1. INTRODUCTION

The recent surge of interest in border issues in both the social sciences and the humanities is a natural response to the changing political, socio-economic and cultural realities of the post-Cold-War world. The collapse of the rigid international political and ideological boundaries established at the onset of the Cold War, the reunification of Germany, the break-up of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, the move toward deeper political and economic integration within the European Union, as well as the extension of its boundaries, intensifying economic and cultural globalization – all of these developments have heightened awareness of state borders and their functions, particularly in Europe, to a degree unparalleled since the geopolitical convulsions unleashed by the First and Second World Wars. This heightened interest in border regions has been accompanied by a fundamental shift in scholarly focus: while previously geographers and other social scientists dealt with the relationship between borders and cultural and physical geography, as well as border regimes and patterns of cross-border interaction, over the last decade there has been an increasing emphasis on the cultural and ideological aspects of borders and border zones and their reflection in the identities, attitudes and behavior of border residents.^[1]
The postmodern theoretical stance of much recent research on issues of identity in borderlands regions, which tends to downplay the significance of political borders and relegate identity to the realm of individual choice, nonetheless overestimates the freedom of the individual to overcome the ideological frames of reference imposed by the modern state and its territorially-defined institutions. As Wilson and Donnan note: “Lost in the crush of much contemporary social science is one simple fact – the new politics of identity is in large part determined by the old structure of the state.”^[2] Indeed, throughout much of the modern industrialized world, and even in its rural peripheries, the populations of previously relatively uniform ethnolinguistic territories that are divided by political borders are in many cases beginning to show signs of significant divergence in national, cultural and linguistic identities, as educational policies, mass media, and national ideologies focus border populations toward different national cultures and standard languages. At the same time, on the same side of the border, different sub-groups within the local population may respond differently to state-managed identity planning policies as a consequence of preexisting socio-cultural divisions, resulting in more complex ethnolinguistic patterns characterized by both convergent and divergent tendencies.
To elucidate some of the ways in which state borders may contribute to both convergent and divergent evolution in the ethnolinguistic characteristics and national identities of indigenous groups, in this article I will discuss the preliminary results of my research on the East Slavic-speaking communities of the contemporary Polish-Belarusian border region in the vicinity of Białystok, Poland and Hrodna, Belarus. This border region shares with many borderlands throughout the world the presence of an indigenous local population historically characterized by fluid and often indeterminate ethnic and national identities. Although united by a common language (Belarusian or transitional Belarusian-Ukrainian dialects), the native rural population on both sides of the post-WWII Polish-Belarusian border is quite heterogeneous in terms of its ethno-national affiliations. Historically, the primary focus of supra-local identity was religion, dividing the local population into divergent communities of faith and cultural tradition. In more recent times, traditional confessionally-based supra-local identities were revaluated in elite and subsequently in popular discourse as national or ethnic identities. Thus, the majority of Roman Catholic speakers of East Slavic dialects on both sides of the border identify themselves as Poles, while East Slavic speakers of Orthodox heritage are divided among those who identify themselves as Belarusians, Poles, Ukrainians, or even simply “Orthodox”. In addition to religion, other markers, such as language, local cultural traditions, socio-economic status and political orientation, have been deployed in various ways by local inhabitants to assert or contest distinct group or national identities.
This article is divided into four main sections. In section 2, by way of introduction, I will discuss the political and linguistic geography and demography of the Białystok and Hrodna regions. Next, in section 3, I will outline the major historical periods in the ethnolinguistic, social and political history of the region up to the late 1980s. In the fourth and final section, I will discuss contemporary trends in the border region on the basis of the results of recent sociological research by Polish and Belarusian scholars, as well as my own sociolinguistic and ethnographic fieldwork. I will focus in particular on the impact of recent efforts on the part of Belarusian activists to promote ethnic mobilization in the region, and the role of religion and language in the construction and maintenance of national identities. Finally, I will discuss the impact of national identity and language attitudes on language maintenance, linguistic innovation, and language shift among local rural populations, as reflected in the results of fieldwork conducted in several Belarusian-speaking villages in the Białystok and Hrodna regions between 1996 and 2000.

