization, and about a hundred Orthodox parishes” (ibid.).
Viktar Siankevich, in turn, addressed the question of the Polish national minority in Belarus. In the publication On the Question of the Polish Minority in Belarus (in: “Zapisy,” No. 14, New York 1976, pp. 76-84), he referenced research conducted in the Soviet Union. In 1952-1953, the Institute of Ethnography of the USSR Academy of Sciences conducted anthropological research in the Baltic region. The studies began in villages of the Belarusian-Lithuanian borderland. It emerged from them that the population was trilingual: Belarusian, Russian, and Polish. The majority of those surveyed identified themselves as Poles, although at home they spoke “simply” (pa-prostu), meaning in Belarusian dialect. The researchers concluded that the reason for this was the equation of nationality with religious denomination. The majority of the population of the surveyed territory was Catholic (ibid., p. 77, citing: M.V. Vitov, K.Yu. Mark, N.N. Cheboksarov, Ethnic Anthropology of the Eastern Baltics. Proceedings of the Baltic Combined Comprehensive Expedition, Book 2, Moscow 1959, p. 10).
“When Belarus was part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, religion played a defining ethno-differentiating role among Belarusians. And religious self-identification was equated with ethnic identification: Catholics called themselves Poles, Orthodox – Belarusians or Russians. Traces of this have been preserved to this day. […] It is indicative that only 16.7% of Poles named Polish as their native language” (Ibid., p. 78, citing: E.R. Sabalenko, The Contemporary Ethnic Situation in Belarus, in: Proceedings of the Academy of Sciences of the BSSR. Social Sciences Series, No. 3, Minsk 1976, p. 107).
In the pages of the Belarusian emigration press, great attention was paid to questions of the Belarusian-Lithuanian border.
In the publication Facts and Truth (in: “Zapisy,” Book 4, Munich 1966, pp. 252-256), Andrei Bagrovich placed critical remarks about the book by Bronius Kviklis Musu Lietuva (Our Lithuania, 752 pp.), published in Boston in 1964, in which the author “presents ‘historical, geographical, ethnographic essays’ of the most important localities of the territory not of interwar Lithuania, nor of today’s Lithuanian SSR, but of Lithuania within far broader borders, drawn by himself” (A. Bagrovich, Facts and Truth, in: “Zapisy,” Book 4, Munich 1966, p. 252).
According to Kviklis, the border of a future Lithuania, rebuilt within ethnographic boundaries, could reach 105 thousand square kilometers (interwar Lithuania had an area half as large – 56,670 square kilometers). On the Belarusian side – in Kviklis’s imagination – the border would run approximately through Druya, Braslav, Pastavy, Maladzyechna, Valozhyn, Mikalaewshchyna, Indura, Augustow. Further, the author notes that he does not include in this territory a whole series of other Lithuanian lands, to which Lithuania supposedly has historical rights: the Belarusianized Disna and Vileika districts, and the lands of the Slonim and Navahrudak regions (Ibid., p. 253).
From B. Kviklis’s book it follows that among the territories he includes in Lithuania are the Belarusian lands of the Vilna, Trakai, Vileika, Maladzyechna, Ashmyany, Valozhyn, Lida, Shchuchyn, Hrodna, Braslav, and Sviantsyany districts. Kviklis proceeds from his view that Belarusian Catholics are Lithuanians who only speak Belarusian because they became Belarusianized.
The population of the Belarusian-Lithuanian borderland is polylingual – notes G. Grinaviatsene, writing about certain phenomena of contact between Lithuanian and Slavic dialects in southeastern Lithuania, but more about that next week.