Have Belarusian authorities decided to destroy all manifestations of "Polishness"? The authorities are quietly preparing a global purge of the State List of Monuments
Local authorities have received instructions to urgently prepare documents to strip historical objects of their protected status. Potentially, thousands of monuments could be stripped of protected status and demolished. The example of just one district shows that almost exclusively noble estates are being targeted for demolition.
Telegram channel "Spadchyna" published a document signed by Alexander Iliyashevich, Deputy Chairman of the Minsk Regional Executive Committee, addressed to the chairmen of district and city executive committees.
The first paragraph of the document notes that the work is being carried out "to fulfill the instructions of the Council of Ministers on the exclusion of certain immovable tangible historical and cultural values." This indicates that the reduction of the list of monuments is a centralized government initiative, not a decision by local officials.
According to the document, officials of the Klietsk district were supposed to prepare a package of documents for the exclusion of seven historical objects by August 10, 2026. They were required to draw up inspection acts and describe losses to legally justify the need to strip the status.
The list for exclusion in Klietsk district immediately included two monuments of the 2nd category (republican significance): the wooden classicist Radziwiłł palace in Radziviliamonty (modern village Chyrvonaya Zorka), built in the 1780s according to the design of Italian architect Carlo Spampani, and fragments of the Vainilovichy manor in Kuntseўshchyna.
Also losing their 3rd category protected status are the historical estates of Yalenski in Tuchy, Vendorf in Halynka, Charnotski in Liatsiashyn, and Labotski in Tsiasnoўka. The seventh object on the list is a wooden tent-roof windmill in the village of Shaiki.
A comparison of the exclusion list with the general State List of Historical and Cultural Values of Klietsk district demonstrates a certain trend in the selection of objects.
Before the document appeared, 30 objects were officially protected in the district. Of these, 7 (23%) are being removed.
There are eight mass graves and Soviet military memorials in the district — none of them are being stripped of status. All seven objects of religious architecture (Orthodox and Catholic churches, as well as the building of a former yeshiva), as well as two archaeological monuments — a fortified settlement and a kurgan burial ground — remain under protection.
The stripping of status affects almost exclusively noble manor and park complexes. Of the nine such objects in Klietsk district, six are losing their protected status. This means that the district is losing two-thirds of its historical manor heritage with a single stroke of a pen.
It is interesting that even the status of a 2nd category value, i.e., a monument of republican significance, which has historical and cultural importance for the entire country, does not protect against exclusion. There were only three 2nd category objects in the district — the church in Halynka, the complex in Radziviliamonty, and the manor in Kuntseўshchyna. The latter two are planned for exclusion from the list.
This unprecedented purge is happening against the backdrop of Belarus's already meager list of monuments compared to neighboring countries. As we wrote earlier, the State List of Belarus contains only about 5600 objects (of which real historical buildings are slightly more than 3000). For comparison, in small Lithuania, over 26 thousand objects are protected, and in Poland, about 80 thousand are on the prestigious list and over half a million on the ordinary list, which in character is little different from the Belarusian State List. However, the Belarusian list is not just failing to expand; they are constantly trying to reduce it or at least prevent new objects from being added.
Destroy to write off
To legally justify the exclusion of an object from the State List, officials must prove its loss of historical value or physical destruction without the possibility of scientific restoration. However, this destruction is most often the result of conscious long-term inaction by the authorities themselves.
For example, the wooden tent-roof windmill in the village of Shaiki, which had been under state protection for almost four decades (since 1987), collapsed from dilapidation in July 2025, because during that time, local authorities, on whose balance sheet the monument was, literally did nothing to preserve it.
A similar situation occurred with the Labotski manor house in Tsiasnoўka. In 2017, the classicist portico on the main facade of the manor collapsed, but neither before nor after the incident did local officials do anything again. Now the result of their inaction will be the formal reason for removing the protected status.
These are just examples where it "fell apart on its own," but there are examples where this destruction was aided. In 2021, local farmers unhinderedly demolished several 19th-century buildings and cut down 52 trees in the historical park in Radziviliamonty, because the protection boundaries, which local authorities should have ordered from specialists, were not developed and approved.
According to the law, bringing a historical and cultural value to destruction is a criminal offense. But to avoid implicating themselves when looking for culprits, the best way out is to strip protection from what they themselves brought to ruin.
Previously, they at least tried to shift responsibility to a naive investor who would agree to restore the ruins with their own money. Thus, the Yalenski estate in Tuchy from the late 18th century was repeatedly put up for auction for 1 basic unit without success. Now a simpler method has been found.
What happens after stripping status
Exclusion from the State List, as well as the official refusal to grant status, is effectively a death sentence for a historical object in Belarus. Practice shows that bulldozers immediately follow such a decision.
In 2021, in the village of Dvor-Homyel, Polatsk district, local authorities demolished the wooden Orlitski estate immediately after the regional council for historical and cultural heritage decided on "insufficient grounds" for granting protected status to the building, despite the same council recommending local authorities to preserve the historical object.
An even more egregious case occurred with the suburban residence of the Uniate Metropolitan Siestrantsevich in Mahilioŭ's Pechersk, which later became a psychiatric hospital. In the 2000s, at the initiative of local authorities, the complex was stripped of its status as a historical and cultural value, after which most of the historical buildings were quickly demolished and the site cleared.
In the summer of 2026, in Minsk, the demolition of the hospital building at Piatsrusia Brovki Street, 5, designed under the guidance of French modernist architect André Lurçat, began. The authorities managed to exclude the building from the list, despite its good condition. The formal reason for stripping the status was provided by loyal academicians who signed the necessary conclusion for the Council of Ministers about the "loss of value."
