Polityka władz sowieckich wobec Polaków na Litwie

LTReikšminiai žodžiai: Lenkai, sovietų valdžia; Lenkų tautinė mažuma Lietuvoje; Vilniaus kraštas; Švietimas; Švietimas lenkų kalba; Education; Lithuania; Poles, Soviet authorities; Polich minority ir Lithuania; Polish education; Vilnius region.

ENLithuania, throughout the period of its affiliation to the Soviet Union, was subjected to all processes characteristic for the entire Soviet system. Years 1948-1953 - consisted a period of Stalin’s dictatorship, mass deportations, repression and collectivization. These times amounted to a creation of a model of education in Lithuania which has survived, with minor changes, until the egress of Lithuania from the USSR. Lithuania was the least Russified republic within the USSR, despite the gradual intensification of the process of Russification, which began in 60’s as a result of an implementation of the ideological stipulation designated to decrease the differentiation between nations and the formation of a new type of “Soviet man”. These processes also affected the situation of Poles living in Lithuania. While analyzing the data regarding the ethnic constitution of Lithuania (Table 1), one must pay attention to the steadily increasing number of Russian denizens, who came from other regions of the USSR. The area of the common use of Russian language exapanded fast to all those lands where there was a large number of Russians or representatives of other “Russian” nationalities, due to its position as the official language of the Soviet Union. Any additional language of the republic was treated only as an auxiliary language. That division was most evident within the education system (Table 3). You could say that the dispute over schooling - was the primary way to show the social opposition for the Poles living in Vilnius.Thanks to their perseverance the schools with tutelage in Polish language survived both in Vilnius, as well as in the closely surrounding areas. Alongside education also press started to be available in Polish, the creation of folk groups was allowed, and in the Vilnius the mass services were retained in Polish, although the number of Polish priests declined steadily. Poles in Kaunas Lithuania did not gain access to the Polish education. It can be concluded that the authorities in Vilnius and the Vilnius allowed for use of Polish as the mother tongue to counterweight the ambitions of the Lithuanian nomenclature Communist, elites who demanded a wider range of use of the Lithuanian language and were interested in “Lithuanisation” of areas located around the capital of Lithuania. Russian communist nomenclature who settled in Vilnius, did not intend to give up lucrative jobs because of the lack of Lithuanian language. In the battle for the positions Russian nomenclature decided to use for its purposes the fact that the Vilnius population was dominated by Poles. The permission to use their mother tongue issued to Poles was justified by the need to work amongst them, which was easier to do in Russian than in the Lithuanian language. Under pressure from Moscow, the Lithuanian Communists had to agree to it. [From the publication]