2. THE BORDER REGION TODAY: POLITICAL, CULTURAL AND LINGUISTIC GEOGRAPHY

The border region that is the focus of this study includes the territories lying between the Brzozówka and lower reaches of the Narew rivers in the Białystok region of Poland, and the Nioman and Ros’ rivers on the Belarusian side (a region that extends approximately 40 kilometers in both directions from the border). The region under investigation is approximately 90 kilometers in length, bounded on both sides of the border by the Augustowo forest in the north (along the Lithuanian border) and the Białowieża/Belaveža forest in the south. I will thus be focusing primarily on those regions that have been in the past, and are often still considered today, ethnolinguistically Belarusian and transitional Belarusian-Ukrainian, with a mixed Roman Catholic and Orthodox population.
According to the 1989 Soviet census, the population of the Hrodna voblasc’ was 1,164,000, of which 702,000 (60.3%) were self-declared Belarusians. The four border rajons that I will focus on in this presentation, Hrodna, Berastavica, Vawkavysk and Svislač, in 1989 had a combined population of 159,201 (excluding the city of Hrodna, with an additional 280,000 residents), of which 94,291 (59%) were Belarusians, 40,480 (25%) were Poles, and 19,370 (12%) were Russians.^[3] The three ethnic groups are not, however, equally distributed according to location. The Poles constitute a majority of the population in rural areas in the northern part of the Hrodna rajon, while the majority of Russians live in the city of Hrodna and other smaller towns, including Vawkavysk, Vjalikaja Berastavica and Svislač.^[4]
Polish census data for 1993 give the population of the Białystok voivodeship as 699,000. As part of the Polish administrative reforms of 1998-1999, the Białystok voivodeship was incorporated into the reconstituted Podlasie voivodeship, including, apart from the territory of the former Białystok voivodeship, territories that had formerly been part of the Łomża and Suwalki voivodeships (neither of which had been part of the historical Podlasie, before or after the Union of Lublin in 1569). The population of the new Podlasie voivodeship is 1,224,189.
Although Polish census data do not include data about language or national identity, it is possible to estimate the approximate numbers of Orthodox believers in the Białystok region, which in turn gives us a rough estimate of the number of people of Orthodox Belarusian (or Ukrainian) heritage. In accordance with the conventional association of Orthodoxy in the region with East Slavic ethnic origins, the number of people of Belarusian (or Ukrainian) heritage in the Białystok region has been estimated at between 250,000 to 340,000. It should be stressed, however, that these figures do not provide any indication as to the number of those who still speak East Slavic dialects, or how many consciously identify themselves as Belarusians or Ukrainians. In addition, it should be noted that Polish census data do not provide any indication of the numbers of Catholics in the region who still speak East Slavic (that is, Belarusian and transitional Belarusian-Ukrainian), rather than Polish dialects.
The Orthodox population on the Polish side of the border is not evenly distributed throughout the Białystok region, being concentrated in the eastern and southeastern gminas of the Sokółka, Białystok, Bielsk and Hajnówka powiats. The percentage of the Orthodox population ranges from more than 75% in the Hajnówka powiat to between 50 and 75% in the eastern gminas of the Białystok powiat, to between 25 and 50% in the eastern gminas of the Sokółka powiat. In the western portions of the former Białystok voivodeship, with the exception of the solidly Catholic northwest fringe along the Brzozówka river, the Orthodox population ranged from less than 10% to 25%.^[5]
As regards the linguistic geography of the border region, the entire eastern part of the Podlasie voivodeship was, at least until quite recently, overwhelmingly East Slavic in terms of the linguistic characteristics of the local rural dialects. At present, the Białystok region, rather like southeastern Lithuania and parts of northwestern Belarus, is an area where widespread bilingualism, as well as linguistic convergence, often complicates the delineation of clear linguistic boundaries. It is, however, largely due to political considerations that in such sources as the Belarusian Dialect Atlas (hereafter DABM), the dialects of Belarusian mysteriously disappear at the western border with Poland and the northern border with Lithuania (in contrast to the geographical distribution of Belarusian dialects shown in the maps compiled by Karski (1903, reproduced in DABM) and the Moscow Dialect Commission (1914, reproduced in DABM) earlier in the century).^[6] This “oversight” on the part of the compilers of the Belarusian Dialect Atlas has, fortunately, been at least partially corrected by a group of Polish dialectologists, who between 1980 and 1996 published six volumes of the Atlas of East Slavic Dialects of the Białystok Region.^[7] The authors of this atlas, on the basis of data collected mainly in the 1960s and early 1970s, were able to establish the westernmost limit of East Slavic dialects in the Białystok region at that time. Roughly speaking, the language border (as represented by communities in which at least the oldest members still spoke an East Slavic dialect) was found to run from the area east of the Augustów canal in the north, along the Brzozówka river down to the Supraśl river, then west of Białystok as far as the Narew. South of Białystok the Polish-East Slavic language border ran west of Bielsk Podlaski down to Siematycze.
By comparing the geographical distribution of dialectal features as shown in the Belarusian Dialect Atlas and the Atlas of East Slavic Dialects of the Białystok region, it is possible to reconstruct the original linguistic landscape of the contemporary border region. In terms of their basic linguistic characteristics, the East Slavic dialects of the Białystok region are clearly the western extension of the two main dialectal areas of southwestern Belarus: the southwestern Belarusian dialects per se, and the west Polesian Brest-Pinsk dialects, typologically closer to Ukrainian, separated by a narrow band of transitional southwest Belarusian-west Polesian dialects extending from the Belaveža forest to the vicinity of Białystok.
In this discussion, the linguistic term “Belarusian” will be applied to those typologically East Slavic dialects on both sides of the border which display “classical” Belarusian features, including (among others): so-called akanne/jakanne (the pronunciation of the low vowel [a] in place of unstressed /o/ and /e/), affrication of the stops /t/ and /d/ before the original front vowels /i/ and /e/ (known as cekanne and dzekanne), the dispalatalization of /r’/, the use of the demonstrative pronoun hety ‘this’, etc. The strong structural affinity between the East Slavic dialects on the two sides of the contemporary border is also supported by the linguistic characteristics of the Belarusian dialect texts collected in final decades of the 19th century in the Białystok and Hrodna regions by the Polish linguist, ethnographer and folklorist Michał Federowski.^[8]

3. POLITICAL, SOCIAL AND ETHNOLINGUISTIC HISTORY OF THE REGION

For most of their history, the western Hrodna and eastern Białystok regions have been part of a single political entity, whether the medieval Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the Lithuanian lands of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Prussia, the Russian Empire, or the interwar Polish Republic. Since the conclusion of the Second World War, however, the region has been divided politically, the western portions belonging to Poland, and the eastern part having been incorporated into the Soviet Union (and after 1991, the Republic of Belarus). In this section I will examine the political, social and ethnolinguistic history of the Polish-Belarusian borderlands to provide a perspective on the human landscape of the region as it appears today.

