Archive for the ‘belarus’ Category
Earlier this year there were reports that register offices and state archives in Belarus had started to take an uncooperative stance towards Belarusian citizens of Polish descent seeking to document their immediate ancestry. The number of applicants applying for documentary evidence of vital events – birth or baptism, marriage, death or burial – for their parents, grandparents and great grandparents had risen sharply. However, this was not due to a sudden interest in Polish family history in Belarus. Rather, acquiring such certificates proving Polish ancestry has the practical effect of enabling a Belarusian citizen to enter Poland without a visa, following a new law which took effect in Poland in March 2008.
Belarus under Lukashenko is sometimes described as the last Stalinist state in Eastern Europe. The general standard of living is low, unemployment high, and a number of basic freedoms taken for granted across the rest of Europe are denied. Movement across the border into Poland – a member state of the European Union and relatively affluent compared to Belarus – is therefore a potentially attractive option for Belarusians with Polish roots. Furthermore, the so-called Karta Polaka which is issued by Polish consular authorities to the Belarusian Poles entitles them not just to free movement into Poland but also the right to employment without a work permit and to receive some state benefits include schooling and emergency healthcare.
The Belarusian state regards the issuing of the Karta Polaka with suspicion and is attempting to stem the flow of its citizens into Poland by denying them the necessary civil registration or Roman Catholic parish register documents required to make the application to the Polish consular authorities.
Belarus is of course not the only state affected by the Polish state’s extension of certain privileges to ethnic Poles outside its borders. The same law applies to all citizens of the successor states to the former USSR. While this has limited applicability in, for example, Estonia, where there are few Poles, it has potentially significant repercussions to states on Poland’s eastern border (Lithuania and Ukraine as well as Belarus) and to those more remote former Soviet republics to which many victims of the periodic purges and repressions of the minority nationalities of the Soviet Union were deported (for example, Kazakhstan).
The Karta Polaka has excited much interest and there are reports of hundreds of thousands of applicants at Polish consulates in such places as Ivano-Frankivs’k, Luts’k, L’viv and Vinnytsia in Ukraine, as well as Grodno and Brest in Belarus.
As the Karta Polaka is only issued to citizens of the former Soviet states named in the Polish legislation, it is unlikely that access restrictions to family history records will extend to genealogists in the worldwide Polish diaspora. However, these recent developments are likely to fuel the general nervousness and suspiciousness of some civil servants – both registrars and archivists – in Belarus and we may find that the level of cooperation and speed of service is affected when undertaking genealogical research in Belarus.
The former Russian Empire gubernia or province of Volhynia, part of the region which Poles know as kresy, was divided at the Treaty of Riga in 1921. The western side was joined to newly re-independent Poland, while the eastern side became part of the Ukrainian SSR. Towns such as Lutsk and Rivno became officially Polish Łuck and Równe; Zwiahel and Żytomierz became formally Ukrainian Novohrad-Volynskyi and Zhytomyr. In the Imperial Russian era, Poles had made up a minority of the overall population across Volhynia but held disproportionate influence, usually forming the local elite in both town and country areas.
The situation on the ground was not so straightforward, however. Volhynia was an ethnically mixed region, home to Germans (for whom it was Wolhynien), Jews (who called it Vohlin in Yiddish), Poles (who called it Wołyń) and Ukrainians (Volyn), with a corresponding mix of religions. Even this does no justice to the granular complexity. For example, Roman Catholics, unless they were German, were usually regarded as Poles, even if they spoke only Ukrainian; but it was a moot point as to whether they were Poles who had lost their mother tongue over time, or Ukrainians whose ancestors had converted due to Polish landowner or clerical pressure. Moreover, while the population may not have been especially literate, many peasants and other villagers were bilingual.
Furthermore, there was little national consciousness. Just as in neighbouring Polissia immediately to the north, also split after WW1 between Poland and, in this case, the Belarusian SSR, the peasantry identified themselves primarily by their religion or by their social estate as peasants: many, when questioned by early Soviet ethnographers, stated that they were “locals” and spoke the “local” language.
Of course the Soviets, having gained formal control over Ukraine at the Treaty of Riga, sought to modernise and develop what was still a largely traditional society, religious, insular and self-sufficient. The Soviets wanted the backward periphery to acquire the new forward-looking Soviet consciousness. One way in which the USSR of the 1920s and early 1930s tried to achieve this was through recognising and encouraging national minorities. This involved tidying up the particularities of “local” cultures – for example, Poles had to be Poles and, if they were not sufficiently Polish, they must be polonised, meaning that Ukrainian-speaking Roman Catholics were classified as Poles and encouraged to learn proper Polish. Each national minority was acknowledged and appropriate local administrative structures were put in place to develop and of course to try to Sovietise each national group. Within Zhytomyr okrug, a special Marchlevsk Polish Autonomous Region (Marchlewszczyzna in Polish) was set up in 1925, centred around the Polish village of Dołbysz (re-named Marchlevsk after the Polish activist Marchlewski), during this phase of Soviet enthusiasm for the minorities. However, this was not to last.
