The Beginning of British Post-war Belarusian Studies

Abstract

The initial period of British Belarusian studies was significantly different from the process of formation of research on Belarus in the United States. There was no intervention of special services; the state and political establishment of the kingdom showed no interest in Belarusian issues. In such a situation, the first works on Belarusian history in the UK were prepared by representatives of the insignificant Belarusian emigrant diaspora. The inspirer and organizer, as well as the author of historical publications, was the president of the Belarusian Central Rada, appointed to this post at the end of 1943 by the Nazis in occupied Minsk, Radoslaw Ostrowski. Radoslaw Ostrowski’s collaborationist track record is considerable. This includes the creation of civil administration bodies in Minsk, Briansk, Smolensk, Mogilev; the formation of Belarusian military units to fight partisans; cooperation with the CIA in post-war Germany with projects to prepare an anti-Soviet underground in Belarus, and more. Ostrowski considered the “Bolshevik Moscow” to be the “mortal enemy” of Belarus, which, in his assessment, did not want to see the Belarusian people free at any time. That was the reason for an explicitly anti-Russian attitude in all the London publications prepared by Radoslaw Ostrowski and his son Viktor, who was arrested in the fall of 1939 in Vilnius by the NKVD and sentenced to 8 years of camps, joined the army of General Anders, which at the end of the war was transferred to England and demobilized here.

Keywords:

history of Belarus, British Belarusian studies, Belarusian post-war emigration