Author's Note: This piece grew out of a request for more on the conditions Jews faced in the territory that later became Belarus, before my grandfather emigrated. I'm a Sovietologist and lawyer, not a historian, and I don’t read Belarusian, German, Hebrew, Polish, or Yiddish, so this rests on English and Russian-language sources. For the real thing, see Timothy Snyder (Toronto), especially Bloodlands (2010) and Black Earth (2015), and timothysnyder.org. Also see Nancy Sinkoff (Rutgers), a childhood friend and college classmate, at the Rutgers Center for the Study of Jewish Life; her new book, Polish Jewish Culture Beyond the Capital (2023), won PIASA's 2024 Cienciala Award. Concert: https://polishjewishmusic.iu.edu/

A Jew in the Street: New Perspectives on European Jewish History (2024).

Nearly a thousand years ago, Polish monarchs invited Jews into their lands, hoping their commercial and financial skills would help build up the country’s economy. Many of the arrivals were themselves refugees, fleeing persecution elsewhere in Europe. The relationship that followed was reciprocal. Jews became integral to the Polish economy, and by the years before partition they made up roughly one in ten of the population of the Polish lands as a whole, and a far higher share in the cities. Kraków, Vilna, and Warsaw grew into major centers of Jewish culture and scholarship on the strength of that urban concentration.

Jewish Wedding. A. Trankowsky (Алексей Транковский), late 19th century. Oil on canvas. (The Judah L. Magnes Museum, Berkeley, California)

None of this made Poland uncomplicated. The common history was not free of hard times, and periods of acceptance by Catholic neighbors coexisted with episodes of tension rooted in economic competition and other frictions. But the relationship was durable enough that when Poland re-emerged as an independent state after the First World War and had to fight for its survival against Soviet Russia, Jews took up arms alongside Catholic Poles to repel the Bolsheviks. The interwar Polish republic that resulted was a genuinely heterogeneous country, home to large German, Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Jewish communities — and the Jewish community was itself far from monolithic in its own sense of identity.

Helena Schrammówna, Market scene, 1924.

This is the Poland that later generations, including many Polish Catholics only now discovering Jewish roots hidden in their own family histories, still struggle to sum up in a few words. It is also, crucially, not the same Poland that the Jews of the Belarusian lands experienced after 1795. Grodno, Minsk, Vitebsk, and Mogilev did not fall to a re-emergent Polish state, or to Habsburg Galicia. They fell almost in their entirety to the Russian Empire, whose treatment of its new Jewish subjects diverged sharply from the pattern of qualified acceptance described above.

THE IMPERIAL VARIABLE

Look at the three partitioning powers side by side — Russia, Austria, and Prussia — and a pattern emerges: the “push” factors that drove mass Jewish emigration out of the former Polish-Lithuanian lands were disproportionately the product of Russian imperial policy, not of partition itself. That matters enormously for the Belarusian lands in particular, since virtually the entire Jewish population of the Grodno, Minsk, Vitebsk, and Mogilev gubernias fell under Russian rather than Habsburg or Hohenzollern administration.

Gustaw Pillati, Wilanów Frieze, Peasants of the village of Wilanów (now part of Warsaw) merrymaking in a Jewish-run tavern

The Pale of Settlement, created by, created by Catherine II’s decree of 1791 and expanded after later partitions, walled in roughly five million Jews by the turn of the twentieth century — a population that could not leave the zone without special dispensation: conversion, first-guild merchant status, or a university diploma. [1] Inside the Pale, Jews were largely barred from landownership and agriculture and legally corralled into an artificially narrow band of occupations, which produced chronic underemployment no individual family or enterprise could fix on its own. [2] This was not the byproduct of some general agrarian crisis touching all of the Tsar’s subjects equally. It was policy-engineered scarcity.

Хоральна синагога у Феодосії, побудована в 1904 р., була відібрана радянською владою в 1929 р., зараз - Будинок офіцерів. Праворуч від неї-Талмуд-Тора (тепер школа № 19).

