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

Abstract

The article is aimed at studying the Belarusian historiography on the dissolution of the Communist Party of Poland and its constituent part — the Communist Party of Western Belarus in 1938 by a decision of the Executive Committee of the Comintern on suspicion of penetration of enemy agents. On the basis of a wide range of historiographical sources, including archival documents, the author reveals the emergence and transformation of the approaches and critical views of historians of the BSSR on this topic, taking into account the positions of Russian and Polish scholars and the determination of the judgments of the researchers of the 1930s — the first half of the 1950s by the official Soviet version of the validity of the dissolution of the communist parties of Poland and Western Belarus as agents of Piłsudski. The political rehabilitation of the Communist Party of Poland in 1956 contributed to the intensification of the study into the history of the Communist Party of Western Belarus, but there was no significant extension 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 has not been explored, and no attempts have been made to systematically identify the contacts with the Polish police and the Polish security service. The research identifies archival documents of the Communist Party of Western Belarus and Polish state bodies, including the state police, which 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 security service and the Polish police.