‘The Lithuanian Pole’ Michał Römer and the Formation of the Krajowość Idea
Aliaksandr Smalianchuk: The study of the idea of krajowość* and the activities of its proponents – the krajowcy – is, in essence, a discussion of the confrontation between tolerance and xenophobia, and between openness and ethnocentrism.
Literature as a Political Tool
Sergei Lebedev: Born as a mass phenomenon in the 19th century, when the Russian Empire was rapidly conquering the Caucasus and Central Asia, Russian literature bears the hallmarks of this conquest, serving as a chronicler and instrument of colonisation.
‘A Man of Phenomenal Intellectual Ability and Strong Ethical Principles’: January Uprising Insurgent Nikolai Witkowski in Siberian Exile.
Dzmitry Matwiejczyk: A significant part of the participants of the January Uprising were young people who were just starting to find their way in life.
Letters from Siberia on Birch Bark
Ērika Jaskólska Residents of Latvia deported to Siberia by the Soviets sent letters to their loved ones written on birch bark. In 2009, these letters were inscribed in the Latvian register of UNESCO’s Memory of the World programme. The collection of letters written by...
Hues of Sybir
Anna Pisula Motto: The only beautiful thing there in Kazakhstan was the tulips blooming on the steppes in early spring. After winter, the vast steppes, saturated with meltwater, turned green. As soon as the snow had melted – sometimes as early as late March – tulips...
The Belarusian Katyn list. What is it, and who might have been on it?
Maciej Wyrwa: To this day, we do not know where and how the victims of the Katyn massacre were executed in Belarus, nor where their bodies were hidden.
The small peoples of Siberia – revival and the struggle for survival
Ewa Nowicka-Rusek: Small, and sometimes very small, peoples living across the vast expanse of Siberia are struggling, with varying degrees of success, to survive—both as culturally distinct communities and in terms of maintaining their individual ethnic identities.
From ‘lost’ to ‘recovered’ territories. The resettlement of the Polish population from the Eastern Borderlands of the Second Polish Republic to the west between 1944 and 1946
Grzegorz Hryciuk: After the Tehran Conference and the establishment of the Polish Committee of National Liberation, the Soviet authorities started resettling Lithuanians, Belarusians and Ukrainians from areas situated west of the new Polish-Soviet border.
Freedom, bitterness, stagnation
The Soviet Union, attacked by Hitler’s coalition, became an area of real migration of peoples from the summer of 1941. Millions of refugees and evacuees moved chaotically from west to east and from north to south, including hundreds of thousands of Polish citizens… An interview about the turning point that took place in the summer of 1941 and the situation of those who partially regained their freedom but had to risk their lives in return with Prof. Albin Głowacki, one of the leading experts on the history of Poles and Polish citizens in the Soviet Union.