Belarus – David R Marples

The Soviet authorities targeted thousands of landowning Polish families, Polish state officials, and small and large businesspeople, as well as peasants, most of whom were sent to Siberia and Central Asia. The tension was very high as very often newly recruited members of the local NKVD were of Jewish origin, as they were better educated than Belarusian peasants.

Thus, in the eyes of many Poles, Jewish NKVD workers were the ones sending many Poles to death, which further fueled the hatred between different ethnic groups in the region and had consequences when the Holocaust unfolded on those territories. Hitler’s regime tended to instrumentalize the tensions among the ethnic groups on the occupied territories and used that for its benefit. Another important group of Jews—Jewish refugees—were coming to the now enlarged BSSR from Poland, occupied by the Nazi regimes. After Nazis established ghettos throughout Poland in 1939–1940, many Jews experienced an ongoing deterioration of the conditions and started to flee to the neighboring Soviet Union.

This is the main reason why estimates of the number of Jews killed during the Shoah in Belarus are questionable. The newcomers would bring terrifying stories to the Jews of the Soviet Belarus about the Nazis, but the Jews felt safe in the BSSR, thanks to Soviet propaganda. When Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union in Brest and other places from land and air on June 22, 1941, this news was a surprise for the Jewish population of Belarus.

Many of them refused to listen to the Jewish refugees from Poland that they were in danger and remained on the occupied territories. They could still remember the Germans’ behavior during the First World War. Those who were involved in the work of big factories and plants, as well as the Communist Party, were able to evacuate to Central Asia and deeper Russia and mostly survived.

In line with the evil irony of that time, many Jews who were serving prison terms in Soviet concentration camps in Siberia and Central Asia survived the war, thanks to the Soviet repression they had experienced before 1941. As the occupants were already experienced in organizing ghettos for the Jewish population in their occupied territories to the West from Belarus, the first Belarusian ghetto was quickly established in July 1941 in Minsk, according to that pattern. It was the fourth biggest ghetto on Nazi-occupied territory, after Warsaw, Lviv, and Łódź.

Other large Belarusian ghettos include Brest, Hrodna, Baranavičy, and Pinsk—all cities from the Western Belarusian territories, acquired by the Soviet Union in September 1939. The Nazis quickly established a network of bigger and smaller camps on the Belarusian territory, dispersing the atmosphere of total control and fear with the help of their Lithuanian, Latvian, Ukrainian, Hungarian, Russian, and Belarusian collaborators.

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You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data ISBN 978–0–19–777296–6 (pbk.) ISBN 978–0–19–777295–9 (hbk.) ISBN 978–0–19–777298–0 (epub.) DOI: 10.1093/wentk/9780197772959.001.0001 The manufacturer’s authorized representative in the EU for product safety is Oxford University Press España S.A. of Parque Empresarial San Fernando de Henares, Avenida de Castilla, 2 – 28830 Madrid (www.oup.es/en or [email protected]).

OUP España S.A. also acts as importer into Spain of products made by the manufacturer. 1kitap1.com/en 1. 2. CONTENTS PREFACE BY VERONICA LAPUTSKA PREFACE BY DAVID R. MARPLES ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Why Belarus? Why were the presidential elections of 2020 so different from previous ones? Who were the initial candidates and what happened to them?

What were the main features of Tsikhanouskaya’s campaign? Did Tsikhanouskaya win the 2020 election? Why did mass protests begin after August 9, 2020? Why did women play such a prominent role in the protests? What was the role of social media in the opposition campaign to the incumbent president? How did Belarus achieve the growth of the IT sector and what role did IT play in the 2020 revolution and subsequently? How did the Lukashenka regime survive?

What happened to Lukashenka’s opponents after 2020?

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