3.1 THE 11TH-16TH CENTURIES

The early ethnolinguistic history of the contemporary Polish-Belarusian border region remains to some extent a contentious issue among historians, linguists and archaeologists, the debate often reflecting certain national biases of the researchers. Polish archaeologists and historians (for example, Tyszkiewicz, Wiśniewski) maintain that in the 10th century, the entire southern part of the Białystok and Hrodna regions as far east as Navahrudak was settled by a Polish Mazovian population, mixed in some areas with relict Baltic populations, as well as East Slavic settlers (presumably the proto-Belarusian Dregovičy) in the eastern regions.^[9] In the north, Baltic tribes (Jatvingians in the west, and Lithuanians in the east) dominated the upper reaches of the Biebrza and the Nioman. Some scholars from the former Soviet Union (Sedov, Kuxarenko and others), on the other hand, have argued that most if not all of the contemporary Polish-Belarusian border region was occupied from the 10th to the 13th centuries by the Jatvingians, who thus formed a barrier between the East Slavs and the Mazovian West Slavic population (the so-called “greater Jatvingia” theory).^[10]While the border region as far east as Vawkavysk had been part of the realms of Mieszko I (from 980-990) and Bolesław Chrobry (to 1018), in the middle of the 11th century the entire territory was annexed by the Rus’ian principality of Volhynia. Beginning in this period, there commenced a wave of settlement from the Volhynian lands to the southeast. The early proto-Ukrainian presence in this southern region is reflected in the composition of the modern dialects of the southern Białystok and Brest region in Belarus, which are transitional to or typologically closer to Ukrainian than to Belarusian.
Under pressure from the Teutonic Knights, the Jatvingians began to move southward in the 13th century, eventually displacing much of the Mazovian and East Slavic population. Due to the repeated invasions of the region by the Teutonic Knights, East Slavs and Lithuanians in the 13th and 14th centuries, the Jatvingians were finally driven from the region, leaving it largely depopulated. This territory, much of it still covered by (or having subsequently reverted to) dense forests (puščy), was finally taken by the Grand Duchy of Lithuania from the Teutonic Knights after the battle of Grünwald in 1410. At this point there commenced a new wave of settlement from the east by speakers of southwestern Belarusian dialects of the Hrodna type, accompanied by smaller numbers of Lithuanian and Jatvingian speakers.
Thus, in spite of disagreements on the ethnolinguistic history of the region before the 14th century, most scholars agree that the modern cultural landscape of the contemporary Polish-Belarusian border region began to take shape only in the 14th-15th centuries. Along the western part of the Białystok region (from the Brzozówka in the north to the lower reaches of the Narew in the south) speakers of East Slavic dialects came into direct contact with speakers of Mazovian Polish dialects in approximately the 15th-16th centuries. Subsequently, areas of mixed East Slavic-Mazovian settlement arose as far west as Goniądz, Tykocin and Brańsk.^[11]
The religious division, with a majority of Catholics in the northern portions of the Białystok and Hrodna regions and a majority of Eastern Orthodox in the areas just to the south, is a reflection of the medieval boundary between the Catholic Vilnius diocese and the Orthodox Volhynian diocese. At the same time, some scholars have argued that this border coincides roughly with the 14th century frontier between areas with a majority Baltic (Lithuanian and Jatvingian) and a majority East Slavic population.^[12] The religious factor is important for reconstructing the ethnolinguistic history of the region, because it is known that when Jagiełło (Jogaila) of Lithuania adopted Catholicism in 1387, the remaining pagan areas, i.e. those inhabited primarily by Lithuanians and other Baltic-speaking groups such as Jatvingians, were converted with him, whereas the East Slavic speakers remained largely Orthodox. Safarewicz and Ochmański thus argue those Belarusian-speaking areas that were overwhelmingly Roman Catholic before the 17th century must have been originally Baltic-speaking. Since conversion from the Roman Catholic rite to the Uniate rite must have been very rare, these historians conclude that those Catholic populations that were formerly Uniate must have been originally East Slavic rather than Lithuanian. The logic of this argument is compelling; however, it must not be forgotten than Baltic speakers in ethnolinguistically mixed regions may have converted to Orthodoxy (and subsequently the Uniate church) as well.
On the basis of historical, ethnographic and onomastic data, scholars have concluded that the majority of Roman Catholic Belarusian speakers in the contemporary Białystok and western Hrodna regions are the descendents of Catholicized Belarusian Uniates, with an admixture of old Catholic Mazovian and Baltic speakers. The dominance of the ethnographically Belarusian element among the local Catholic population in the Białystok and western Hrodna regions is reflected, for example, in the prevalence of surnames typical of western Belarusian anthroponymy. Thus, among the indigenous Catholic population on the Polish side of the border we find such surnames as Sidorowicz, Makarewicz, Horosz, Arciuch, Ciereszko, Ostapowicz, Borysewicz, Andruszkiewicz, Woroniecki, Hakało, Zieziula, Gryc, Chociej, Bakun, Boboryko; while on the Belarusian side of the border, Catholic surnames include Arciux, Bazyl’čyk, Pakačajla, Tkačuk, Bajarčuk, Danilčuk, Pir’janovič, Zdanovič, Kupraščvič, Lewkevič, Siderkevič, Mickevič, Babrukevič, Sjamaška, Hnjazdzejka, etc. At the same time, a smaller portion of the population on both sides of the border bear surnames of clearly Baltic origin (e.g. on the Polish side: Szymkuć, Tulkis, Kiežel, Miksza, Rojsza, Dojna, Možejko, and on the Belarusian side: Vojšal’, Mikuc’, Mikaluc’, Pavilojc’, Mačel’, Źemla, Kirmel’, Mikšta, Borcis, etc). On both sides of the border, the percentage of etymologically Baltic surnames decreases significantly as one moves south from the Catholic and mixed Catholic-Orthodox areas in the vicinity of Sokółka and Hrodna to the predominantly Orthodox areas between Białystok and Vawkavysk.
In the first two centuries of Lithuanian rule in the region, the coexistence of the Catholic and Orthodox churches was quite stable. Significant for the future of the region, however, was the fact that the two faiths had come to be associated with two different politico-cultural formations, neither of which was unique to the territory of the Lithuanian state: Catholicism was ‘the Polish faith’, associated with the Kingdom of Poland whence it had come to Lithuania, while Orthodoxy was the “Rus’ian” faith, still strongly associated with the legacy of the former Kievan state. The general absence of any clear association between the “Polish” and “Rus’ian” religions and specific ethnolinguistic characteristics in the pre-modern era is strongly suggested by passages in the Lithuanian chronicles, for example, when we read that Vytautas, son of the Lithuanian prince Skirgaila, ‘became Rus’ian” (stal ruskim) (i.e. upon being christened in the Orthodox rite), but then converted to “the Polish faith”, i.e. Catholicism.^[13] The absence of a single traditional “Lithuanian” faith was to have a decisive impact upon the population of the Białystok and Hrodna regions in later centuries, when traditional links between state power and religion were deployed in the emerging discourses and practices of modern ethnolinguistic nationalism.

3.2. THE 16TH-18TH CENTURIES

After 1569, with the transfer of Podlasie (the westernmost part of the Białystok voivodeship) to the Polish Crown, East Slavic influence in that region was greatly reduced.^[14] On the other hand, most of the territory now occupied by Belarusian speakers in contemporary Poland (not counting the transitional Belarusian-Ukrainian dialects to the south, which also became part of the Polish Crown lands) remained part of the Troki voivodeship of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, where it remained until the Partitions in the late 18th century.^[15]
Over the course of the 17th and 18th centuries the Belarusian and Lithuanian-speaking magnates and gentry of the Grand Duchy gradually shifted to Polish, resulting by the 19th century in a situation where social stratification closely correlated with differences in language. Thus, by the end of the 18th century, a diglossic pattern of functional differentiation between Polish and Belarusian had emerged on the territory of the former Grand Duchy. Polish had taken the place of Latin (at least in non-liturgical functions) in the religious sphere, as well as assuming the cultural and official functions formerly fulfilled by the Old Belarusian chancellery language. For most of the population, Catholic, Uniate and Orthodox, the equation of language with social status had become quite straightforward: to speak Polish was to speak “like a gentleman” (pa-pansku), while to speak Belorussian was to speak “plain” (pa-prostu) or “like a peasant” (pa-mužycku). While the gentry was increasingly adopting a Polish or Lithuanian-Polish national consciousness, there is little indication that language was associated with any form of supra-local identity apart from class identity for most of the peasantry.
In the case of the peasants, whether Catholic, Uniate or Orthodox, it appears that there was little apart from religious life that separated them, particularly in religiously mixed villages. The poorer szlachta, who lived in conditions often no better than their peasant neighbors, often continued to speak Belarusian amongst themselves well into the 19th century, although they generally had a better knowledge of Polish than the peasants and used this criterion to distinguish their settlements (zaścianki) from neighboring “cjomnyja/ciemne” ‘dark, benighted’) peasant villages.

