15 3 December 2005 UTC Cut funding completely actually means no more state schools in Belarussian language No need for hair splitting There were no Belarussian millionaires to fund private Belarussian schools The same was in Russia We are not going to teach inorodcy languages in Russian schools The then term Inorodcy means alien born i e non Russians the word which is politically correctly translated today as ethnic minorities At least Tsar had a reason to clamp down hard there were Polsih rebellions which he wanted to eradicate There was nothing like that in say Russian Turkestan But why would Poles want suppress Belarussians Are you aware of any Belarussian rokosz Polish government not Poles I know nothing about attitueds of Poles towards Belorusians I don t have the book here but Davies describes cutting of funds to the minorities schools as a misguided attempt by Polish government to polonize them done in the spirit of the raising nationalism that was prevailing in most European countries at that time A shameful policy without doubt and stupid in the country in which 1 3 of the population belonged to one minority or another Davies concludes that if the the Second World War would not had happened and the policies were kept in place Kresy might have been a scene of a civil war Ukrainians were already throwing bombs and assasinating Polish politicians and it was all going to hell in a handbasket On the other hand as far as funding cuts go one has to remember that it was the time of the Great Depression and so some budget cuts had to be done anyway but the fact that it was the minority schools who faced most of the cuts was purely politicaly motivated 01