Historiography and New Sources about the Dissolution of the Communist Party of Western Belarus

Abstract

The article is aimed at studying the Belarusian historiography of the history of the dissolution of the Communist Party of Poland (СPP) and its constituent part of the Communist Party of Western Belarus (СPZB) in 1938 by a decision of the Executive Committee of the Comintern on suspicion of penetration of enemy agents. Based on a wide range of historiographical sources, including archival documents, taking into account the positions of Russian and Polish scholars, the author reveals the emergence and transformation of the approaches and evaluative judgments of BSSR historians on this topic, noting the conditionality of the formulations of the researchers of the 1930s – the first half of the 1950s official the Soviet version of the validity of the dissolution of the СPP and СPZB as Pilsudchik agents. The political rehabilitation of the checkpoint in 1956 helped to intensify the study of the history of the СPZB, but there was no significant expansion of the topic of dissolution either in 1960–1980 or during the period of the Republic of Belarus. At the same time, the organizational status of the communist organizations in Western Belarus in the 1930s was not investigated, and attempts were not made to systematically identify the contacts with the Polish police and the defensive. Identified archival documents of the СPZB and Polish state bodies, including the state police, testify to the unsatisfactory state of the communist organizations, low party discipline, as well as secret contacts of ordinary party members and leading workers with the defensive and the Polish police.

Keywords:

Тhe communist movement in Western Belarus, Dissolution of the Communist Party of Poland, historiography, sources