3.3. THE 19TH CENTURY TO WWI

Following the Third Partition of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1795, most of the Białystok and western Hrodna regions were annexed by Prussia, remaining under Prussian rule until 1807, when they were ceded to the Russian Empire. While the Tsarist authorities initially did little to counter Polish linguistic and cultural influence in the Belarusian lands, the anti-Russian uprisings in Poland and Lithuania of 1830 and 1863 led to increasingly draconian measures on the part of the authorities to Russify the annexed territories, the results of which were widely felt in the Białystok and Hrodna regions. In 1839 the Uniate Church (to which up to 80% of the Belarusian peasantry had belonged since the 17th century) was forcibly merged with the Russian Orthodox Church, and in 1840 Polish was replaced by Russian as the official language of the region. While previously official St. Petersburg had generally ignored the existence of the Belarusians as a distinct ethnic group, maintaining that the population of the so-called “Northwestern Territory” was predominantly Polish as a concession to the Polish-oriented elites of the region, it now maintained that the majority of the population were in fact Russian, albeit corrupted by insidious Polish Catholic influences. To strengthen the Russian cultural and linguistic presence in the region, Roman Catholic Belarusians were forcibly converted to Russian Orthodoxy and the use of both Polish and Belarusian in education and the cultural sphere was prohibited.
Russian policy in the region after 1863 was torn by contradictions; on the one hand, it was maintained that the local peasantry, both Catholic and Orthodox, was on the whole loyal to the Tsar, and thereby constituted a bulwark of the state; at the same time, the identification of “Catholic” with “Polish” meant that many Belarusian-speaking Catholic peasants were subjected to the same restrictions as Polish gentry (limitations on the purchase of land, etc.)^[16] The question of the use of Russian or even Belarusian in Catholic churches divided Russian officialdom: some supported the idea as the most effective means to bring about linguistic and cultural Russification among the Belarusian-speaking Catholics, with the ultimate goal of converting them to Orthodoxy. Others expressed the concern that replacing Polish with Russian would permit the formation of a sizeable Russian Catholic community, which would inevitably demand equal rights, thereby strengthening the position of Catholicism in Russia.^[17]
Through forced conversions and other forms of discrimination against Roman Catholics, the Tsarist authorities unwittingly furthered the identification of Catholicism with Polish national identity in the region, since at the time only the Polish national cause offered a clearly articulated defensive ideology in the face of the regime’s anti-Catholic policies. Indeed, one governer of the Vilna guberniia noted that “in general at the present time [1907] the term ‘Pole’ in Vilna province has lost its ethnographical character and has become almost exclusively a political term.”^[18] This development is reflected in the Belarusian Catholic poet Francišak Bahuševič’s 1891 poem “Chresbiny Maciuka” (Maciuk’s Christening), about attempts by Russian cossacks to force a Belarusian Catholic villager to convert to Orthodoxy:

“Da ty,” jon kaže mnie, “wiery jakoj?
Ci ty praslawny, ci ty palak?”
A dajciež panoczku, kažu, mnie pakoj.
Da jaž tutejszy, jaž kazaw tak!”...
Kaliž užo tak
Szto waspan bieszsia biaz-daj-pryczyny
To musić i prawda szto ja palak
I budu palak ja ad hetaj hadziny!”

(“So what’s your religion?” he says to me.
Are you Orthodox, or are you a Pole?”
I say, “Leave me in peace, sir.
“I’m a local, I already said so!...”
...But if your honor beats people for no reason
Then maybe I truly am a Pole
And will remain a Pole from this hour on!).^[19]