The Soviets found that the local population in Marchlevsk and elsewhere in Volhynia was not compliant. The locals were averse to collectivisation, they failed to fulfil command economy quotas, they persisted in their old ways of life, preferring to remain upon their scattered homesteads and in their small hamlets rather than congregate in efficient centralised nuclear villages and towns. The experiment in encouraging national minorities backfired, not on the Soviets but on the minorities themselves. Increasingly they began to be seen as wreckers, saboteurs, conspirators, collaborators, spies; not good Soviet citizens but consciously or subconsciously working for capitalist Poland or Nazi Germany.
Volhynia didn’t really have any fat exploitative kulaks to purge but, nevertheless, in 1930 some 15,000 “kulaks” and “enemy Poles” were identified. In 1935 the Marchlevsk polraion was dismantled. Some 35,000 Poles were deported to eastern Ukraine, and 4,000 volunteer eastern Ukrainian families brought in to take their place. In the following year, 1936, there were mass summary deportations of approximately 70,000 Poles and Germans from Volhynia to Kazakhstan. In 1937/38 an estimated 56,000 Poles and German were arrested, charged and then imprisoned or deported.
The deportees became so-called special settlers in the remote semi-arid northern reaches of Kazakhstan. By 1945 the number of national minority special settlers in Kazakhstan had reached 900,000, including minorities from Karelia, the Caucasus and the Russian Far East as well as from the kresy. They were expected to cultivate the previously uncultivated steppe grazing lands of the Kazakh nomads (who themselves had been deprived of their traditional manner of life, forced into collectivised or urban existences). The new special settlements each comprised a founder population of 1,500 people, and initially were simply numbered rather than named. Later, the settlers named them, often reflecting their places of origin (such as Podilske or Volynka). The conditions imposed on the special settlements were not entirely punitive but there were restrictions upon travel and a requirement to register monthly with officers of the NKVD, the state apparatus which managed them. Special settlers were not in receipt of internal passports – from 1932, when they were re-introduced by the Soviets, until reforms in 1956 during the post-Stalin thaw, these were granted only to Soviet citizens in towns or working on state farms, not to peasants or collective farm workers.
The national minorities were encouraged to assimilate and to become Homo sovieticus. Mixed marriages were commonplace. Native language fluency diminished at the second or third generation. A new Soviet identity was forged. Today one must expect there to be a resurgence of interest in roots, in ancestry and in the historic homeland, among these peoples who were made to colonise Kazakhstan, just as, in an entirely different context, the growth of identity politics since the 1970s in the melting pot of USA has led to an increased desire to understand one’s family history and the specificity of its immigrant experience.
*This blog owes much to Kate Brown’s A Biography of No Place (Harvard University Press, 2004), to which the reader is referred for more on Marchlevsk Polish Autonomous Region and also on its German equivalent, the Pulin German Autonomous Region.
Who was recruited?
In the early 18th century, the expectation was that one man would be enlisted into the army from every 20 families within a community each year. All social estates, high and low, were liable for military service. However, over the decades many privileges and exemptions were granted so that by 1858 an estimated 20% of the otherwise eligible male population of the Empire was in fact exempt – this included landowners, members of merchant guilds, those with a higher education and the like, but also all those living in specific regions of empire such as Bessarabia. The burden of “other ranks” military service therefore fell heaviest on the peasantry and the urban poor.
How were recruits selected?
In rural Russia, the peasant community itself – the mir – was responsible for putting forward a list of candidates. While the mir or commune probably knew who among its members was eligible for the draft, the undertaking of the Russian censuses, producing the periodic but somewhat irregular revision lists (now of great value to family historians with roots in the former Russian Empire), formalised the process by identifying and recording the population. Unlike censuses in Britain, for example, which were used solely for social planning, the Russian revisions were used explicitly for taxation and conscription purposes.
Each year, the commune produced a shortlist of potential recruits which was then submitted to an army induction centre set up temporarily for the purpose in the nearest town in the volost or uezd (or district). The requisite number of men would then be conscripted into the army, while those not selected could expect to be put forward again the following year. Of course, some men were rejected by the army for not meeting its physical criteria and would unlikely to be conscripted in any year. Others, such as those with disabilities, were deselected by the commune itself and never made the list. To a certain extent, both the commune and the army were sensitive to the fact that each conscript was a lost worker and a lost taxpayer, with the peasants knowing that someone else would have to make up the deficit in labour and money. This meant that there was usually a conscious effort to spare only sons, or only working males in families. In a household of many brothers or sons, it was almost inevitable that one or more would be drafted. However, it was also possible for wealthier farmers to use influence or to purchase a surrogate from a different community to take the place of their brother or son who had been placed on the shortlist. Finally, commune members perceived to be unproductive, or exhibiting anti-social behaviour or committing petty crimes, would be sure to top the shortlist.
While therefore the commune exercised a measure of influence over who was recruited and who not, it is easy to see that the whole process of conscription was a source of stress and tension within each community. This was particularly the case as army service was neither short nor sweet…
How long did a soldier serve in the army?
- Before 1793, a soldier could expect to serve in the Russian army for life.
- From 1793, this was reduced to 25 years.
- From 1834, military service was reduced to 20 years.
- From 1874, the term of service was reduced to 18 years, of which initially the first 5 years were to be spent in the regular standing army and the subsequent 13 years in the reserves. However, later this was changed to 3 years in the army and 15 years in the reserves.
What happened to a new recruit?
