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Belarus Belorussian Territory under Poland
Belorussian territory under Poland experienced its own
drama.
The new Polish state, where ethnic minorities, including
Belorussians, Ukrainians, Jews, and Germans, made up
one-third of
the country's population, began as a democracy. The
country's 3.5
million Belorussians were able to open their own primary
schools,
high schools, and teachers' colleges; the government
supported
cultural activities; and Belorussians elected three
senators and
eleven deputies to the Polish parliament, or Sejm, in
1922.
By 1924, however, Poland's policy toward ethnic
minorities
had changed drastically. Under the guise of combating
communism,
most Belorussian schools were closed, and publications in
the
Belorussian language were banned. The government
encouraged
ethnic Poles (see Glossary)
to settle in the Belorussian
region,
but at the same time it neglected the overall economic
development of the area. The Belorussian region became an
agricultural appendage to a more industrialized Poland,
and
unemployment and land hunger were widespread. Between 1925
and
1938, some 78,000 people emigrated from this part of
Poland in
search of work, mainly to France and Latin America.
In May 1926, war hero Marshal Józef Pilsudski
established an
authoritarian regime in Poland. The following year, when
the
Belorussian Peasant-and-Workers' Union spearheaded a
widespread
protest against the government's oppressive policies in
the
Belorussian region, the regime arrested and imprisoned the
union's activists. Further governmental policies toward
the socalled Eastern Territories (the official name for the
Belorussian
and Ukrainian regions) were aimed at imposing a Polish and
Roman
Catholic character on the region.
In 1935 Poland declared that it would no longer be
bound by
the League of Nations treaty on ethnic minorities, arguing
that
its own laws were adequate. That same year, many
Belorussians in
Poland who opposed the government's policies were placed
in a
concentration camp at Byaroza-Kartuzski (Bereza Kartuska,
in
Polish). The Belorussians lost their last seat in the
Polish Sejm
in the general elections of 1935, and the legislation that
guaranteed the right of minority communities to have their
own
schools was repealed in November 1938. The state then
involved
itself more deeply in religion by attempting to Polonize
the
Orthodox Church and subordinate it to the government.
Data as of June 1995
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