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“What schools? Forget about schools!” Audonin’s claims about education in Western Belarus don’t hold up to the facts
During the interwar period, Polish authorities destroyed almost all schools in the Eastern Borderlands, a BISR analyst claimed.
Belarusians from the Eastern Borderlands had no reason to like Polish rule, since it deprived them of education, said Aliaksei Audonin of the Belarusian Institute for Strategic Research. We put his historical knowledge to the test.
The subject of education in Western Belarus between 1922 and 1939 came up on September 16, 2025, in the program Azaronak. Napryamuyu (Azaronak. Directly). BISR analyst Aliaksei Audonin claimed that Polish authorities destroyed almost all the schools in those areas:
“What schools? Forget about schools! We already said there were no schools at all. In the Eastern Borderlands (Polish: Kresy Wschodnie), the entire school system was wiped out. Before 1922, there were about 450 schools there, if I recall correctly. Only around 40 remained. Why? The regime of Piłsudski (Józef Piłsudski, the first head of the Polish state reestablished in 1918 — editor's note) had no use for an educated population, and as a result my grandmother started working at age 7.
For Belarusians in Western Belarus at the time, getting an education was indeed difficult — but only when it came to schooling in their native language. Of the 37 Belarusian-language schools in the early 1920s, by 1939 only one lyceum and one gymnasium remained. But the claim that Belarusians were left without any education at all is false. In fact, the number of schools grew. The difference was that instruction was in Polish.
In the early 1920s, the Vilenskaye Vayevodstva (Vilnius Voivodeship) — which included towns such as Ashmyany, Vilieyka , and Maladzyechna— had 1,172 schools. By the late 1930s, that number had grown by another 277. During the same period, the number of schools also increased in the Navahrudskaye Vayevodstva (Navahrudak Voivodeship), rising from 881 to 1,227 by the end of the 1930s.
