Рижский мирный договор в советской и современной белорусской историографии / The Treaty of Riga in Soviet and modern Belarusian historiography

Abstract

The Riga Peace Treaty was a very important political fact for the whole of Eastern Europe and for this reason it began to figure in Soviet historiography almost immediately after its signing. This interest on the part of the Soviet government in the treaty was justified by the desire to ‘soften’ the results and ‘explain’ the reasons for the defeat in the Soviet-Polish war. The war, which was very important from an ideological point of view for Soviet Russia and was initially presented as ‘the victorious march of bolshevism to the West’. At the same time, despite the ideologization of Soviet historiography on the issue of the Riga Peace Treaty, these works contain factual material and also deserve critical analysis. In modern Belarusian historiography, despite the enormous importance of issues related to the Riga Peace Treaty, there are still no elaborated and generalizing research works of an encyclopedic and dissertation nature that consider this issue from a critical and non-ideologized point of view. Such works should be based on the achievements of global scholarship, take into account different points of view and reveal the true reasons, conditions and consequences of the conclusion of the Riga Peace Treaty between Poland and Soviet Russia for Belarusians and Belarusian lands. At the same time, modern Belarusian historiography is in continuous development and, of course, in the near future, it will be replenished with new scientific works, including those revealing the problems of the Riga Peace Treaty.