Then came conscription, and here the record is especially hard to read. Nicholas I’s Recruitment Statute of August 1827 imposed a twenty-five-year military term on Jewish males aged twelve to twenty-five — with the clock not starting until the conscript turned eighteen, so that a boy taken at twelve could face thirty-one years under state control before release. [3] Jews were the only population conscripted as young as twelve; every other subject of the Tsar was drafted between eighteen and thirty-five. [4] Quotas were handed down to the kahal, the local Jewish communal leadership, who bore the responsibility of filling them — and when they couldn’t, khappers, professional child-snatchers, seized boys off the street, often orphans or the sons of the poor.

Few Russian policies did more damage to the internal fabric of Jewish communal life. [5] Historians’ estimates of how many Jewish boys and men were swept into the cantonist system over three decades range from roughly 30,000 to as many as 70,000 or 75,000, and there is real disagreement over how many were pressured or coerced into converting to Russian Orthodoxy — figures run from about a quarter to nearly half of the cantonist minors. [6] Even after later regulations formally put Jewish and Christian cantonists on the same footing, discriminatory sub-regulations kept unconverted Jews from being promoted. Conversion pressure remained the system’s unstated purpose throughout. [7]

Violence followed, and here too the state’s role is worth being precise about. The wave of pogroms that broke out after the assassination of Alexander II in March 1881, and the “Temporary Regulations” — the May Laws of 1882 — that followed, mark the point most historians now treat as the true beginning of mass Jewish emigration from the Russian Empire. [8] It would be an overstatement to say St. Petersburg organized every riot; historians today are more careful about that claim than they once were.

Jewish Community Bielsko Biala Poland, Zionist Congress Bielitz, May 19, 1902.

But the imperial administration, having found in Jews a convenient scapegoat for broader unrest, routinely failed to meaningfully suppress the violence once it started, and in documented cases allowed local police and Cossack units to stand down or arrive late. [9] Further waves in 1903–1906 and 1919–1920 compounded the damage, and the government’s insistence on preserving the Pale and its disabilities even after 1881 makes clear that the underlying legal architecture of exclusion — not just mob violence — was official policy. [10] The numbers bear this out starkly: Jews made up at least seventy percent of all emigration from the Russian Empire in every year between 1882 and 1898, and roughly a third of all emigrants from the Empire between 1871 and 1910 — a share wildly out of proportion to their share of the general population. [11]

Compare that to Galicia. The Jewish populations that fell under Habsburg rather than Russian rule after the partitions — chiefly in Galicia, which after 1772 took in a large swath of formerly Polish-Lithuanian territory — followed a genuinely different path. Austria’s constitutional reforms of 1848 began dismantling estate-based Jewish taxes, and the constitutional settlement of 1867 formally emancipated Jews as full citizens, lifting restrictions on landownership, guild membership, government employment, and university teaching. [12]

Marlet Squuare in Rożniatów, 1910

Galician Jews were not conscripted younger or on harsher terms than anyone else, were not confined to anything resembling the Pale, and were not the targets of state-tolerated pogrom violence on the Russian pattern. [13] None of which is to romanticize Habsburg Galicia — antisemitic agitation, economic boycotts, and localized anti-Jewish riots did occur there too, notably in western Galicia in 1898, and legal emancipation coexisted with plenty of everyday social antisemitism. [14] But the difference in the posture of the state itself is well documented. By the early twentieth century, Galician Jews had a foothold in commerce, skilled trades, and industry, and — notably — in the liberal professions, civil service, and self-employed expert occupations, at rates essentially closed off to their coreligionists across the Russian frontier. [15]

Prussia moved fastest of all. Jews in the Prussian-annexed portions of partitioned Poland — above all the Posen/Poznań region — were emancipated even earlier and more thoroughly than in Austria. Prussia’s 1812 Emancipation Edict gave Prussian Jews civil rights and, crucially, occupational access — including to the professions and to state institutions of higher learning — that Russian Jews would not approach even in principle until the monarchy fell in 1917. [16] The German Empire’s 1871 constitution completed legal equality nationwide. That helps explain something that might otherwise look like a coincidence: why the demographic weight of Polish-Lithuanian Jewry, and later the great emigration wave, sat so heavily in the former Russian partition rather than the former Prussian one. The Jewish population under Prussian rule started smaller, but it also had far less reason to flee westward, having already reached rough legal parity inside a wealthier, more diversified economy.