Even if historical buildings are part of an estate and create its unique surroundings, but are not formally listed separately, they are destroyed like ordinary neglected Soviet barracks. Thus, at the end of 2023, in Vialikaya Lipa, Niasvizh district, the farmyard at the Abukhovichy estate was completely demolished. It had no protected status, and the boundaries of the estate itself were not approved.
And last month, the Dziarzhynsk District Executive Committee was looking for buyers for the remnants of the unique classicist Church of Saints Peter and Paul from 1836 in the village of Starynki, with one condition — the new owner must completely demolish the historical object, which still does not have the status of a historical and cultural value.
So the fate of those objects that will be stripped in the framework of this global purge is predetermined – they will simply cease to exist.
Continuation of the struggle against the "Polish occupation"?
After the political crisis of 2020, the Belarusian regime found itself in total dependence on Russia. In exchange for economic and military support, full synchronization with Russian imperial narratives was required. Any independent, pre-Soviet, European history of Belarus – tied to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth – began to be seen as a potential source of disloyalty and a reason why Belarusians do not identify with Russia. Today's policy of the Belarusian authorities synthesizes various layers of hostility towards everything "Polish," by which is understood everything non-Russian.
Firstly, this is the legacy of the Russian Empire, which after the partitions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, throughout the 19th century, harshly suppressed any manifestations of "Polishness" and Catholicism, which was also considered a Polish faith, in the annexed territories. Secondly, it is a Soviet ideological trauma. For the Bolsheviks, Poland was the main ideological enemy in the West, which in 1920 successfully repelled the onslaught of the Red Army and occupied half of Belarus. It is no coincidence that in 2023, the authorities forced the painting depicting the Battle of Warsaw in the church in Soly to be whitewashed. Later, it was Poland that was one of the first to independently shed the yoke of Soviet ideology, launching a chain reaction of the collapse of the entire Eastern Bloc. Finally, these old imperial and Soviet phobias overlapped with the events of 2020, when Poland became the center of Belarusian political emigration and the most consistent implementer of harsh economic and personal sanctions by the European Union against the Belarusian regime.
The entire European tradition of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in union with the Polish Kingdom, and later the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, began to be viewed as a source of potential disloyalty. The official start of rewriting history was given personally by Alexander Lukashenka on January 6, 2022, at a meeting on "historical policy." He stated that before 2020, there were "too many portraits of Polish and Lithuanian nobility" in the country, and this precisely led to protests. The idea was formulated to present the period of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in textbooks and museums as "Polish occupation and ethnocide of Belarusians."
The era of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was described as privatized by modern Lithuanians, but at the same time, all local aristocracy was excluded from the concept of "Belarusian people." They were equated with colonizers who "exchanged Belarusians for dogs."
The only safe historical periods recognized were Ancient Rus, membership in the Russian Empire, and, as the culmination of nation-building, the Soviet period and the Great Patriotic War.
First, a wave of destruction of monuments to Home Army soldiers swept across the country. Later, the change in historiographical paradigm also required rewriting the national pantheon.
The main blow fell on the leaders of anti-Russian uprisings of the 18th-19th centuries — Tadevuš Kaściuška and Kastuś Kalinoŭski, also affecting figures of the Belarusian national movement of the late 19th — early 20th centuries, a significant part of whom belonged to the Catholic nobility or Catholic clergy, which for the Belarusian authorities is equivalent to "Poles" who wanted to separate Belarus from Russia.
Thus, in state media, from the mouths of propagandists and pro-government historians, the narrative began to be systematically implanted that Kalinoŭski was not a revolutionary democrat, as Soviet historiography believed, but a "Polish terrorist" and "religious fanatic" who allegedly created firing squads and massacred Orthodox peasants who did not want to fight for the interests of Warsaw. An additional trigger was the creation of the Kalinoŭski Regiment in Ukraine, which allowed propaganda to link the name of the historical figure with contemporary armed resistance. And Kaściuška became exclusively a "patriot of Poland," whose uprising's defeat and the partitions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth allowed Belarusians to survive as a nation.
In 2023, near the railway station in Hrodna, a monument to the 1863 insurgents was demolished. A year later, a plaque commemorating the 1794 uprising disappeared from the New Castle building. In both cases, the authorities pretended to have no idea about the fate of the memorial signs. At the end of the same year, another monument disappeared in the village of Slabodka, Astravets district.
In May 2025, in Malyja Siaсhnovichy, Kaściuška's bust and the exhibition about the hero in the local museum were secretly removed.
In 2024, in Kobryn, Kalinoŭski Street was renamed, and a name change for the street of the same name in Minsk was announced. The gymnasium in Svislach, which bore Kalinoŭski's name, was given the name of a Soviet underground operative.
Realizing that the European past remains popular in society, the regime began to pressure the sphere of culture and tourism. Everything connected with the nobility is automatically equated with "propagating Polishness."
The popular history park "Sula" was subjected to harassment by pro-government propagandists. They did not like the propaganda of "the Polish component of our history," mentions of Jesuits, the glorification of the nobility and King Stephen Báthory, who triumphantly defeated the Russian tyrant Ivan the Terrible in the Livonian War. It is indicative that as a result, the legal entity "Peasant (Farm) Household "Grand Duchy Sula"" changed its name to "Peasant (Farm) Household "Land of Treasures"."
This year, the festival-reconstruction "Our Grunwald" was also canceled — the victory of the united army of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and Poland no longer fits the permitted canon.
Against the backdrop of this anti-national policy, where everything non-Russian is declared Polish, and therefore directly hostile, the stripping of protected status from noble estates no longer seems so much a cynical concern for good reporting, as a continuation of the ideological purge of Belarus from any signs of otherness.
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