Y. Karpenkina_Summary (Советизация еврейского населения Западной Белоруссии (1939-1941 гг.)), страница 3

Martin.23Moreover, this work refers to the field of regional history.24 By region I mean not a merelyadministrative territory but also a historical and cultural area. Overall, in my analysis I amengaging with the Borderland studies,25 as the observed territory has been passing from Poland toRussia (Soviet Union) and vice versa for centuries.20Sh. Fitzpatrick.

Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary life in Extraordinary Times. Soviet Russia in the 1930s (Oxford:Oxford University Press, 1999); М. Devid-Foks (editor). Amerikanskaya rusistika: vekhi istoriografii poslednikh let.Sovetskiy period (Samara: Samarskiy universitet, 2001); M. Edele. Stalinist Society: 1928-1953 (Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 2008); Kritika: Explorations in Russia and Eurasian History, No. 4, Vol.

18, 2017 etc.А. Lyudtke. “Chto takoe istoriya povsednevnosti? Eyo dostizheniya i perspektivy v Germanii” In Sotsialnayaistoriya. Ezhegodnik, 1998/1999 (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 1999), 71-100.21J. T. Gross. Revolution from Abroad: The Soviet Conquest of Poland’s Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia.(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002).2223T.

Martin. Affirmative action empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939 (Ithaca: CornellUniversity Press, 2001).C. Applegate. “A Europe of Region: Reflection on the Historiography of Sub-National Places in Modern Times” InAmerican Historical Review, No. 4, Vol. 104, 1999: 1157-1183; L. V. Repina. “Teoreticheskie osnovaniya iperspektivy regionalnoi istorii” In Prepodavatel XXI vek, No.

3, 2013: 266-273.2425K. Brown. A biography of no place: From ethnic borderland to Soviet heartland (Cambridge: Harvard UniversityPress, 2004); M. K. Kolesnikova, S. I. Malovichko. „Istoriya pogranichnykh oblastei (borderlands history) kak odnoiz napravlenii izucheniya regionalnoi istorii” In Otechestvennaya i zarubezhnaya istoriya: problemy, mneniya,podkhody (Pyatigorsk: Izdatelstvo Pyatigorskogo gosudarstvennogo lingvisticheskogo universiteta (PGLU), 2006), 71910The source database of current research is presented by materials from the archives of differentcountries.

I process the data that could be divided into two groups: 1) the Soviet governmentdocuments on the issue of Western Belorussia which helps me to analyze and reconstruct the“sovietizational” efforts of the authority; 2) memoirs and testimonies of the Poles, Belarussiansand - of course mostly - Jews who used to live in Western Belorussia and were witnesses of theevents happened between 1939 and 1941.During the archival research, documents of three levels of state and party bodies had beenexamined:1) supreme level - central archives such as the State Archive of Russian Federation (GARF)and the Russian State archive of social and political history (RGASPI).

This group of documentscontains regulatory acts and proceedings of All-Union level. It is essential to emphasize how thesematerials are mainly presented in the form of final decisions, while the data on the discussions ismostly absent. This feature to the different extend refers to all Supreme Soviet bodies duringStalinism.2) republican level – in local state archives such as the National Archive of the Republic ofBelarus (NARB). This group of documents is represented by the fond of the Central Committeeof the Communist Party of Belorussia, where all cases of general proceedings of the BSSRconcerning the position of Western Belorussia - from the particular reports of the People’sCommissariat for Internal Affairs to the acts of the local administration - are collected.3) local level – in regional Belarussian archives such as the State Archive of Grodno Region(GAGR) and Regional State Archives in Baranovichi (SGABar); and in RGASPI where all theprotocols of regional Party committee meetings in the BSSR are collected.

Together with materialsfrom other archives, regional documents are the significant addition to the picture of Sovietizationpolicy in Western Belorussia.11While studying the adoption of the Soviet policy from the perspective of local Jewishpopulation, I also employed some personal data such as published and unpublished writtenmemoires of the Jews of Western Belorussia and other sources of oral history – such as video- andaudio-interviews with them.