Because Grodno, Minsk, Vitebsk, and Mogilev sat entirely inside the Russian Pale, the communities at the center of this story felt the full weight of cantonist conscription, May Laws restriction, and pogrom-era insecurity, with no Habsburg or Hohenzollern alternative available to them the way it was to Jews in Kraków or Lwów. The exodus from these Belarusian-lands communities to the United States, South Africa, and elsewhere between the 1880s and 1914 shouldn’t be filed away as one more generic “Old World hardship” story, interchangeable with every other East European Jewish emigration. It was a response calibrated to specific, documentable Russian state policy — conscription law, residential and occupational restriction, toleration of communal violence — measured against a visible, known alternative just across the Austrian and German frontiers. Many Russian-Jewish emigrants knew about that alternative through family and trade networks long before they ever boarded a ship. [17]

WAR AND REVOLUTION, 1914–1921

If the period from 1881 to 1914 established emigration as a principal Jewish response to persecution and insecurity in the Russian Empire, the years 1914 to 1921 brought a compressed sequence of catastrophes: military expulsion, revolution, civil war, pogroms, and the Polish–Soviet War. Across much of the former Pale of Settlement, these events destroyed communities, displaced populations, and transformed the legal and political setting of Jewish life. Flight remained one response, but for many communities it was no longer practicable; they instead endured the violence directly.

From the opening months of the First World War, the Russian military command increasingly treated Jews in the western borderlands as presumptive security threats. In early 1915, military policy authorized expulsions from front-adjacent areas and the taking of hostages in an effort to deter alleged espionage and assistance to the enemy. These measures affected both Russian-subject Jews and Jews living in occupied Austrian Galicia. [18]

Jewish war sufferers. Shall they plead in vain?, American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (sponsor)Grinnell Litho Co., New York, 1917 (approximate)

The largest single expulsion occurred in May 1915, when General Nikolai Radkevich, with the support of Chief of Staff Nikolai Yanushkevich, expelled approximately 200,000 Jews from the Kovno and Kurland provinces — an operation that disrupted transportation and disorganized the army’s own rear areas. [18][19] Between 1914 and 1916, at least 189 Jewish communities in the Russian Empire, Galicia, and Bukovina experienced expulsion or deportation. [18] Contemporary accounts describe deportees being sent deep into the Russian interior under conditions of severe deprivation, and often encountering hostility from people who regarded them as suspected traitors rather than as displaced fellow subjects. [20][21]

By August 1915, the government permitted many Jewish refugees to settle outside the Pale, although restrictions remained in Petrograd and Moscow. The Pale therefore ceased to function effectively as an impermeable residential boundary well before its formal abolition. [22] On March 20/April 2, 1917 (Old Style/New Style), the Provisional Government abolished legal disabilities based on religion or nationality, including restrictions affecting Jewish residence, education, public service, and occupation — bringing formal civic emancipation to Russian Jewry roughly fifty years after Jewish emancipation in Austria-Hungary, and more than a century after Prussia’s 1812 emancipation edict.

The fall of the autocracy in February/March 1917 was, in legal terms, an extraordinary liberation for Russian Jews. The Provisional Government’s decree dismantled the principal legal apparatus of residential and occupational discrimination. The political and military collapse that followed, however, soon created different and more immediate dangers.