The growth of divergent national identities among the rural population of this region, in particular the gradual transformation of Belarusian-speaking peasants of the “Polish faith” into “Poles”, was thus indirectly a product of Tsarist Russian nationalities policies. While the Orthodox (including the formerly Uniate majority) were identified as Russians, at the local level this term continued to be associated primarily with confessional, rather than national identity.
At the level of everyday life, there was at this time little, apart from religious practices, that distinguished the Belarusian-speaking Catholic and Orthodox communities in the Białystok and Hrodna regions. The deeply-rooted traditional folk beliefs and pre-Christian rituals remained largely the same for the two groups. The principal differences were reflected in such areas as anthroponymy (the Catholics employing the Polish system of personal names, and the Orthodox that of the Russian Orthodox Church), in the languages of religious life (Latin and Polish vs. Church Slavonic and Russian), in differences in the dates of religious holidays, as well as differences in the significance of certain shared holidays and the existence of holidays not celebrated by both churches (for example, January 6 for the Orthodox was Vadoxryšča (the Christening), and for the Catholics Try karali (Three Kings). As noted by Grinblat, perhaps the only notable difference in material culture between Catholic and Orthodox Belarusian-speaking peasants was the fact that the former hung religious pictures in their houses on the walls, while the Orthodox hung icons in the corner.^[20]
Despite intensified Russification policies after 1863, the linguistic character of the region, particularly outside of the cities, remained largely the same. Native speakers of Russian, increasingly numerous by the beginning of the 20th century, were to be found primarily among military personnel, government officials, white-coller workers and professionals, Orthodox clergy, and some of the landowners who had been granted lands confiscated from Polish participants in the Uprising of 1863. Native Polish speakers were found primarily in the towns (mainly among the intelligentsia) and on the estates, among the Catholic clergy, and in some rural szlachta settlements. Nowhere in the area east of western Podlasie did speakers of Polish live in a compact mass in rural areas, except for the so-called “Wilno Island” (Wyspa wileńska) to the northeast of Vilna, itself considered by linguists to be largely the result of relatively recent (late 18th-19th century) language shift on the part of the originally Lithuanian- and Belarusian-speaking petty gentry and peasantry.^[21] Even in the towns, native Polish speakers were generally in the minority, since by the end of the 19th century, from 50 to 75% of the urban population were Jews, of whom most were bilingual or trilingual in Yiddish, Polish and/or Russian.
Prior to the middle of the 19th century, the Belarusian, Polish and Lithuanian-speaking inhabitants of the former Grand Duchy had been simply known as “Lithuanians” (“Litwini”), although this term was not used as a preferred self-designation by all of these groups.^[22] It was only in the second half of the 19th century, and particularly after 1863, that the term “Belarusian’ began to be applied, mainly by scholars and government officials, to the entire East Slavic-speaking population of the western part of the Belarusian speech territory, including the Białystok and Hrodna regions. By the end of the century, we find Polish scholars employing the same term, as seen in the title of Federowski’s collection of dialect texts from the Sokółka, Białystok, Hrodna and Vawkavysk areas: “Lud białoruski na Rusi Litewskiej” (The Belarusian people in Lithuanian Rus’).
The 1897 Russian census, which for the first time relied primarily on the criterion of language rather than religion or ethnic identity, was an important milestone in the construction of a specifically “Belarusian” linguistic identity. Although officially, Belarusian (“belorusskij jazyk”) was still regarded as a dialect (narečie) of a single Russian language, along with Great Russian (“velikorusskij jazyk”) and Little Russian (“malorusskij jazyk”), i.e. Ukrainian, the fact that the East Slavic dialects of the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania were assigned a distinct name was of considerable importance. Reliance on the linguistic criterion alone, however, produced results that from the standpoint of the present, strike one as curious, to say the least. Thus, we are informed that the Sokółka district near Białystok in fact had more Belarusians (more than 75%) than the Grodno district just to the east (with 50 to 75%), while there were less than 10% of Belarusians in the Brest and Kobryn regions to the south (where, in fact, the local dialects are indeed linguistically closer to Ukrainian).
The new ethnolinguistic meaning of the term “Belarusian,” cutting across confessional divisions, did not gain acceptance among the local population in the Białystok and Hrodna regions until well into the 20th century, if at all. In the late 19th century, the Belarusian-speaking peasantry had a clear idea of what they were not, but their own identities were fragmented along local, regional, social and confessional lines. In the many stories and anecdotes that deal with different ethnic groups that were collected by Federowski, a consistent distinction is made between the “mužyk” (‘peasant’) or “nasz czaławiek” (‘one of our people’), and the other social and ethnic groups inhabiting the region: “Mazuró/Mazuré” (Polish-speaking peasants, mainly from western Podlasie and eastern Mazovia), “szlachta” (petty gentry), “pany” (Polish-speaking landowners), “Paleszuki” (West Polesians, from the Brest region), “Maskale/kacapy/burlaki” (Russians, particularly Russian soldiers), Jews, Gypsies and Tatars. What is striking about the stereotypes and characterizations revealed in these texts is the fact that there is still no clearly articulated sense of a Polish nation that cuts across social or even dialectal distinctions. Indeed, although of the same social class and same religion, the Mazovian Polish-speaking “Mazury” were considered quite alien by the Belarusian-speaking Catholics. Referring to Mazovian population across the Brzozówka river, (part of the Kingdom of Poland from 1569 to 1795), a Catholic villager in the vicinity of Suchowola (north of Białystok) told Federowski: “Mazury, co za rékaju na Polszczy, czasto śmiejućsie z naszych ludzéj, co chodziać w kažuchu i świci i nazywajuć nas Rusínami, kapuśniákami, alé jeny samy nie lépszyje, bo na ích nie zabaczysz ínnaho adzienia jäk kupczo, a swahó nie wyrablajuć, bo ich kabiety hultajki... [the Mazury, who live across the river in Poland, often make fun of our people for wearing sheepskin coats and homespun cloth shirts, and call us Ruthenians, cabbage-eaters, but they themselves aren’t any better, because you never see anything but store-bought clothes on them, they don’t make their own, because their women are lazy]”.^[23] Another Catholic peasant in the vicinity of Mscibava, now on the Belarusian side of the border, showed a similar, if somewhat more charitable view of the “Mazury”, who by the logic of modern Polish nationalism, should have been considered “fellow Poles”: Mazuró to staránnyje ludzi i dóbryje katóliki, alé niczoho ni chítryje, bo kwóžnaho Mazurá naszo malóje dziciá abszukaje [the Mazury are conscientious people and good Catholics, but not very smart, because any child of ours could fool one of them].^[24] The distinction between “naš čalavek” and the Mazury was not only cultural and regional: the linguistic peculiarities of the Polish Mazovian dialect were clearly noted and formed the basis of a rich body of linguistic humor.
While standard Polish held considerable authority for the Belarusian-speaking Catholics as the language of religious life and high culture, it was viewed as inappropriate for a peasant to try to speak pa-pansku, at least as the language of everyday communication within the community. This perhaps explains why Federowski’s texts contain so many anecdotes which focus on the often comic attempts of the szlachta to speak Polish; since the petty szlachta were often materially no better off than their peasant neighbors, their efforts to speak pa-pansku at home were viewed as the epitome of pretentiousness. In time, however, the more well-to-do and better-educated peasantry in some areas began to follow the example of the szlachta, resulting in the emergence of Polish-speaking peasant households, particularly in the Vilnius region.
Although cultural and linguistic distinctions contributed to the perception of the Mazury as a separate ethnic group among Belarusian-speaking Catholics (not to mention the Orthodox population), even the less major linguistic differences between the East Slavic dialects of the Białystok and Hrodna regions became the basis of distinguishing between different groups. Thus, it is mistaken to claim that the Belarusian peasantry perceived its language (and variants thereof) only in class terms. Federowski’s dialect materials from the 1880s and 1890s indicate the wide range of local names for neighboring groups, suggesting that the linguistic divisions within the East Slavic dialects were often as salient as those between the dialects and Russian and Polish. Often, a single linguistic feature would become the basis for the definition of an out-group: those who pronounced the reflexive suffix as -sa rather than -s’a or s’e (primarily in the vicinity of Vawkavysk) were called by those to the north and northwest of them “sakaly”, “cakaly” or “Szkocie” (from the ethnicon Scot, evidently a legacy of the Scottish mercenaries who fought in the region during the wars of the mid-17th century) and regarded as a group as boorish and unrefined. The sakaly, in turn, referred to Belarusian speakers in the Hrodna and Sokołka regions as “Mazury” or “siekaly.”
Another East-Slavic speaking group clearly perceived by Belarusian-speaking villagers as different from “naš čalavek” were the Polesians or Palešuki from the Brest region, whose dialects are typologically closer to those of northwestern Ukraine. Federowski’s texts include numerous anecdotes about the alleged primitivism and stupidity of the Palešuki, often involving imitations of the Polesian dialect. The Polesians, in turn, referred to their Belarusian-speaking neighbors to the north as Lytvyny (“Lithuanians”) and no doubt had similar negative stereotypes about them.
Similarly, according to Kuraszkiewicz, villagers in the Bielsk region of Poland (who speak a Polesian dialect with dispalatalization before front vowels) referred to speakers with pronunciations of the type c’ep’er ‘now’, dz’e idz’eš ‘where are you going?’ (that is, with cekanne and dzekanne as in standard Belarusian) with the terms Litviny (‘Lithuanians’), c’epruk’i (lit. ‘those who say c’ep’er ‘now’ ‘instead of teper), and the variety they speak as litowski jazyk (‘the Lithuanian language’); the term they use for themselves is korol’owc’i (people of the Kingdom (of Poland), and for their dialect, po korol’owsku hovoryt’i ‘to speak in the Kingdom way’.^[25] These terms, it should be noted, reflect the earlier territorial divisions in the region: the dialects with cekanne and dzekanne for the most part were confined to the part of the Białystok region north of the river Narew which belonged Grand Duchy of Lithuania, while the areas south of the Narew had been incorporated into the Kingdom of Poland in 1569 .
Thus, we may suppose that the identity of the Belarusian-speaking peasant in the Białystok and western Hrodna regions at the turn of the 20th century had three dominant components, each with social as well as linguistic correlates: 1) membership in the local community (tutejšy ‘from hereabouts’, naš čalavek ‘one of our people’) as reflected in the observance of local speech norms (pa-svojmu ‘our way of speaking’, svaja havorka ‘our dialect’) and other local traditions; 2) membership in a specific social class (mužyk ‘peasant’, prosty čalavek ‘simple person’) with a specific class dialect (prostaja mova ‘simple language’, pa-prostu ‘the simple way of speaking’); 3) membership in a community of faith (pol’skaja vera/ruskaja vera ‘the Polish faith/Russian (Rus’ian) faith), associated with specific “High” languages of religious observance (Latin/Polish or Church Slavonic/Russian). The dominant ideologies of the 20th century, socialism and nationalism, would compete for the loyalties of the Belarusian peasant on the basis of these fundamental components of his identity, seeking to infuse them with new meaning based on the “imagined communities” of the international working class or the Polish, Russian, Belarusian or nations.
The First World War represents a major turning point in the development of the Białystok and Hrodna regions, and indeed for the entire Belarusian ethnolinguistic territory. In 1915, as part of the Tsarist government’s “scorched earth policy,” Russian officials organized the evacuation of a sizeable portion of the Orthodox population of the western Hrodna and Białystok regions, spreading rumors through Cossack detachments to the effect that the advancing Germans were slaughtering civilians. As a result, entire villages were depopulated and burned, particularly in the Bielsk and southeastern Białystok regions, as well as the Svislač and Vawkavysk regions in modern Belarus. Between 700,000 and 900,000 refugees from the Grodno gubernija, which included the Białystok region, the western part of the Hrodna region, and the Brest region of modern Belarus were loaded onto trains and wagons, and transported to central Belarus and as far east as Moscow and the Urals.^[26] Most of the local Catholic population, on the other hand, remained behind in their villages, witnessing and in some cases participating in the struggle for the restoration of the Polish state. Only in 1921 after the Treaty of Riga had been signed did the thousands of Orthodox refugees from the Białystok and Hrodna regions begin the long journey home. During the time they had spent in central Belarus and Russia, many of the villagers had been exposed to Bolshevik agitation, and in some cases, Belarusian nationalist ideas. Significantly, more than half of the 227 delegates at the Congress of Refugees from Belarus organized by the Bolsheviks in July 1918, were from the territory of the western Hrodna region, the Brest region and the Białystok region.^[27]

