The Second Rzeczpospolita - Part 3 - Ethnocide

Ethnocide (from Greek - people and lat. caedo - I kill) - the policy of destroying national identity, self-consciousness of the people. Ethnocide can be carried out both through the colonial policy of assimilation, and in the process of the formation of new nations through the destruction or change in the self-consciousness of the old (or part of them).

According to the Riga Peace Treaty of the Second Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the lands of Western Belarus and Western Ukraine were transferred. At the same time, the agreement stipulated in a separate article the obligations of the Polish government in relation to the population of the transferred lands:

“Poland grants to persons of Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian nationality residing in Poland, on the basis of equality of nationalities, all rights that ensure the free development of culture, language and the performance of religious rites... Persons of Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian nationality in Poland have the right, within the limits of domestic legislation cultivate their native language, organize and maintain their schools, develop their culture and form societies and unions for this purpose” (Article VII of the Riga Peace Treaty).

But Poland, already habitually ignoring the international treaty (the first international act that Poland ignored was the agreement on the Curzon Line), began to pursue a policy of rigid Polonization and Catholicization of the annexed lands.

Like any rulers in the occupied lands, the Poles adhered to the principle of "Divide and Conquer". They divided among themselves Catholics and Orthodox. At the same time, Catholics, both Ukrainian and Belarusian, were considered “potential Poles” and they were carefully separated from the influence of the Orthodox Church and non-Catholic neighbors.

The Polonization policy provided for the complete assimilation of the Belarusian and Ukrainian peoples until the loss of national identity and the destruction of culture. To this end, Belarusian and Ukrainian schools were closed everywhere, and Polish schools were founded instead, up to a complete ban on the use of their native language. By 1938, not a single Belarusian-language school remained on the territory of Western Belarus.

The Poles defined their attitude towards the inhabitants of Eastern Kresy as follows:

We wish one thing and insistently demand that this national minority think in Polish, give nothing in return and do nothing in a different direction.

In addition to political and cultural pressure, pressure was also exerted from the economic side: Belarusians and Little Russians were the poorest. The wages of the "kresovyak" workers were 2 or even 3 times lower than those of the Poles. Accordingly, the standard of living was much lower than that of the Poles. The Western Belarusian and Western Malorusian lands were an agrarian appendage of the Polish state. While active industrialization was taking place in the BSSR, primitive agrarian production dominated on the “sprouting chairs”. The land was in the hands of the landowners. Landlord farms accounted for 1% of the total number of farms, but 52% of the land was in their hands, and only 9% were in the hands of dwarf and small-land peasants (58.2% of all farms).

In order to colonize and finally assimilate the Western Belarusian lands, the Polish government launched a wide campaign to populate "Vskhodny Kresy" with siegemen - immigrants from ethnic Polish territories (mostly retired military men - participants in the Soviet-Polish war with their families). The settlers were given plots of land from 10 to 45 hectares free of charge or at reduced prices. The scale of colonization can be judged by the eviction of Poles from Western Belarus, which followed the Liberation Campaign of 1939. In 1940 alone, the NKVD evicted more than 50,000 osadniks to the deep regions of the USSR.

Warsaw's plans for colonization were impressive. In 1937, an employee of the Polish Ministry of Internal Affairs, Arnitsky, prepared a secret plan called "Prospects for Internal Colonization." According to this plan, 6 million Poles from the western regions were relocated to Kresy Vskhodnie. The percentage of the Polish population in certain areas of Western Belarus was to exceed 56.2%. So the Belarusian lands almost became the new America, where the role of the Indians was prepared for the indigenous Belarusian population.

Underground organizations that fought against the Poles were very active on the territory of Western Belarus. To combat resistance, the Polish administration founded a special camp for extrajudicial detention of political prisoners. It contained opponents of the ruling regime: communists, leaders of the Jewish, Ukrainian and Belarusian national movements, Polish political opponents of the government. At the same time, up to 300 people could be kept in the camp, and in just five years there were about 3,000 people there. The prisoners were subjected to torture and abuse - everything was aimed at breaking a person morally and physically.

In addition to the official “intimidation” of the prisoners (this was precisely the purpose of the harsh order and bullying: so that those who got into the camp once tried not to get there a second time), there were often “excesses” of the camp guards. The fact is that the policemen, who were sent to serve in the camp from all over Poland, perceived such work as exile and vented their anger at the prisoners, as evidenced by the many disciplinary punishments of the guards. Prisoners were starved, they were forbidden to turn during sleep, they were forced to run, they poured water on the floor so that it was impossible to lie down, they were subjected to an exhausting “exercises”, they were forbidden to talk, they were beaten ...

Such was the Polish "democracy" in action. At the same time, in Poland, unlike the USSR, the Belarusian people were in mortal danger: for several decades it was planned to assimilate them and erase all memory of them.

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