The Bolshevik seizure of power and the ensuing civil war intensified the antisemitic myth of “Judeo-Bolshevism,” which portrayed Jews collectively as agents or beneficiaries of revolution. That claim ignored the political diversity of Jewish communities, the relatively small proportion of Jews who were Bolsheviks, and the fact that Jewish socialist and Zionist organizations — including the Bund and Po’alei Zion — were themselves eventually suppressed by the Bolshevik regime. Nevertheless, the myth supplied a recurring justification for anti-Jewish violence by otherwise antagonistic military and political factions. [23]

The pogrom wave accompanying the Civil War — concentrated primarily in Ukraine but extending into Belarus and other parts of the former Pale — was far larger and deadlier than the pogrom waves of the late imperial period. Estimates vary, because contemporary documentation was incomplete and because historians distinguish differently among immediate deaths, later deaths from wounds or disease, and broader wartime mortality. Nokhem Gergel’s foundational study documented more than 1,200 incidents and estimated roughly 50,000 deaths; more recent scholarship, including Jeffrey Veidlinger’s, places the death toll above 100,000. [24] The toll is best described as disputed, and probably somewhere between the tens of thousands and more than 100,000.

Gergel identified 1,236 episodes of anti-Jewish violence, of which 887 were classified as mass pogroms. His attribution data assigned roughly 40 percent of the documented pogroms to forces associated with the Ukrainian People’s Republic, 25 percent to independent or “Green” formations, 17 percent to White forces, and 8.5 percent to Red Army units — figures that measure documented incidents, not necessarily a precise division of total deaths. [26]

Responsibility was thus distributed across several forces, although not equally. A recurrent enabling condition was impunity: soldiers and irregulars often understood that robbery, assault, rape, and murder directed against Jews would bring little or no punishment. Pogroms combined antisemitic ideology, allegations of Bolshevik sympathy, plunder, military indiscipline, and the brutalization produced by prolonged warfare. The violence also generated mass displacement and extensive destruction of Jewish homes and communal property.

For an essay centered on Belarus, the Polish–Soviet War is especially important. The front crossed Grodno, Minsk, Pinsk, and Polesia as Polish and Bolshevik forces repeatedly gained and lost territory.

The best-known episode was the Pinsk massacre of April 5, 1919. Major Aleksander Narbutt-Łuczyński ordered the summary execution of thirty-five Jewish residents whom he suspected, without an adequate investigation, of participating in a Bolshevik meeting. The subsequent American mission led by Henry Morgenthau concluded that no Bolshevik arguments had been made at the meeting, characterized the commander’s reliance on untested allegations as “reprehensible and frivolous,” and called his action “inexcusably drastic.” It also rejected as unfounded the claim that Jewish participants had attacked Polish troops. [27][28]

Pinsk was not the only instance of anti-Jewish violence involving Polish troops. Recent scholarship documents violence in Bobruisk in 1919 and situates it within a broader pattern in which soldiers associated Jewish civilians with Bolshevism and treated them as politically suspect. [29]

Jewish communities in the Belarusian lands were also victimized by irregular formations. One account of David-Gorodok reports that forces associated with Stanisław Bułak-Bałachowicz imposed a large ransom on the town and committed robbery, rape, and murder. [30]

The Treaty of Riga, signed on March 18, 1921, ended the Polish–Soviet War and established a border that divided the Belarusian lands between Poland and the Soviet republics. Jewish communities on either side of that border thereafter developed under sharply different political and legal systems — a division that profoundly shaped their interwar histories. [31]

The experience of pogroms helps explain why some Jews came to regard Soviet rule as comparatively protective, or chose to cooperate with it. The Bolsheviks formally prohibited antisemitic agitation, and although Red Army units also committed pogroms, Soviet authorities were generally more willing than their rivals to condemn and punish such violence. It is reasonable to infer that physical insecurity made Soviet power comparatively attractive to some Jewish civilians — though that conclusion should not be generalized to all Belarusian Jews, or described simply as ideological conversion. [32]

