The results of the system of driving people out

Besides those Belarusian young people, more than a hundred students in all, who emigrated to Prague (Czech) because the doors of the Polish universities were closed to them, in recent years the Polish authorities have "driven out" of the country a whole series of Belarusian intellectuals. In Latvia there have settled: the outstanding cultural figure Ivan Kraskouski and the well-known national worker Andrei Yakubetski, both expelled by force from Poland. To Eastern Belarus a long line of our intellectuals has emigrated, beginning with the recently deceased Kuzma Tareshchanka, namely: the author of the Belarusian geography, Arkadz Smolich; the teacher of the Vilnia Belarusian Gymnasium, author of the history of Belarusian literature, the writer Maksim Haretski, deprived by the authorities of the right to teach; the journalist, writer and stage figure L. Rodzevich, tormented by constant police searches; the teacher of the Vilnia Belarusian Gymnasium Hienadz Bahdanovich, deprived of the right to teach at the Gymnasium as an "obcokrajowiec" (foreigner), although his own brother, Vyacheslau, is a Polish senator (!); Aliaksandar Karabach, formerly a member of the Belarusian National Committee, taken by force to Lithuania as one of 33; Yazep Lahinovich, editor of Belarusian newspapers that were constantly confiscated and closed by the authorities; Pavel Zhauryd — and an innumerable multitude of Belarusian teachers whom police persecution has "driven out" of their native villages.

According to reports that reach us from time to time from the East, all our emigrants have found there a broad field for cultural work, on a state scale. And the very fact of their presence in the Belarusian Socialist Soviet Republic awakens among the broad Belarusian masses a mood very unfavorable to Poland….