Język polski w jednoklasowych szkołach podstawowych w guberni grodzieńskiej po 1906 roku: niespełnione obietnice rządu

This article examines the implementation of one paragraph of the Tsar’s decree of 22 April 1906, to which historians have paid little attention. It stipulated that in those one-class schools that were located in the Polish populated part of Grodna Province, the Polish language could be taught as a subject and used to teach arithmetic. The overseer of the Vil’na school district, Boris Wolf, and some other local officials tried their best to implement the decree not only because the regulations passed by the higher authorities had to be enforced but also because they believed that the loyalty of non-Russians could be ensured by meeting their cultural requirements. In the end their efforts were in vain. The official version was that the‚ ethnographic expeditions’ and meetings of local administration officials did not indicate the exact area where Poles would dominate numerically, but this interpretation was a pretext, not a cause. The Polish language in primary school was seen by many officials as a tool for the Polonisation of Belarusian Catholics, so those close to the principles of nationalist nationality politics obstructed the implementation of the decree of 22 April 1906 in the Grodno Governorate. They would also have been aware that the introduction of the Polish language in primary schools, together with other measures confirming that the area was a Polish ‚national territory’, could lead to parts of the Białystok and Bielsk districts being included to the Kingdom of Poland in the event of future territorialization of ethnicity. The likelihood of the implementation of such projects on the western borderlands of the Romanov empire grew in the early 20th century, until their eventual implementation in the Soviet Union.