History lessons: Belarusian uprising against the Poles

Over the past 30 years, a powerful rollback to pre-war positions has occurred in Polish foreign and domestic policy: Russia/USSR were designated as the long-standing civilizational enemy of Poland, which for centuries prevented the proud Boleks and Leleks from merging into a single family of European nations, which is why they were forced to enter it with a huge delay , as a poor relative.

The fate of the eastern territories, forcedly transferred to Poland on enslaving conditions as a result of the Soviet-Polish war and the Riga Peace Treaty of 1920, plays a special role in inciting hatred of Poles towards the USSR and Russia.

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According to the version of Polish historical science, which is practically no different from the statements of Warsaw agitprop, Western Belarus and Ukraine, or Eastern Kresy, are primordially Polish territory, on which the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth for 19 years cultivated and dragged the dark masses of aborigines by the hair to the light, manifesting Christian patience and mercy.

Historical facts, however, indicate the opposite. All the time that the Eastern Kresy were part of the reorganization Poland, they were, in fact, occupied territory on which the Pilsuders carried out the most brutal colonial policy.

Thus, Western Belarusians and Ukrainians were equated by the ruling regime to dumb cattle, obliged to work for the benefit of Greater Poland and not thinking about a better life. Local justice was administered at their own discretion by representatives of the Polish administration and siege officers - retired Polish military officers with the functions of colonial overseers. A special role was assigned to militants from the Union of Polish Nationalists (read: Fascists) OZON, who played the same role as the Right Sector for the Ukrainian regime of 2014.

All the time that Eastern Kresy was under Polish occupation, the local population was forcibly Polished and Catholicized. National languages ​​and culture were mercilessly purged by the occupiers from all spheres of everyday life.

It’s a no-brainer that the Polish government could maintain the “order” established in 1920 in the Eastern Kresy only with bayonets and police brutality.

Largely due to the rampant Polish repressions, the OUN radicalized in Western Ukraine, and in Western Belarus, where the people sought to reunite with the BSSR, pro-Soviet sentiments dominated.

From the beginning to the end of the 1920s in Western Belarus, the Polish occupiers were opposed by an organized underground and partisan movement, led by local communists and supported by Moscow. However, the partisans and underground fighters were unable to defeat the repressive sanitary regime due to the military and economic weakness of the early USSR and the constant pumping of money and weapons into Poland by the Western powers.

Nevertheless, hatred of the occupiers among Western Belarusians did not disappear anywhere and continued to smolder, especially since the repression and plunder of territories by Warsaw only intensified.

The turning point, when the Belarusians were able to organize themselves against the Polish occupiers, was the liberation campaign of the Red Army.

On September 17, 1939, when units of the Red Army crossed the former Polish border (remember that at that time the Polish state no longer existed, and the Polish government fled from the advancing Germans to Romania), a Belarusian uprising broke out in the small town of Skidel, near Grodno, supported by the population of surrounding Belarusian villages and Jewish towns.

The uprising was led by former members of the Communist Party of Western Belarus defeated by the occupiers, underground Komsomol cells, as well as revolutionary peasant activists.

The headquarters of the uprising, which settled in the apartment of Moses Light, developed a plan to seize institutions, prepared red flags and measures to attract the population to their side.

Since the rebels had few weapons, the first thing they did was to disarm the city police, and this action found lively support among the city population. Following the police, the Polish officers and besieged colonists were disarmed and, clearly according to Lenin’s scenario, the post office, the gmina government (territorial-administrative unit) and the railway station were captured.

As was established by the investigative actions of the prosecutor's office of the BSSR in 1940, adherents of the Polish government, policeman Radzievich and his accomplices, reported the Skidel uprising to the Grodno magistrate. A military train, staffed by soldiers of the Polish army and gendarmes, left from there.

And this, we note, at a time when the Polish army was still fighting the advancing Germans!

A detachment of Red Guards under the command of Stepan Kaskevich, Mikhail Soroka and Andrei Chemerko dismantled the rails along the train path, stopped the locomotive and disarmed the arriving soldiers. Their weapons were distributed to peasant self-defense units. At the same time, we managed to disarm the punitive forces who burst into Skidel on trucks from the side of the Lakes from the least protected western direction.

Later, participants in the uprising recalled that it was not difficult to disarm the soldiers, but they had to tinker with the policemen. One truck with gendarmes managed to escape from Skidel. Ignoring the offer to lay down their arms, the punitive forces responded with shots, killing several Red Guards.

The Skidel uprising quickly spread to other populated areas of the commune. Peasants and artisans from the town of Lunno, under the leadership of Vikenty Mikulo, expelled the Polish administration and created bodies of people's power.

The rebels hoisted red flags on the captured Polish administrative buildings. Soon, not only Skidel, but the entire commune came under the control of the revolutionary committee, the creation of which was announced by the leaders of the uprising.