Enlistment into the army was a transformational experience. Not only would the recruit very probably leave the vicinity of his native village for the first time but he would be unlikely to return for many years, if at all. Instead, he would be swallowed up into the army corpus, be billeted upon unwilling householders and endure all the hardships of army life which were severe even during peacetime.
However, something else rather peculiar immediately happened to a new recruit. His legal status in Russian society changed. That change was a form of emancipation, albeit deferred until such time as he was discharged from the army. Upon joining the army he ceased to be exposed to any of his former tax or labour obligations, whether to state, church or landowner. Effectively, he was now a free man, just a free man conscripted into the unfreedom of army life.
What about soldiers’ wives and children?
If a recruit was already married, with or without children, the usual scenario was long term separation. There was no easy mechanism for wives and children to go upon the strength, although some managed to continue to cohabit with their men when they were stationed in garrisons or fortresses. Instead, the recruit’s family was subject to great uncertainty and potential hardship. Wives, too, became legally free when the soldier attested. This meant also that they were entitled to an internal passport granting freedom of movement and employment. However, a disproportionate number of wives either drifted into prostitution in towns, or had illegitimate children; some remarried bigamously.
Soldiers’ children were a subcategory in the system of social estates. Sons, including until 1856 the illegitimate children of soldiers’ wives (where the soldier was not himself the father), were registered and expected to enter military service when they came of age.
In Imperial Russia, the status of women and children was determined by that of their husbands or fathers. This is why a soldier’s wife became free when he was recruited. However, this also meant that a soldier’s widow who remarried could become a serf or a peasant owing normal dues once again, and similarly a soldier’s daughter who married a serf lost her free status and became herself enserfed (until emancipation).
Unmarried recruits were of course strongly discouraged from marrying.
What happened to a soldier once discharged from the army?
If a soldier survived the hardships of a full term in the army, he would be discharged to enjoy for the first time and as best he could the freedoms he had acquired when he was recruited. Now he had theoretical freedom of movement; he was exempt from taxation; he did not have to labour for the landlord. However, at the same time he received only a small lump sum and had no immediate means of support. Therefore he was also free to become jobless and hungry and poor. In these circumstances, it was not unusual for a discharged soldier to have to live upon charity, or to become a hawker or a casual labourer, or to struggle to ply a trade. Other old soldiers entered state service as messengers or guards, or in the police or fire services. Additionally, until reforms in 1867, significant numbers of retired soldiers were settled in so-called veterans’ towns or on virgin lands owned or claimed by the state, often in frontier situations.
Others where they could returned to their native village to farm the family plot if it still existed, or to buy a new plot if they had the money. In fact, the 1867 returns henceforth required discharged soldiers to return to the community from which they had been recruited, at least partly to prevent the social problems associated with ex-soldiers which were a growing cause for concern in cities and towns.
A family historian in the English-speaking world searching speculatively for the marriage of an ancestor on an unknown date does not usually consider seasonality; that is, they have no preconceptions as to whether a wedding would or would not have taken place at any particular time of year. Furthermore, one rarely comes across any especially noticeable peaks or troughs in the frequency of marriages across the calendar year. Couples get married all year round, perhaps in the post-WW2 world showing a preference for summer weddings.
In contrast, in most rural societies across Eastern Europe before WW2 and certainly before WW1 when traditional ways of life were still very much intact, there was marked seasonality of marriage. This is reflected in the pages of any volume of a parish marriage register.
One of the two chief factors was the agricultural year. Throughout the growing season and especially during the harvest, farmers, smallholders and peasants were joined in the fields and in the processing of harvested crops by just about every available hand – villagers of both sexes and all ages would be involved and frequently laboured both long days and by moonlight. During this period, there was generally no time for marriage.
The second factor was the religious calendar. In particular, fasting created marriage seasonality. Especially in Eastern Orthodox communities, marriage was an occasion of extended feasting and therefore incompatible with the fasts, during which meat, dairy produce, rich oils and so on were eschewed. There are various individual feast days during the Orthodox calendar, upon which it would be unthinkable for a wedding to be celebrated. But more to the point there were two fasts of great length.
The first fast was the great or holy fast of the seven weeks of Lent. For instance, in the Serbian Orthodox calendar, traditionally the Church celebrated no marriages between Bele Poklade (a moveable feast, “white Shrovetide”, the last Sunday before Lent) and Đurđevdan (St George’s Day, 6th May).
The second fast took place over the 40 days leading up to Christmas. Again, for the Serbian Orthodox calendar, this is the Božićni Post period from 28th November up to Božić, the Orthodox Christmas itself, on 7th January.
Marriages therefore tended to cluster between these two extended feasts. Factoring in the principal months of agricultural activity, this produced a spate of weddings from mid-January to early March, and again from October to late November.
Of course, for other Orthodox societies, the harvest might move a few weeks according to latitude, altitude, climate and other factors. Similarly, fasting at Lent might well take place over fewer weeks. However, the pattern itself remains largely true and produces the same seasonal peaks in marriage.
Revision lists are the nearest Imperial Russian equivalent to the censuses conducted in places such as Canada, USA and Britain which are so familiar and indispensable to family historians in those regions. While those censuses were intended as a count of the population at a particular point in time and were conducted over a single night or weekend every 10 years, the Russian revision lists were generated for taxation purposes and were more irregular in frequency and duration, with each one tending to take up to a year or more to be completed.