3.4. THE INTER-WAR PERIOD

In accordance with the provisions of the Treaty of Riga, the Białystok and Hrodna regions, along with the rest of western Belarus and the Vilnius region, became part of the Second Polish Republic, while the eastern half of modern Belarus, as the Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic, officially joined the Soviet Union in 1922. While the Polish authorities effectively put an end to Belarusian language education and Belarusian cultural autonomy in western Belarus by the mid 1920s, in the Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic the Belarusian language was elevated to the status of state language, and although Belarusian national life was increasingly subordinated to the interests and ideology of the Soviet state, the BSSR represented for nationally-conscious Belarusians in the Białystok and Hrodna regions a positive alternative to Polish rule.
It should be stressed that it was only in the inter-war period that the term “Belarusian” as a self-designation first became common in rural communities in the Białystok and Hrodna regions, being promoted primarily by political, rather than cultural institutions. Belarusian political and cultural aspirations were thus represented primarily by parties of the left: the Communist Party of Western Belarus (founded in 1923), an autonomous subunit of the Communist Party of Poland, and the Belarusian Peasants’ and Workers’ Union (Hramada). Thus, Belarusian activism in this region became from the beginning closely associated with left-wing political views. For politically non-committed Orthodox locals, “Belarusian” meant a “conspirator, oppositionist” and for Catholics and ethnic Poles, “Communist”.
In contrast to the Nowogródek and Wilno voivodeships, where Catholics played an important part in the leadership of the Belarusian national movement, the Belarusian-speaking Catholics of the eastern Białystok region and western Hrodna remained largely unaffected by Belarusian nationalist agitation. Thus, to a much greater degree than in eastern and central Belarus, in the western regions the Belarusian movement was primarily associated with the Orthodox population.
While the Belarusian-speaking Catholics of the region identified themselves (at least to outsiders) as Poles, the establishment of a Polish state did not, at least initially, result in their complete cultural and linguistic assimilation. Polish observers as late as the mid 1930s indicate that even in the western Sokółka region the predominant means of referring to the local people was still “one of our people” (naš čalavek) or simply “čalavek”, or “prosty čalavek”, as noted by Federowski in the same region in the 1880s and 1890s, and the older generation in the Sokółka region still referred to Polish as “pa-pansku” (the gentry’s way of speaking). Szyroki notes that in the Janów parish (north of Białystok) “everyday conversation still takes place mainly in Belarusian, or ‘po-prostemm; one rarely hears Polish, and even more rarely, correct Polish.^[28] And there is nothing surprising about this, inasmuch as the Janów parish is ethnically Belarusian (ludowo-białoruska) par excellence.”
The interwar period also witnessed the emergence (however tentative) of a new hybrid identity which would become far more significant in the Białystok region in the post-war period: that of Orthodox Pole. In 1935, a Movement of Orthodox Poles was founded (under the sponsorship of the Ministry of the Interior) in Białystok, its members made up primarily of local officials and intellectuals who had been educated in Polish institutions. Due to continued identification of Polishness with Catholicism, however, this movement failed to elicit much sympathy among Orthodox villagers. The majority of the rural Orthodox in the region continued to identify themselves as simply “tutejšyja”, “ruskija,” and among the politically active, Belarusians.