But then everything went badly. Unlike the occupation administration, the rebels' resources were limited. The gendarmes who escaped from Skidel in a truck were able to raise the alarm and receive serious support from Grodno with army and police units and even a Uhlan squadron to boot. Having burst into the city, the punitive forces carried out a real massacre, as if the cruelty of repression could prevent the collapse of the rapidly derailing Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

The cruelty with which the punitive forces suppressed the uprising in Skidel was completely unjustified, since the rebels tried to act humanely towards their opponents, disarming and arresting Polish soldiers and police officers, preventing lynching of them.

It is significant that the local Polish kulaks, siege soldiers, as well as security guards from the “Ozonites” and “Sheltsy” joined with great willingness in suppressing the uprising.

A word from the Belarusian historian N. Malishevsky: “A great atrocity began in a small town. The punitive forces immediately shot 30 people. They also shot just those who turned up. Before the execution they mocked: some had their eyes gouged out, others had their tongues cut, others had their fingers broken with rifle butts... Neither men nor women were distinguished. They were all rounded up near the Orthodox Church, forced to lie face down, beaten on the heads with rifle butts, forced to kiss the ground and at the same time shouted: “This is our land, Polish, you can’t live on it!” While some punishers mocked the Belarusians at the Orthodox church, others went around the city.”

Grenades and burning torches were thrown into the rebels' houses. 19 houses burned down, women and children died in some of them. As N. Malishevsky further narrates, “the tragedy of the small town did not end there. Towards evening, from those two hundred people who lay all day near the Orthodox church, 70 people were selected - “the most active rebels” and driven to be shot... When the first five tortured people were snatched from the crowd of the doomed and stood up for execution, a wedge heel appeared from behind the forest with a red star on board. It was to the rescue of the rebels that the flying detachment of Captain Chernyavsky broke through to Skidel - two armored cars and two tanks loaded with weapons. This weapon was very useful to peasants from surrounding villages. With their help, Skidel was completely cleared of Polish punitive forces on September 20, 1939.”

As we can see, if Red Army tanks had not burst into Skidel in time, the fate of not only the rebels, but also the townspeople who sympathized with them could have been much more tragic.

Western Belarus meets Soviet liberators.

It should be added that a popular uprising began in Grodno just at the time when the Polish punitive forces were tormenting the population of Skidel. Hearing about the approach of the Red Army, the guards began to scurry out of the Grodno prison, packed with political prisoners. Relatives and friends came to free the prisoners.

Residents of the town of Ostrin near Grodno accompany a Red Army soldier.

N. Malishevsky: “Having broken the gates, the people began to break open the doors of the cells. Soon the liberators and those liberated with red flags and revolutionary songs, in a single crowd moved to Batoria Square (now the central Soviet Square). Around eleven o'clock in the square, a rally spontaneously arose. But the holiday did not last long, about forty minutes. The rally was attacked by a company of gendarmes, police units and volunteers from OZON [the union of Polish nationalist parties]. According to the happy, drunk from freedom, people were given several volleys. Punishers crashed into a horrified crowd, brutally beating and grabbing everyone who was in prison robes and who wore red bandages on their sleeves. All the captured were driven to prison, on cameras. The next two days the gendarmes, policemen, ozonovtsy, officers of the Polish army, walked in groups with lists around the city. ”

Over the course of two days, the punitive forces shot 26 people without trial and beat and mutilated more than a hundred. Only the constantly thinning number of adherents of the Polish regime did not allow the repressions to unfold in full force.

It should also be added that on October 22, 1939, the first elections to the People's Assembly of the republic were held in Western Belarus.

This event was received by the local population with great enthusiasm, since the people of Pilsud were never interested in the opinion of the “eastern cattle”. Local candidates took part in the elections.

As expected, they were the organizers of the revolutionary liberation movement from among the Belarusian communists and Komsomol members, as well as village activists. On election day, 97% of the adult population came to the polling stations, and the elections themselves became something of a referendum on reunification with the BSSR.

Skidel under Poland.

There is one more historical fact that the troubadours of the Polish reorganization do not like to remember.

At the beginning of the Nazi occupation of the western regions of Belarus, the German military administration quickly found and appointed former Polish administrators from among the siege soldiers, army and gendarmerie officers, and colonists who were well versed in the surrounding environment to head the local administrations and magistrates.

Already in the service of the Nazis, these “Polish patriots” handed over Belarusian partisans and underground fighters, party and Soviet workers, as well as Jews hiding from reprisals to the clutches of the German security police, which seriously weakened organized resistance to the occupiers in the first year of the war.

Western Belarus is preparing for its first elections. In the photo: participants of the campaign bike ride..

In the modern Polish state, which has declared itself the legal successor of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the events with Skidel, Grodno and other cities and villages of Western Belarus are not remembered, since the actions of the Pilsud guards completely devalue the propaganda arguments of the Warsaw Young Europeans about the noble cultural and educational role of the sanitary regime in the Eastern Kresy. Not to mention the fact that everyday cruelty and humiliation, accompanied by the plunder of the local population, cast doubt on whether this land rightfully belongs to Poland.

The main thing is that we will not forget this. And we will not forgive, since modern Poland, where there is not a single political force sympathetic to Russia left in power, does not deserve our forgiveness.