# There Is No Land for Us

- URL: https://syn.by/en/history/archives/no-land-for-us-2/
- Published: 1924-06-26T20:00:00+00:00
- Updated: 2026-11-11T01:50:21+00:00
- Section: Archives
- Language: en
- EN edition: https://syn.by/en/history/archives/no-land-for-us-2.md
- BE edition: https://syn.by/historya/arkhivy/dlia-nas-ziamli-niama.md
- RU edition: https://syn.by/ru/istoriya/arhivy/dlya-nas-zemli-net.md

> In the Sejm General Sikorski announced that Polish military settlers have a right to land, while Belarusians have nothing to wait for. The author sees in this not the arbitrariness of the administration but a carefully thought-out state system of oppression.

![](https://syn.by/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/illustration-5736-1024x585.webp)

General Sikorski, the most sincere friend and like-minded associate of Marshal Piłsudski and a semi-official representative of Polish democracy, "distinguished himself" while he was head of the Polish government in this way: from the Sejm rostrum he promised the Belarusians and Ukrainians to satisfy their just demands, and at that price bought the votes of the Belarusian and Ukrainian members of the Sejm; afterwards he did not even think of fulfilling his promise, and merely laughed at the trusting representatives of the Belarusian and Ukrainian population of the Polish state.

There is a very apt Russian folk proverb: "ложью весь свет пройдешь, да назад не воротишь" (with a lie you can go through the whole world, but you cannot come back). And now, when Gen. Sikorski has returned to power as Minister of War in the cabinet of Mr. Grabski, he no longer even tries to sing the old song about his "favour" or "justice" toward the Belarusian and Ukrainian peoples. And rightly so: a second time neither Belarusians nor Ukrainians will be taken in by "sweet words"! So Gen. Sikorski has cast off the mask, which he no longer needs in present conditions, and in his latest great speech in the Sejm, speaking about military settlement, he revealed his political face completely.

The general idea of Gen. Sikorski, which he expressed in defending the rightness of sending Polish settlers to us, comes down to this: Belarusians cannot even hope for land in the Polish Republic. The manor land in Western Belarus, which ought to be divided among the working people, is in Gen. Sikorski's opinion not Belarusian (for we have no Belarusian landowners!) but belongs to landowners of Polish and Muscovite nationality, so only Poles can have a right to it!

In short: the Belarusian peasant, who for ages has watered with his sweat the manor fields next to his village, has no right to that same land, because a Polish landowner sits on it, although by origin that landowner is mostly a Belarusian who has simply renounced his own people.

This savage position of the representative of the present Polish government, as the facts show, is shared by all members of Mr. Grabski's government and, what is worse, shows itself not only in words but in deeds. As Gen. Sikorski said in the aforementioned speech in the Sejm, of the total of 6704 military settlers granted land in the Belarusian and Ukrainian lands, local soldiers number only 1459, while 5245 were brought in from the depths of Poland.

Gen. Sikorski's declaration, which takes from landless and land-poor Belarusians even the hope that their just demand for land will be satisfied, is however nothing new or unexpected. It merely puts the dot on the i of the much-publicized statement of President Wojciechowski that only Poles are the "born masters" within the borders of the Polish Republic.

But Gen. Sikorski's declaration is truly historic, because it shows with complete clarity that the oppression of the "national minorities" in Poland is the result not merely of the arbitrariness of the borderland administration, as the English-style democrats, the deputies Niedziałkowski (of the P.P.S.) and Tugut (of the Wyzwolenie), hypocritically declared, but the result of a state system carefully thought out in all its details, sharply contradicting both the Polish constitution and the international treaties on the rights of Poland's "minorities".

In the history of the Russian state, with which our own history was bound for a century and a half, there was a moment very reminiscent of the present situation in Poland. On 17 October 1905 the revolutionary movement of the working masses of all nationalities of the Russian Empire wrested from Tsar Nicholas the Last a manifesto proclaiming to the people all political and civil liberties. But right up to the Revolution of 1917 the Russian authorities did not even think that this manifesto might bind anyone, above all themselves. And after the manifesto savage repressions, mass arrests and shootings rained down on the people; a terrible political reaction set in, which finally led to a new revolutionary explosion in 1917, an explosion extraordinarily bloody, which overturned the old order to its very foundations. Something very similar is happening in present-day Poland. For the land that is "in principle" (on paper!) given to the people, for the fulfilment of the proclaimed constitution and of the international treaties signed by Poland, for the realization of the right of enslaved peoples to self-determination, recognized by the whole world and by Poland herself, one must still wage here a stubborn, hard struggle. But the outcome of this struggle can be only one: the course of events in Russia in recent years points to it…