The revision lists, also known as revision of souls, are extremely useful to those genealogists with ancestral roots in the Russian Empire, which of course covered great swathes of territory outside its current borders, for instance in the Baltic and in the modern states of Belarus and Ukraine. The term “revision” derives from the detailed comparison which is being made by the census-takers between the census being undertaken and its immediate predecessor.
Although revision lists evolved and therefore vary over time, essentially each revision list enumerates all residents (or at least all male residents) of a particular place. In the Baltic provinces, with the exception of land owned by church or state, most land was in the hands of a small number of the usually Baltic German elite. Their estates were divided into the demesne (the manor or farm – hof – and its surrounding estate lands) and the peasant farmsteads or smallholdings, all of which were named, and of which there could be a hundred or more on any one single estate. Agricultural labourers lived both on the estate lands and on the smallholdings of other peasants. Those smallholding peasants did not have an opportunity to own their farmsteads until this was made possible by the land reform measures implemented first in 1849 and then ratified in 1860 in Livland (Livonia) and in 1863 in Kurland (Courland). Thereafter, peasant ownership expanded rapidly until by the 1880s most smallholdings were owned by their occupiers.
What the revision lists provide, among other things, for the family historian is evidence of movement. This is because each revision records not just where an individual is resident at that time but also where he or she was resident at the time of the previous revision, if different. For example, the 1850 revision gives where a person was living in the 1833 revision. This of course makes it possible to track a person across time.
It is important to understand that migration in early and mid-19th century European Russia, for instance in the Baltic provinces, was generally local. Usually, we are not talking about emigration beyond Russia or beyond the province, but about small-scale movements of only 2 or 3 km in most cases.
Movement between estates was minimal. Those peasants making such movements were usually young men and women in their twenties getting married. Military conscripts were the only other major group of individuals who moved outside the estate.
Movements within an estate were common. Some smallholders moved to another farmstead, while many agricultural labourers were mobile, even moving annually between different farms on the estate.
A revision list such as the 9th revision in 1850 records departures and arrivals. For those individuals who were present at the time of the previous revision in 1833 and have left since, it records when they left and their destination. For those who were living elsewhere in 1833 and have since arrived, the place of origin is recorded. Just as the 1840 and 1850 American censuses, or the 1841 and 1851 English censuses, show only where individuals were living at those two dates, and are silent on any movements in between, so the 1833 and 1850 revision lists only plot where a person was at these two dates, not any interim places of residence. For instance, an agricultural labourer could quite conceivably have moved every year between the two revisions but will only be recorded on them at the two qualifying dates of 1833 and 1850. This also means that a person who is at the same place in 1833 and 1850 may of course have lived elsewhere in between but returned. The family historian must therefore accept that they are only being presented with snapshots in time and not with an unbroken seamless record of movement. Nevertheless, the significance of the revision lists cannot be under-estimated for those researchers investigating their ancestors and the structure and composition of family trees in the Russian Empire in the 19th century.
The situation of the peasantry in the 19th century Russian Empire is much more complex than generally thought, and a genealogist with ancestors in the territories of rural Russia should be aware of this complexity so as to better understand the likely circumstances under which their ancestors may have lived.
Firstly, it is not true to think of the peasantry as being a single undifferentiated mass, or to say that all peasants were serfs. The Russian Empire was expanding in all directions at the start of the 19th century. The Poles in the Partition were not enserfed when they came under Tsarist jurisdiction; nor were the Finns after 1809 or the Bessarabians after 1812. Furthermore, where serfdom had previously existed in the Baltic, it began to be modified, first in Livonia (or Livland – roughly the north of modern day Latvia and the south of Estonia), where there were reforms in 1804, and then in Estland (today’s northern Estonia) and Courland (or Kurland, western and southern Latvia) where there was landless emancipation of the serfs during the years 1816 to 1819. This introduces another point worth emphasising: emancipation did not necessarily lead to increased prosperity and, in fact, the opposite was true in these Baltic regions – the serfs were freed without being gifted or sold land and therefore became more destitute than they had been before the reforms.
Elsewhere in the empire, most minorities, such as the free agriculturalists, were not subject to serfdom, something that the Russian peasantry did not understand and which could cause resentment – why should German colonists, for example, be free when native Russians were not?
Secondly, there were different types of peasant in the lands of Imperial Russia.
There were state peasants, who were literally owned by the state and worked upon state lands. They were the responsibility of the Ministry of Finance and later, from 1837, the Ministry of State Properties. Although state peasants enjoyed some rights and freedoms (for example, they could acquire smallholdings of their own and even become civil servants), they had to pay taxes, maintain roads and supply recruits to the army. Moreover, the state was a largely indifferent owner and did not invest in its properties.
Then there were privately-owned serfs, who were the property of the landowning aristocracy and gentry. Absentee landowners often left an estate manager in charge, not infrequently to exploit the serfs on the estate. Some landowners permitted their serfs to remit in cash not labour dues – in other words, instead of working upon the landowner’s estate, they could leave the land and go to work in a town or city, and pay their owner in lieu. Of course, while some serfs made a substantial amount of money and were able to purchase their freedom, the majority remained upon the land in reduced circumstances.
