Hienadź Sahanovič. Many Faces of the Kryčaŭ Peasant Uprising, or The Need for a New Look at Social Conflicts

The paper analyses how the peasant revolt of 1743–1744 in the Radzivil’s estate located in the east of today’s Belarus has been treated in Belarusian historiography. At first, it was shown as a true example of the class struggle, then, from the late 30. Stalinist historiography started to insist on its anti-Polish spirit. After Stalin, the peasant revolt of the mid-18th century was used to illustrate how the Belarusian people “strived for reunification with Russia”. It was only after fall of the Soviet Union that historians in Minsk attempted to interpret the peasant movement without using of old ideological schemes. At the same time, since the Jewish issue used to be under taboo in Soviet Belarus, some researchers began to present the events as an anti-Jewish revolt of Belarusian peasantry. The author finds such assertions unfounded sweeping exaggeration and calls for a new study in peasant movement on the Belarusian lands of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania by setting it into a broader comparing scale and using modern approaches of Western social history as well.