Americans Digitized Trophy Documents from the Smolensk Archive, Taken by Nazis. Documents on the Belarusian Question Should Also Be Sought There

Cover of the English-language archive guide. Photo: catalog.archives.gov

The history of this archive is quite well-known, as it was taken out by the Germans during the occupation, and after the war, it ended up overseas, much like German aerial photographs of the USSR territory, which later served American intelligence. American specialists have now made the Smolensk Archive accessible to the entire world.

For domestic historiography, this archive can be of great value, as it should reflect events that directly influenced the formation of the borders of the Belarusian state. On January 1, 1919, the Soviet Socialist Republic of Belarus was declared in Smolensk itself, and just a few weeks later, Moscow took the Smolensk region back into the RSFSR — these political upheavals must have left their mark in the contemporary documents, reports, and directives of local Soviet bodies.

Another promising direction could be the study of the details of the first expansion of the BSSR in 1924. At that time, Minsk, relying on scientific data and the 1897 census, laid claim to broad ethnically Belarusian territories, while the Smolensk officialdom resisted this in every way. Fearing to lose Moscow's subsidies and their own positions, provincial officials manipulated statistics, proving that the population had become completely Russified. As a result of that bureaucratic war, Belarus received only the Horki and part of the Mstsislaw districts.

Likewise, local authorities quietly and methodically sabotaged Belarusianization, which also should not have gone unnoticed.

The published archive definitely contains documents about the life of national minorities: Jews, Poles, and Balts — they are mentioned in the case titles. The absence of Belarusians, perhaps, is explained by the Americans' lesser interest in the Belarusian question compared to the Jewish, Polish, and Baltic ones, which were deemed more promising.

Where to Look for Documents on Belarusian Topics

To narrow the search, one can rely on the existing English-language archival guide, which has already partially cataloged this collection. For example, materials on national policy are concentrated on microfilm roll 52 (Roll 52). There, a block of party documentation is located, covering files from WKP 476 to WKP 495.

Precisely within this range, researchers can find file WKP 482, which is entirely dedicated to the living conditions and political activity of the aforementioned national minorities in the Smolensk region. In file WKP 488, one can even find an article about Jewish philology in the USSR, written in German.

One of the files (WKP 475) is dedicated to communist literature, primarily published by the Belarusian Academy of Sciences in Minsk, focusing on the social-democratic movement before the revolution and the emergence and development of the Communist Party in Belarus after 1917.

File (WKP 442) contains documents about collective farms in Belarus: the development of collectivization, leadership views on collective and state farm construction, the growth of collective farming after the October Revolution, Jewish collective farmers in rural Belarus, as well as excerpts from the newspaper "Pravda" regarding the work of farms in the country.

However, searching the archive is not the simplest task. Naturally, there is no search by the content of the files, as the documents' text has not been recognized. They were not even broken down into separate thematic folders. American specialists simply took the reels of microfilms, created back in the 1950s, and scanned them entirely into long PDF files or simply collections of up to one and a half thousand images. In some cases, the numbering on the website's reels does not match that indicated within the reels themselves, and finding the sheets that separate one historical file (WKP) from another among thousands of thumbnails is quite challenging.

But if someone has enough time and dexterity to navigate the archive, it can reveal previously unknown pages of Belarus's pre-war history and the intricacies of the national policy of that time.

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