The serfs in Russia were emancipated from 1861. Unlike in the Baltic region of the empire in 1816, the serfs were able to purchase their dwelling and land, so as to become independent smallholders. As redemption prices for the privilege of emancipation were way beyond the means of many serfs, the state lent them monies at 6% annual interest for up to 49 years, thereby creating a generation of peasants perpetually in arrears to the state.
Then there was the issue of military service. By 1815 the Russian Army was 1 million strong and the state, entering peacetime, was apprehensive of demobilisation and its impact upon communities across Russia and its potential for unrest. At this point, it needs to be explained what military service entailed. Men were recruited at aged 20 years for a period of 25 years (reduced to 15 years from 1834). Once enlisted, a serf became a free man in law; hence, once demobbed he would be his own man, with no immediate source of employment but with the experience of handling a weapon. To mitigate the risks that this entailed, the army found ways of making military service mean life service, not releasing men at the end of their term (for instance, by imposing extra service as a penalty for the many disciplinary offences).
Between 1815 and 1858, the state found an ingenious way of dealing with demobilisation and managing the risk to stable civilian life of releasing ex-soldiers into the community. So as not to demobilise troops, agricultural “military colonies” were established. Previously uninhabited state land was colonised by a mixture of soldiers and state-owned peasants commandeered from elsewhere. The soldiers retained the status of soldiers, although in their everyday lives they became agricultural labourers working for the state peasants. The army was therefore kept at full strength and made economically productive and self-supporting. Furthermore, the reserve army was strengthened because of the newly acquired status of the state peasants residing in these military colonies. The head of the household and the eldest son remained state peasants. However, younger sons were classed as military canonists (the term used for sons of soldiers during their minority) and joined the reserve at aged 18 years. It is estimated that by 1825 over 750,000 soldiers and families had been settled on these military colonies in areas such as Mogilev, Novgorod and St Petersburg, as well as in the southern region of Ukraine.
Much has been written about Jewish aversion to military service and, of course, the Jews shared the same reasons as the Russian peasantry for not being keen on being conscripted into the army, plus had plenty more valid religious reasons of their own. In fact, the Jewish population of the Russian Empire was not subject to military service until 1827. However, from then on, the state pursued a russification programme for the Jews and required them to be available for service from aged 12 years. Community elders had to select the recruits whenever demanded each year and of course this led to tension and frequent flight to evade the draft.
It is interesting to note that the infantry divisions of the Russian Army tended to be garrisoned around the periphery of the empire, especially in the west. While therefore there might be a solitary division in the Caucasus, or one in Orenburg towards the restless Kazakhstan, the vast majority were stationed in occupied Congress Poland and the westernmost gubernia of Russia (areas now in Belarus’ and Ukraine) where there was a perceived and sometimes a very real threat of politically or economically driven internal unrest.
Passports are conceived as facilitators of long-distance travel, to permit the bearer to cross international frontiers. For this reason, only a proportion of the population of most states applies for and possesses a passport: those who have no need to leave the country do not own one.
In Soviet Russia, however, these notions were turned upside down. Passports became mandatory but there was no freedom of international movement and only a tiny percentage of the civilian population ever went abroad.
Effectively, the passport was a misnomer. Really, it was an ID card to control the population, including and especially its movements.
In fact, the Soviets inherited the passport from Tsarist times but abandoned it during the first rush of idealistic reforms, regarding it as a mechanism of ancien régime despotism. However, as the new regime became embedded and found itself confronting no end of difficulties, it recognised the value of the internal passport. It was re-introduced in December 1932 at the time of the famine, with its associated massive displacement of desperate people. At the same time, the Soviets also introduced residence permits for the urban population, so as to control who could and could not reside in particular cities and towns. Both passports and residence permits were administered by the Soviet security police, at that time known as OGPU but later as the NKVD.
As well as the expected details of name, date and place of birth, residence and nationality (ethnicity), the passport also recorded the bearer’s social class. This enabled the Soviet state to manage a system of positive discrimination in favour of, for example, the urban proletariat, and to curtail the rights of a growing list of class enemies and “former people” (kulaks and the dekulakised, former landlords and merchants, NEPmen, nobles, priests, the old Tsarist bourgeoisie and its technical experts etc). The passport enabled the security police to implement internal deportation and exile.
Before the re-introduction of passports from 1932, the basic identity document was the simple spravka, which was issued by the local soviet. It should be borne in mind if using either a Soviet passport, or a residence permit, or a spravka in one’s family history research that the information contained may not be reliable, as these papers were not neutral documents and statements of fact but conferred or denied privilege. For some individuals, therefore, it was useful to alter or fabricate details, to get on in life or simply try to escape persecution and repression. Forging and falsifying documents was a thriving underground cottage industry in some places and times. All ID documents from Soviet times should therefore be treated with caution.
This need for the genealogist to exercise caution with regard to the reliability of official documents is not restricted to the former USSR, of course. For example, following the turmoil of WW2, many millions of people found themselves dislocated in Central Europe and with inadequate proofs of ID, or no ID at all, or with a compromised or an unfortunate ID which they destroyed. Documents were vital in the UN registration of Displaced Persons (which could lead either to repatriation or to settlement abroad) and many of these DPs acquired identification papers which did not truly reflect the holders’ real identities.
