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Belarus Early Belorussian Nationalism
It was those memories that Kastus' Kalinowski (1838-64)
tried
to evoke in his clandestine newspaper Muzhytskaya
Prawda
(Peasants' Truth), which he published to inspire an
uprising in
solidarity with the Polish-Lithuanian insurrection against
Russia
in January 1863. The insurrection failed, and the Polish
territories and people were absorbed directly into the
Russian
Empire. Kalinowski, today considered the founding father
of
Belorussian nationalism, was hanged in Vilnius.
Despite the industrial development that took place in
Belorussia during the 1880s and 1890s, unemployment and
poverty
were widespread, giving impetus to large-scale migrations.
In the
fifty years leading up to the Bolshevik Revolution, almost
1.5
million persons emigrated from Belorussia to the United
States
and to Siberia.
Following the defeat of Russia in the Russo-Japanese
War and
the Revolution of 1905, strikes and peasant disorders
erupted
throughout the Russian Empire; to stem the unrest the tsar
granted, and then extended, civil liberties. Russian
authorities
were forced to relax their repressive policies on
non-Russian
ethnic groups, prompting a national and cultural flowering
in
Belorussia. The ban on the Belorussian language (and other
nonRussian languages) was lifted, although there were still
restrictions on its use; education was expanded, and
peasants
began to attend school for the first time; Belorussian
writers
published classics of modern Belorussian literature; and
the
weekly newspaper Nasha Niva (Our Cornfield),
published by
the Belorussian Socialist Party, lent the name
nashanivism
to this period (1906-18) of Belorussian history.
Data as of June 1995
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