3.5. WORLD WAR II AND THE POSTWAR BORDER SETTLEMENT

Under the provisions of the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, the entire western portion of the Belarusian speech territory, including both the Białystok and Hrodna regions, was incorporated into the Soviet Union as part of the Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic. The new Polish-Soviet border thus corresponded roughly to the border between the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania before 1569, and to the western border of the Western Provinces with the Kingdom of Poland under Imperial Russia. The linguistic border between Polish and East Slavic dialects lay somewhat to the east, inasmuch as the western part of the former Podlasie voivodeship was solidly Polish-speaking. Before war broke out between Germany and the Soviet Union in 1941, elements of the Soviet system were imposed throughout the Białystok and Hrodna regions, including schools with Belarusian and Russian as the languages of instruction. This policy affected to an equal degree both Orthodox and Catholic communities.
During the Soviet and Nazi occupations of the territory in 1939-1944, as well as in the immediate postwar period, in general the Belarusian-speaking Catholics adopted the same political position as the Polish-speaking population of western Podlasia and eastern Mazovia.^[29] On the other hand, a portion of the local Orthodox population participated actively in the establishment of Soviet rule in the region, including repressions against local Polish officials, landowners and clergy. Following the outbreak of war with Nazi Germany, many of the same people joined the Soviet partisan movement.
The Soviet occupation and particularly WWII brought about a number of drastic demographic and social changes in the region. These changes included the near total annihilation of the primarily Yiddish-speaking Jewish population of the region, which before the war had comprised up to 60% of the population in cities such as Hrodna and Białystok, and up to 90% in some smaller towns, as well as the repression or forced emigration of Polish-speaking landowners, businesspeople, government officials, clergy and intelligentsia.
Following the expulsion of German forces from the region by Soviet troops in 1944, the Lublin government and the Soviet Union agreed on the Curzon line, as the future border between the USSR and Poland. Although the Curzon line purported to mark the “natural” ethnolinguistic division between Polish and East Slavic territories, in the Białystok region the allies made a significant deviation in Poland’s favor, giving her not only the city of Białystok, but also all of the predominantly Belarusian-speaking territory to the north and east of the city. The rationale for this revision was to provide Poland with more direct access to the Suwalki region to the north, and to provide Poland with a more satisfactory defensive line along the Svislač river and the western fringe of the Białowieża/Belaveža forest.^[30] The political preferences and ethnolinguistic characteristics of the local population in the proposed border region appear to have played little or no role in the decision.
The establishment of the new border was accompanied by the so-called “repatriation,” an exchange of population between Poland and the USSR, between November 1944 and November 1945. Although the resettlement was supposed to be voluntary, there were numerous incidents reported of Soviet representatives forcing the Orthodox inhabitants of the Michałowo, Gródek, Zabludów and other areas to sign up for “repatriation.” At the same time, many of those who were being recruited for resettlement were supposedly promised private farms in the BSSR or on the Volga.
In addition to coercion and cajolery on the part of the Soviet representatives, another factor that led many Orthodox inhabitants of the Białystok region to choose resettlement in the Soviet Union were the actions of the Polish anti-Communist underground, which terrorized the Orthodox population in some areas, accusing it of complicity in the Communist takeovers before and after the German occupation.^[31] Fortunately, due to the limited nature of Belarusian political and partisan activity, the local Orthodox population was spared the wholesale relocation experienced by the Ukrainian population of southeastern Poland in “Operation Wisła”.
In contrast to other population movements at the end of the war, the “repatriation” of populations across the new Polish-Belarusian border was a relatively small-scale operation. Vjaliki and Jazykovič cite the following figures: although 115,000 people in the Białystok region had been registered for “repatriation,” only 27,409 people were actually relocated to the BSSR, while from the Belarusian side, 148,724 were registered, of which 47,054 actually were resettled in Poland, 36,009 were refused resettlement, while 101,670 of those registered declined to leave.^[32]
The majority of those who ultimately opted for “repatriation” on both sides of the border appear to have been motivated primarily by ideological and political considerations, although economic factors also played a role in some cases. From the Belarusian side, the majority of those leaving were individuals with a strong attachment to the Polish national idea (which generally correlated with a better knowledge of Polish, and in many cases the use of Polish as the home language); others were motivated primarily by an aversion to Soviet rule. From the Polish side, in addition to those who had actively collaborated with the Soviet authorities in 1939-1941 and/or had supported the Soviet partisans, came landless agricultural laborers and other members of the rural poor. Only a part of those “repatriated” to the BSSR were primarily motivated by Belarusian nationalism.
In this period, the Polish authorities acted as if they expected the entire Belarusian/Orthodox population of the Białystok region to leave for the Soviet Union. Thus, in 1945-1946, efforts were made to “polonize” the local administration, and the Belarusian-language schools that had been set up in the eastern Białystok region in 1944 were liquidated. Only in 1949 were Belarusian schools and cultural organizations allowed to resume their activities.
In the first years after the war, the PPR experienced difficulty in recruiting members among the Catholics (both Belarusian and Polish-speaking) in the western and northern parts of the Białystok region; as a consequence, the authorities had to rely on the same elements in the region that had supported the Soviet partisans during the war: the Orthodox. In the heavily Orthodox southeastern parts of the Białystok region, party cells were established in Hajnówka, Bielsk Podlaski, Ciechanowicz, Gródek and other locations. Another unfortunate consequence of this was that up to 50% of the personnel of the security organs at the local level was made up of ethnic Belarusians.^[33]
In general, interethnic conflicts were more heated in those areas where the Catholic-Orthodox divide coincided with clear ethnolinguistic divisions, for example in the western and central Bielsk region south of Białystok, where Catholic Poles of Mazovian origin were interspersed with Orthodox East Slavs. In the region to the north of Białystok, where rural Catholic Poles and Orthodox both spoke Belarusian dialects, relations between the two groups were less tense.^[34]