It would be naive to expect family history research in Russia, and many other places within the former Soviet Union, to follow the comparatively smooth path that it can take in most of the English-speaking world and in many countries in Western Europe. Even if the First World War, the ensuing Civil War and the Great Patriotic War (as the Second World War is known in Russia) are put to one side, millions were arrested, killed, internally deported, or incarcerated in the Gulag. For a great many others, the social revolution provided for a new, albeit still relative freedom of movement, and travel for education, employment and political career, often across great distances and what are today’s international borders, became commonplace.
The NKVD, a precursor of the KGB, disappeared many tens of thousands of Soviet citizens at Moscow’s Lubyanka prison. The victims were drawn in from all across the USSR and from all sections of society, from the poorest to the elite, from the apolitical to the committed Stalinist, and from the capital itself to the remotest corners of the Soviet empire. The photographer and collector of Soviet era visual art David King gathered mugshots of some 166 of these victims for publication in a volume called Ordinary Citizens: The Victims of Stalin (Francis Boutle, 2003). Apparently, King obtained the photographs from the NKVD’s interrogation files held by Russian human rights organisation Memorial, which documents the Soviet repressions across Russia and campaigns for official rehabilitation of the victims. It publishes regional and local memorial books and lists of the executed.
Among the haunting photographs in King’s selection are the following:
Fedor Andreevich Baikov – peasant, born 1861 in Moscow, executed 20 October 1930 on charges of anti-Soviet agitation
Pyotr Petrovich Dragachevatz (Dragačevac) – lithographer, born 1886 somewhere in what was later Yugoslavia, executed 19 April 1939 on charges of anti-Soviet espionage
Stefan Leonovich Geltman – collective farm technical manager, born 1886 in Zamość, Poland, executed 20 September 1937
Wolf Shmulievich Genpelman – Jewish apprentice locksmith, born 1914 in Dombrovitsy, near Rivne (Rovno), Volhynia, Ukraine, executed 1 November 1940 on charges of being counter-revolutionary
Yelena Ignatievna Oshmyago – railway guard, born 1911 in Sprugi, Belarus, executed 10 October 1939 on charges of railway sabotage
Dionis Petushkov – Russian Orthodox monk, born 1863 in Tver’, Russia, executed June 1931 on charges of anti-Soviet activities
Ruzya Iosifovna Todorskaya – technician, born 1900 in Łódź, Poland, executed 9 October 1937 as a Trotskyist
Up to six million civilians are thought to have been displaced within the Russian Empire between 1914 and 1917. Up to 30% of the inhabitants of Russian cities in wartime were refugees: places like Ekaterinoslav, Kharkiv, Kiev, Nizhny Novgorod, Pskov, Rostov and Samara, received tens of thousands of displaced persons. Refugees flooded into central, black earth and Volga basin gubernia, while many others crossed the Urals into Siberia, or found themselves deposited in Tashkent or elsewhere in Central Asia.
There were three broad types of refugee.
Firstly, there were refugees who fled the advancing German army as it threatened and occupied the Russian territory on which they lived.
Secondly, the Russian military authorities evacuated the population in the path of advancing German forces and as the Russian army was forced to retreat, usually operating a scorched earth policy to prevent resources (manpower, settlements, farms, crops) falling into enemy hands and transporting livestock and machinery behind their own lines to assist the war effort. This pattern also applied to Austro-Hungarian province of Galicia, which the Russian army occupied in 1914 but was then forced to withdraw from: Austrian subjects either fled or were evacuated to the Russian interior.
Given the rapid advance of the Germans through the lands of what are today Poland, Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia and western Ukraine, these first two types of refugee merge one into the other: if the population did not flee the Prussian military machine, they were evacuated by the Russians. Neither type can be said to have migrated voluntarily; both were displaced in response to irresistible forces. Nearly all found themselves with limited or no means of support by the time they arrived at their destinations in Russia.
As men of fighting age had often been conscripted into the Russian army already, the refugees of these two types were overwhelmingly the women, children and elderly.
The third type of refugee formed a tiny minority. This was the intelligentsia and bourgeoisie who were able to escape to the Russian interior in a more pre-planned way, making their own private transport arrangements and reaching the relative safety and comfort of a major city such as Moscow or St Petersburg. Even those who started out with money might find themselves in reduced circumstances as the war wore on for years without resolution.
Given their origin, most of the refugees were non-Russian. they were, for example, Jews (never trusted by the Russian army command), Latvians, Lithuanians, Poles and Ukrainians (not to mention German subjects of Russia, who were deported as soon as possible to the interior, often to Siberia or Central Asia, for reasons of national security). Where possible, the different peoples tended to form their own refugee communities in Russia and this was one of the various factors which crystallised national consciousness and precipitated demands for independence in their homelands in the wake of the War.
