Challenges of the Belarusian Soviet Encyclopeadia

On Challenges Faced by the Editors of the Belarusian Soviet Encyclopeadia, 19 May 1970

In 1973, editors of the Belarusian Soviet Encyclopedia confronted political oversight, linguistic standardization, and the delicate task of defining Belarusian identity within all-Union ideological boundaries.

Original source: NARB (National’nyi arkhiv Respubliki Belarus’), f. 4p, op. 85, d. 2279, ll. 78-83.

Translated by Simon Young

CC CPB CENTRAL OFFICE
19 May 1970, 03342

To: Secretary of the CC CPB
Comrade S. A. Pilotovich

Since 1967, the staff of the Main Editorial Office for the Belorussian Soviet Encyclopaedia has been working on the publication of the republic's first universal national encyclopaedia. Many academic research institutes and individual departments of higher educational institutions, as well as a number of the republic’s museums and archives, have been drawn into this work. Around two thousand academics, cultural, literary and artistic figures, and Party and soviet workers are involved in preparing articles for the Encyclopaedia. A body of knowledge amassed through many years of work at academic research institutes, higher educational institutions, museums, archives, specialist organisations and other agencies, editorial offices, and publishing houses makes up the basis of the Encyclopaedia.

While working on the Encyclopaedia's articles, the research editors and writers of the BSE have had to consult a wide variety of sources containing the information they need and make use of works published in Belorussia as well as unpublished theses, archival documents, museum exhibits and so on.

However, during the preparations for the publication of the Belorussian Soviet Encyclopaedia, its writers and editors have encountered serious difficulties when covering a whole range of issues. These difficulties are the result of a dearth of research into many important lines of academic enquiry.

We are not only concerned, but also frequently perplexed by a situation in which entire fields of the republic's history, its Party history and publishing history, its literature and art, linguistic issues, its geography, and the economy of Belorussia turn out to have not been investigated. Passing over these unstudied issues in the Encyclopaedia means to knowingly diminish our history and our culture, yet waiting for these issues to be examined in our learned institutions would involve dragging out publication of the BSE over many years. Taking on the responsibility of researching these unstudied issues is something which the staff of the BSE's editorial branches, given our staffing levels and organisational structure, is incapable of.

Currently, material on the history of the Party-led patriotic resistance movement in Belorussia during the Great Patriotic War remains undeveloped. Because of this, articles on the Orsha, Osipovichi, Bobruisk, Brest and many other resistance organisations are missing from the first and second volumes of the BSE. Neither academic research institutes nor museums are in possession of comprehensive information on numerous participants in the Great October Socialist Revolution, Belorussian-born heroes of the Civil War, or recipients of the Order of the Red Banner, who should feature in the BSE according to our guidelines. No work has been done on the historiography of and source criticism relating to Belorussia (there is not a single piece of research available), while the history of collectivisation and industrialisation in the BSSR remains poorly studied. Due to a lack of research, it may not be possible to include a large number of articles on the feudal period, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and the evolution of capitalism in Belorussia in the Encyclopaedia. Sections on the cities and towns of the BSSR are especially concerning. The BSE should contain 203 such articles. Yet we have published material available on just nine Belorussian cities. In the postwar period, only one monograph has been published in our republic about Belorussian material culture, while hundreds of articles on this subject have been planned for inclusion in the BSE. Evidently, under such circumstances many pieces on the material culture of the Belorussian nation will have to be excised from the dictionaries of the Encyclopaedia. And this will cause serious damage, in scholarly and political terms, to our publication.

Serious gaps have been uncovered in the information available on Belorussians living in foreign countries. When writing historical overviews of foreign countries, it is both crucial and necessary to provide information about the Belorussians living in this or that country (their number; the history of their emigration; their living conditions and places of residence; their social position; the existence of national organisations, print publications and so forth). Unfortunately, in our republic, no one is studying these questions in a systematic manner. The BSE Main Editorial Office is forced to make do with sporadic, often contradictory information available from the Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries, or materials that appear in the periodical press.

Many issues and facts concerning the history of Belorussian literature have not been studied. The so-called Nasha Niva period (1906-1915) might serve as an effective illustration of this. The published material discussing this period is full of contradictions and inaccuracies. The printed publications that are available provide no biographical information on the numerous representatives of progressive literature who lived at that time.