3.6. FROM THE 1950S TO 1989

Despite the fact that, at least after 1947, Poland was firmly tied to the Soviet Bloc, the differences between the eastern Białystok region and the western Hrodna region grew more pronounced as time went on. The heavily guarded Polish-Soviet border was now virtually closed, and even cross-border contacts between relatives became extremely limited.
On the Belarusian side of the border, sovietization and immigration from other parts of the Soviet Union brought a number of profound changes in the local demographic and ethnolinguistic situation. Throughout the Hrodna region, there was a marked influx of Russian and Russian-speaking military personnel, Communist Party and government officials, educators and workers from other parts of the Soviet Union. As a reflection of Stalin’s distrust of cadres who had spent the war in occupied territory, after 1945 party and state functionaries of local origin in western Belarus were replaced by apparatchiki from the more Russified eastern regions of Belarus, as well as from Russia and eastern Ukraine. As Roman Szporluk has pointed out, from the very beginning there was evidently a conscious policy on the part of the Soviet authorities to expand the use of Russian in western Belarus, as reflected in the numbers of Russian-language newspapers published in the region in the immediate post-war period.^[35] This policy was, it would seem, based on an assessment of the strength of local nationalism, and also reflected the importance assigned by Soviet military planners to the western Belarusian region as a vital part of the Soviet Union’s new western border.
In keeping with Soviet precepts, all agriculture on the Belarusian side of the border was collectivized by the late 1940s, and formerly autonomous farming communities were gradually merged into larger collective and state farms. In these farms the daily lives of the peasants were controlled to a considerable degree by outsiders (that is, state-appointed farm administrators, agronomists and other personnel) who generally had no ties to the community and who for the most part did not speak the local dialect. In the Białystok region, as in the rest of postwar Poland, attempts to impose socialist models of agriculture were largely abandoned by the 1950s, the vast majority of peasants having retained or received private plots after the postwar land reform. As a result, the independent freeholder peasantry existed largely outside the framework of the state apparatus and indeed frequently perceived its role as one of opposition to it.
Despite some pronounced differences in land tenure and farming practices on the two sides of the border, both sides experienced a similar process of rural-urban migration beginning in the late 1950s. The regional urban centers, Białystok on the Polish side and Hrodna on the Belarusian side, attracted the lion’s share of migrants from the local Belarusian-speaking rural population, who in the urban environment tended to assimilate to the dominant language, whether Polish or Russian.
While Russian was taught as an obligatory subject in Polish schools in the Białystok region, on the Belarusian side of the border Polish was completely excluded from the sphere of education. In the Hrodna region, standard Belarusian was used as the language of instruction alongside Russian in rural schools, although the number of subjects taught primarily or exclusively in Russian increased significantly by the 1960s, and by the 1970s many rural schools had for all intents and purposes switched to Russian as the primary language of instruction. In Hrodna, Vawkavysk and other towns, the switch to Russian occurred much earlier; by the 1970s, there was not a single Belarusian-language school left in Hrodna, as in the other major cities in Belarus.
On the Polish side of the border, Belarusian-language schools were opened in the late 1940s in some predominantly Orthodox communities in the eastern part of the Białystok voivodeship, although in many of them Belarusian was in fact only taught as a subject. Obviously, no effort was made to provide Belarusian-language instruction for Catholic Belarusian speakers in the northern Białystok region, for whom, in any event, Polish was the preferred language of education.
Although the Belarusians in Poland were allowed a certain degree of cultural autonomy, particularly after 1956, as noted by Mironowicz: “[t]he Belarusians were a topic that was not discussed at the official level on the territory of the Białystok voivodeship. In accordance with the logic of the conception of one state-one nation, they simply did not exist.”^[36] Under the Gierek administration in the 1970s, as the regime sought to bolster its legitimacy by appealing to Polish nationalism, the conception of Poland as an ethnically homogeneous state was elevated to the status of official doctrine. Naturally, this policy strengthened the already formidable pressures for linguistic and cultural assimilation among Belarusian speakers, both Orthodox and Catholic, in the Białystok region. The postwar new intelligentsia from Belarusian-speaking Orthodox rural communities became Polonized quite rapidly, with only some exceptions. The local peasantry, on the other hand, remained deeply suspicious of government officials and institutions, but was on the whole politically unengaged.^[37]
On the Belarusian side of the border, although “Polish nationality” was officially recognized, as reflected in internal passports and censuses, this did not translate into any opportunities for organized Polish activity or for the cultivation of a distinctive Polish cultural and linguistic identity. To a considerable extent, the fact that most of the local Polish-speaking intelligentsia had been repressed, forced into emigration, or “repatriated” after the war meant that the majority of the population who identified themselves as Poles in the region were Belarusian-speaking Catholic peasants, among whom the modern ethnolinguistic definition of Polishness had as yet not been thoroughly assimilated. The degree to which knowledge of Polish has become restricted on the Belarusian side of the border is reflected in the results of a survey conducted in 1989, according to which only 3.8% of Belarusians in the Hrodna region claimed fluency in spoken Polish, 2.2% of Russians, and 36% of Poles.^[38] For comparison, on the Polish side, a survey of local residents showed that: 94.3% of Poles claimed fluency in spoken Polish.^[39] Unfortunately, the survey did not provide information on Belarusians’ knowledge of Polish; significantly, however, 24.8% of self-declared Belarusians in the Białystok region claimed to use Polish at home.^[40]
The post-war sociolinguistic situation in the Białystok region thus represents in a sense a continuation of processes that had been underway throughout the entire western part of the Belarusian ethnolinguistic territory during the inter-war period. Today, in those Belarusian-speaking communities in the Białystok region where Catholicism is the dominant religion, the shift toward Polish is virtually complete among the younger generations, while in predominantly Orthodox rural communities, particularly in the eastern part of the region, stable bilingualism is still often the norm. In the cities, however, such as Sokółka and Białystok, even the Orthodox show a strong tendency to shift to Polish. The general tendency toward language shift in urban areas has left an imprint on the speech of the urban population of the region, in particular the older, less educated segment.
The Solidarity movement in Poland proved to be an important impetus for the development of new forms of Belarusian cultural and political activity. The 1980s and early 1990s saw the emergence, alongside traditional institutions such as the Belarusian Social and Cultural Association and the Belarusian-language newspaper Niva, of new organizations that explicitly linked Belarusian and Orthodox cultural identity with political goals, including the Belarusian Democratic Alliance (Belaruskaje Demakratyčnaje Ab’jadnannie) and the Association of Belarusian Students (Belaruskaja Ab’jadnanne Studentaw (BAS)). The demands of these organization (mainly representation of Belarusian interests in local and national government and official recognition of the Belarusians in Poland as a national minority) led to a growing estrangement between Solidarity and its erstwhile allies in the Belarusian movement. After 1989, many Belarusians in the Białystok region began to see Solidarity as essentially a Polish nationalist and radically pro-Catholic and anti-Orthodox movement, while local representatives of Solidarity and other rightist parties became increasingly hostile toward the Belarusians, often accusing them of pro-Communist sympathies. At the same time, the more politically assertive Belarusians were regarded with suspicion by the more assimilation-minded portion of the Orthodox community.
The assimilationists, however, were beginning to find themselves in a difficult position, both with regard to changing local attitudes on the part of the more nationalistic elements within the local Polish community and with regard to the attitudes of the now more assertive pro-Belarusian groups. As the role of religion in public life grew over the course of the 1980s, the boundary separating the Catholics and Orthodox in the Białystok region grew more salient. For many Catholic Poles, the Orthodox (whether or not they regarded themselves as Belarusians) were not fully-fledged members of the Polish nation, since Polishness and Orthodoxy were considered incompatible, while from the Belarusian camp the “Orthodox Poles” now began to be regarded as “renegades” (a designation formerly used in Orthodox communities for those who had converted to Catholicism).