In all likelihood, any genealogist whose family history lies in the borderlands of the Russian Empire either occupied by the German army or regarded as a military zone by the Russian army during the years 1914 to 1917 is likely to find their family history research disrupted. Black holes in the documentary evidence are probable; family timelines will appear obscure. Births, marriages and deaths may not have taken place in the expected village or town of origin but somewhere along the long route that the refugees travelled into Russia, or at one or more of the places at which they were temporarily stationed or settled. In conditions of wartime poverty, hunger and disease, untold numbers of refugees died great distances from home and the family historian may never be able to identify when or where such deaths took place and were registered (if, indeed, they were registered at all). Instead, you will find no trace of a death which you know must have taken place, or of the birth or baptism of a child you know to have been born, in these years. The war was also a period of family rupture: even when a nuclear family unit did not become separated during the chaos, the more extended family is likely to have become dispersed to different locations and there cannot have been many families where one or men of fighting age were not conscripted and separated from the families for years.
So this is one of the frequent challenges of Eastern European family history research. You cannot apply without reservation what you know from your experience of undertaking genealogical research in Australia, or Canada, or New Zealand, or UK, or USA. You should expect discontinuities in the family timeline and gaps in the surviving documentary record. You may never know where key family members were at certain dates. But the challenges are one of the many reasons why family history research in Eastern Europe is so interesting and rewarding, as each breakthrough does not come with the relative ease and certainty with which you may be accustomed from undertaking your research in the English-speaking world.
In the Church of England, at least as practised in England, individual parish churches tend to be dedicated to a single saint or to the saints as a whole (All Saints). Many settlement names are also taken from the dedication of the church – St Albans, St Helens, St Ives etc – or use the dedication as a qualifier – think of Bury St Edmunds. Apostrophes have mostly disappeared over the years.
The practice of naming parish churches after individual saints is also common in Belarus, although some saints revered in the Orthodox Church are not familiar in the West, for example, Paraskevskaia (St Paraskeva) and Dmitrievskaia (St Demetrius).
However, many Orthodox churches in Belarus are dedicated to the feasts of the liturgical calendar, which is unusual in the Anglican Church. Here are some Orthodox Church dedications which are particularly common in Belarus, transliterated, together with their translations:
- Rozhdestvo-Bogoroditskaia / Nativity of the Virgin
- Krestovozdvizhenskaia / Exaltation of the Holy Cross
- Bogoiavlenskaia / Epiphany
- Blagoveshchenskaia / Annunciation
- Voskresenskaia / Resurrection
- Voznesenskaia / Ascension
- Preobrazhenskaia / Transfiguration
- Uspenskaia / Dormition
- Vvedenskaia / Presentation
The territory of Belarus has been ravaged by world war and civil war, and subjected to the militant atheism of the Soviet Union. Churches, town halls and archives have been among the victims. Notwithstanding this, baptism, marriage and burial registers do survive for many places in Belarus, although seldom do these surviving records form unbroken sequences. Many have gaps of years (sometimes many years), while others might have good stretches of marriage registers, for example, for a given period but no extant baptism registers of the same dates. Still, unless you search you will not find, so do not be needlessly discouraged from attempting family history research in Belarus. Bluebird Research has researchers on the ground who can assist and we welcome enquiries regarding genealogical research in Belarus.
Today, in the era of identity politics, it is expected of everyone that they possess a clear and unequivocal identity and in particular that they identify with a particular nation state, commonly the one in which they were born and/or live.
In some regions of Europe (and of course elsewhere), this is very much a modern phenomenon and a consequence of the nation-building projects of the 19th and 20th centuries. Particularly in the large and sprawling multi-ethnic empires that crumbled during WW1, less focused identities formerly existed.
For instance, in the Ottoman Empire and not just in its Anatolian heartland but also in so-called “Turkey in Europe”, religion rather than nationality or ethnicity was the defining feature. The Empire recognised its component regions, of course, but thought of the constituent populations as Muslim, Christian and Jewish, with Christian perhaps subdivided into Greek Orthodox, Armenian and so on. These religious communities were known as millets. As late as the 1920s, both the Greek and the Turkish states found that they had to impose national identities upon particular populations where they were lacking. For instance, Cappadocia was home to up to 100,000 Orthodox Christians. They were known as Karamanlides, but this did not denote ethnicity or race: it simply meant that they were Turkish-speaking and wrote in Turkish but using the Greek alphabet. Although loyal to Turkey, enjoying good relations with their Muslim neighbours, and not thinking of themselves as Greek, they were caught up in the great Greek-Turkish population exchange of 1923/24 following the Treaty of Lausanne. Removed from their centuries-old heartland in Anatolia, they became unwilling refugees in Greece, where they had to forge a new, national rather than religious, identity and learn a new language.
In what is today Belarus, too, national identities were far from fully formed even between the World Wars. In the years 1918-1924, when a massive repatriation programme was under way to return refugees and other displaced persons from Soviet Russia to their former places of origin in newly independent Eastern European successor states, many effectively Belarusian refugees entered their religion (Orthodox) in the box marked “nationality” on the registration forms: even Belarusian nationalists recognised that the people had little or no national consciousness.
Poland acquired extensive eastern marches following the collapse of Tsarist Russia and a war with the Bolsheviks. One of these new provinces, województwo Poleskie, was ethnically very mixed and had a particularly small Polish Roman Catholic minority population (14.5% according to the 1931 Polish census). As well as approximately 6.7% in Polesie who declared themselves explicitly to be Belarusian, no less than 62.4% (about 800,000 people) identified themselves as “locals” (tutejszy or tutejsi) and their language as “local”. This was a peasant people, speaking a mix of Belarusian and Russian with some Polish and Lithuanian elements; many were illiterate. Some became polonised before WW2 and the end of the Second Polish Republic, but most came to be regarded as Belarusians and found themselves living in the Belarusian SSR from the 1940s.