Most of these sources are collected in the library and archives ofUnited States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) as well as in the digital collections of theUSC Shoah Foundation. The verification of the content of the written memories and oral historywas done by comparing the data with each other and with the Soviet documents.Theses for the defense•The period between 1939 and 1941 in Western Belorussia was quite similar to the reformsof 1920-1930s in the USSR. For the Western Belorussian population, this period was revolutionaryexperienced as a social trauma.•Western Belorussian Jews welcomed the Red Army because this fact meant for them theestablishing of more advantageous national policy in comparison with the Polish one nor the Nazione. Thus, for a significant part of the local Jewish population the Soviet authority was not just theLevin’s “lesser evil”, but the government which had brought them equality against Anti-Semitism.•During the first months after the Red Army’s entry to Western Belorussia, the Jewishpopulation was the most active group cooperating with the new authority.•The Sovietization policy did not grant Western Belorussian Jews with any privileges.

So,the fact that some Jews had ranked high in local Soviet administration was determined by certainother circumstances such as the newly imposed restriction of the opportunities for Polish peopleto take part in self-administration and the inability of the Belorussian population to compete withthe Jews on the literacy level.12•Despite the fact that in the autumn 1939 many local Jews were ready to follow the newauthority, further failures of the Soviet administration in the socio-economic reforms led a greatpart of them to be disappointed by the Soviet rule.•Among the Eastern Polish Jews there were many persons who had been identified asenemies of the new regime - such as wealthy entrepreneurs, active members of the Jewish nationalorganizations, religious activists and refugees – and became the main subject of the Sovietrepressions in terms of arrests and deportations.•The Sovietization involved a massive attack to the traditional Jewish lifestyle.

This processwas an imminent circumstance of the Soviet national policy. Nevertheless, we cannot refer to anabsolute abolition of the Jewish traditional and religious culture by June 1941.•The Soviet propaganda of 1939-1941 - especially the ideas of internationalism - activelypromoted in the annexed region did not lead to the desirable effect on the local population. On thecontrary, the Soviet national policy had escalated a plethora of interethnic problems.The research approbationSelected parts of this research have been presented on 13 international conferences andworkshops in Moscow, Sant-Petersburg, Minsk, Jerusalem, Washington, and Paris.

Moreover, theabstract and analytical frameworks of this work have been discussed on the section meeting“National History” of the School of Historic Sciences of National Research University HigherSchool of Economics, held in September and December 2017 in Moscow.Particular sections of this work have been published in journals indexed in citation bases suchas Scopus, Web of Science, and the base of the State Commission for Academic Degrees. Someof my conference papers had been published in collections of conferences proceedings as well.2626The full list of my publication is on the last page of the current review.13The structure of the dissertation includes the introduction, four chapters, the conclusion,bibliography, the list of illustrations and figures.THE MAIN BODY OF THE THESISThe Introduction contains the following parts: the background information, the literaturesurvey, methodology and source database, theoretical significance, the problem statement and themain theses.Chapter 1 «The First reforms on the “Jewish street”» includes three paragraphs:§ 1.

Political integration of the Western Belorussian territories into the BSSRThis paragraph presents the first events and some main historical trends occurred in WesternBelorussia straight after the Red Army’s entry. In particular, the first reforms are reviewed suchas: the demarcation of the German-Soviet border, the establishment of transitional Sovietgovernment (Temporary government and the Soviet police unions or militsia), the organization ofthe referendum on the integration of these territories into the BSSR and the USSR. Whileemphasizing on the Jewish population, the goal of the first paragraph is to define the socio-politicalframeworks of the following 22 months.§ 2.

The Jewish population of Western Belorussia: demographic and social aspectsThis paragraph analyzes the position of the Jewish population of Western Belorussia. Hence,the conditions of these Jews are presented in the comparative perspective with their previous ethnicand social status in Poland. In my opinion, this approach helps to explain the Jewish politicalmoods and expectations in the autumn of 1939.14The second half of the paragraph reviews the position of the Jewish refugees in WesternBelorussia: their size, the conditions of those crossing the German-Soviet border, their lifeconditions in the BSSR and also their interrelation with local populations, especially with WesternBelorussian Jews.§ 3.