The collections Belorussian Prose Before October (1965) and Belorussian Poetry Before October (1967) do provide some biographical information about the writers under discussion, but unfortunately, it does not meet the Encyclopaedia's requirements, and in a number of cases is inaccurate. The number of research monographs focusing on specific literary landmarks and the activities and oeuvre of Belorussian writers across all periods is severely limited. We do not have any in-depth studies of the connections between Belorussian literature and that of the fraternal peoples or foreign countries.

The BSE editorial section for art and architecture has encountered significant difficulties. It does not possess any statistical data (annals; collections; reference works) on any aspect of the arts in Belorussia. The history of pre-Revolutionary Belorussian theatre (minstrels; school and folk drama; serf theatre; the theatre scene in the second half of the 19th century and early 20th century), Soviet theatre (regional theatre; amateur art), and stage art before October 1917 have yet to become subject of serious examination. There has been no in-depth research into the history of Belorussian theatre life or theatre criticism, nor into the history of the Belorussian circus and variety entertainment. We have no publications on pre-Revolutionary choreography. No one has conducted research into Belorussian folk dancing. In the field of architecture, detailed academic studies providing classifications of buildings and structures (architecture during serfdom; Belorussian dwelling, etc.) do not exist. Pre-Revolutionary visual arts have been insufficiently studied. The single work on this subject, by M. S. Katser, has proved to contain a large number of factual and theoretical mistakes. With the exception of work on ceramics, ornaments and traditional decorative sashes made in Slutsk, the evolution of decorative and applied arts and traditional craftsmanship in Belorussia has yet to be researched. We have no surveys on the development of individual branches of fine art (portraits, landscapes, still-life paintings and so on). Not a single major work has been published that explores developments in pre-Revolutionary or Soviet Belorussian graphic art. On the subject of music, we have no books that shed light on the musical life of Belorussian cities either before the Revolution or in our time, nor any histories documenting how our folk songs were collected. We have no serious analyses of Belorussian composers or major historical survey of Soviet Belorussian music.

Our inventory of available literature and specialist research (in the form of scholarly dissertations) on public education in Belorussia both before and after the Revolution is meagre. Published material on this subject tends to be in the form of overviews and essays and does not contain the kind of information which ought to be included in the articles for an encyclopaedia.

Many issues concerning the press in Belorussia are understudied, especially with regard to the period before the Revolution. The political orientation of many pre-Revolutionary periodicals, which are due to be the subject of BSE articles, has yet to be clarified or studied.

The history of science and technology in Belorussia, including scientific and technological development under Soviet power, is not currently the subject of research in any of the republic's academic institutions. This kind of material is required in order to write a wide range of articles for the BSE. It will be particularly important in producing the Encyclopaedia's 12th volume, which is dedicated to the Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic.

One of the major difficulties encountered in the work of the editorial section for science and technology is the underdeveloped nature of specialised terminology and the standardisation of terminology in Belorussian. The editorial section for geography has also faced the same issue. It has come to light that the matter of translating and transcribing the geographical names of places in the USSR and foreign countries into Belorussian has been completely overlooked. Before work began on the BSE, the vast majority of geographical names had never been written in Belorussian. For the Encyclopaedia, around 100,000 geographical names will need to be transcribed into Belorussian for the first time. A Belorussian-language dictionary of the population centres, lakes, rivers, and marshes located in the republic is yet to be published. There are also no large-scale maps available in the Belorussian language which could be used to determine the correct spelling of the indicated geographical objects.

A significant impediment when writing articles on the geographical features of Belorussia is the fact that many of them have not been studied. For instance, out of 480 Belorussian lakes for which articles are meant to be written as part of the BSE, approximately 330 have not been surveyed (there is no data on their depth, water volume, main types of fauna, etc.).

In view of the above, the Main Editorial Office for the Belorussian Soviet Encyclopaedia requests that the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Belorussia draws the attention of the appropriate academic institutions and organisations to the necessity of work on those issues whose investigation will, to a significant degree, determine the successful creation of the Belorussian Soviet Encyclopaedia.

P. Brovka [signature],
Chief Editor of the Belorussian Soviet Encyclopaedia**