Before November 1918 you would not find Latvia in an atlas, for there was no such country. Pre-WW1 literature in English, following German usage, referred to Latvians as Letts or the Lettish (although strictly speaking this was a term for the native language). Latvia as a modern state was forged in the crucible of WW1, with the collapse of Empire, the October Revolution in Russia, and the victorious Allies’ partial and often expedient commitment to self-determination. The new nation state emerged from former Tsarist Russia, out of Courland, Livonia and part of the Vitebsk gubernia known as Latgale.
From July 1915 until the defeat of Germany, Latvia was under German occupation and, having fled or been evacuated with the retreating Russian army, up to one third of Latvians found themselves living in exile in Russia. Much of the momentum for independence built up among these Latvian refugees.
The right of return for former inhabitants was first extended under the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in February 1918. Perhaps 400,000 refugees were repatriated from Russia in the months up to November 1918: note that this figure includes Baltic Germans as well as ethnic Latvians. A further 225,000 or so were repatriated between 1920 (following the Latvian-Russian Refugee Re-evacuation Agreement in June of that year, and the Latvian-Soviet Russian Peace Treaty in August) and 1924. This total includes, as well as Latvian wartime refugees, significant numbers of Latvian agricultural colonists, an estimated 200,000 of whom had settled in southern Russia and Ukraine from the 1880s onwards. Notwithstanding this movement of people, 186,000 Latvians remained in Soviet Russia, while an estimated 60,000 left newly independent Latvia for Russia (both ethnic Russians and Latvian communists disappointed with so-called White Latvia).
The wartime and post-War displacement of large numbers of Latvians, and the complexity of this background of upheaval, can complicate family history, which is seldom a simple linear narrative at the best of times. It may begin to explain why your grandmother seems to have been living as a young girl in Omsk in Siberia around 1918/19 (she was a refugee there); or why a great grandfather, who was a city boy born in Rīga and a Latvian Riflemen veteran, became a small farmer in Latgale in the mid-1920s (he was awarded land there by the new state); or why your great great grandparents, who were clearly ethnic Latvians, appear to have been living in the region of Kharkiv, Ukraine at the close of the C19th (they were pioneering colonists in the 1880s).
These events also mean that you may need to think laterally when researching your Latvian family history. For instance, if your ancestors came from Latgale (say, from Daugavpils, Ludza or Rēzekne), it is quite possible that at least some of the records you will need to use when reconstructing your family tree will be found, not in Latvia, but in Belarus, in which Vitebsk is now situated.
Belarus is not an easy place in which to conduct family history research. For a start, its geographical location meant that it was fought over in both World Wars and many places where vital records were held – churches and chapels, synagogues, town halls and archives – were accidentally or deliberately destroyed during the conflicts. For instance, an estimated 80% of the buildings in the capital Minsk were destroyed during WW2. This means that for some localities the surviving documentary record begins in 1945; all earlier records may be lost.
Secondly, its territory has been much disputed and its current borders do not much resemble those of its inter-War predecessor the Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic: much of Belarus’s current western lands were part of Poland at that time. And before WW1, what is now Belarus was overlain with a number of the gubernias of Tsarist Russia. What this means is that surviving vital records for localities within modern Belarus may not be located within the country itself. Many records are to be found in Poland, especially Roman Catholic and Greek Catholic parish registers. Others are in Lithuania and, almost certainly, in Russia. As more archives are catalogued in detail, or existing catalogues published or translated, it is quite likely that new sources for Belarusian research will emerge over time.
The civil register offices in Belarus are known by the acronym ZAGS. This is where contemporary events of birth, marriage and death are registered and where post-WW1 registers are kept. These records are effectively closed to general research, although of course next of kin and attorneys will be granted copies of register entries upon application and submission of evidence of entitlement. In due course, the ZAGS registers are transferred to the National Historical Archives, where they are catalogued and made generally available on open access. However, a strict cut-off point does not appear to be operated. As some ZAGS offices possess records for the pre-WW1 period, sometimes even extending back into the late C19th, it is never entirely certain whether all surviving records within Belarus are already in the National Historical Archives or, alternatively, whether others remain at one or other of the ZAGs. The reverse is also true, in that birth, marriage and death registers from the 1920s, ‘30s and ‘40s, which one would expect to be held in the ZAGS and to be closed, are in fact already in the National Historical Archives.
Catalogues provide good visibility of the holdings in the National Historical Archives, which are situated in Minsk and Grodno. Study of these catalogues reinforces the point made earlier about the loss of records: where there are surviving registers for individual localities, these are invariably piecemeal due to loss or destruction at different times. It is impossible to generalise. Records for one Russian Orthodox parish locality, for example, may extend seemingly unbroken for 80 or 90 years, while for another locality nearby only a handful of years may be extant.
Bluebird Research has contacts on the ground in Belarus and will happily provide you with an opinion on the feasibility of and prospects for research. Please supply as much background information as you have, including place of birth or residence, ethnicity and faith.