Nor did Soviet rule preserve autonomous Jewish communal life. The Jewish Sections of the Communist Party — the Yevsektsiya, established in 1918 — campaigned against Zionist organizations, independent Jewish political parties, Hebrew education, synagogues, and traditional religious schooling. The physical security associated with the new order was therefore accompanied by a systematic assault on independent Jewish religious, political, and communal institutions. [33]

Put these two chapters together — imperial confinement, then war and revolution — and they explain something that might otherwise seem strange: why Warsaw could still stage a living Shabbat service in 2007 and ask, however uneasily, whether its Jewish community might yet be more than a novelty, while the Jews of the Belarusian lands, subject to a harsher and more consistently applied imperial design and then to war, revolution, and civil war on top of it, mostly answered the same question a lifetime earlier — by leaving, or did not live to answer it at all. Both stories trace back to the same eighteenth-century Commonwealth. What diverged was which empire, and later which army, drew the border around each community’s fate.

Endnotes & Citations

1. Britannica — Pale of Settlement; see also Wikipedia — Jewish Ethnographic Expedition

2. The Nation — The Saga of the Pale and Soviet Jews

3. JewishEncyclopedia.com — Cantonists

4. Military History Wiki — Cantonist (citing Benjamin Nathans)

5. The Jewish Link — 1827: Russia Begins to Draft Its Jews; see also Shavei Israel — Russian Cantonists

6. Academic Studies Press — Tsar Nicholas I and the Jews; compare with figures in Times of Israel — The Cantonists

7. Military History Wiki — Cantonist Sub-regulations

8. Harvard HIST 1290 — Jewish Persecution, Emigration and the Russian State

9. EBSCO Research Starters — Pogroms in Imperial Russia

10. TheCollector — The Dark History of the Pogroms That Shook the Russian Empire; see also Wikipedia — Pogroms in the Russian Empire

11. Harvard HIST 1290 — Emigration Figures (citing Yannay Spitzer, PhD diss., Northwestern University, 2013)

12. Ukrainian Jewish Encounter — The Jewish Question in Austrian Galicia

13. JGaliciaBukovina — The Jews of Galicia under Austrian-Polish Rule, 1867–1918 (Piotr Wróbel)

14. YIVO EPYC — Political Life in Galicia

15. Zolynia Memorial — Galicia Province Occupational Breakdown

16. For general historiography on Prussian emancipation, see Reinhard Rürup, “Jewish Emancipation and Bourgeois Society,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 14 (1969).

17. Synthesis on comparative migration networks supported by Spitzer (2013), supra note 11.

18. 1914-1918 Online — Antisemitism and Pogroms in the Military (Russian Empire) (Semion Goldin)

19. Palgrave Macmillan — Deportations of the Jewish Population and Hostage Taking (1914–1915) (Eric Lohr)

20. Jerusalem Post — Accounts of Russian Tactics in WWI

21. 1914-1918 Online — Resettlement (Peter Gatrell)

22. Jewish Virtual Library — The Pale of Settlement

23. Brendan McGeever, Antisemitism and the Russian Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2019); see also Ukrainian Jewish Encounter — Between the ‘Whites’ and the ‘Reds’

24. Nokhem Gergel, “The Pogroms in the Ukraine in 1918–21,” YIVO Annual of Jewish Social Science 6 (1951); Jeffrey Veidlinger, In the Midst of Civilized Europe: The Pogroms of 1918–1921 and the Onset of the Holocaust (Metropolitan Books, 2021).

25. University of Toronto Munk School — In the Midst of Civilized Europe

26. Gergel (1951), supra note 24.

27. U.S. Department of State Office of the Historian — Report of the Mission of the United States to Poland (1919)

28. William W. Hagen, “Soldierly Antisemitism, the Pinsk Massacre, and Morgenthau’s Mission,” in Anti-Jewish Violence in Poland, 1914–1920 (Cambridge University Press, 2018), DOI:10.1017/9781139025737.012

29. Marcin Urynowicz, “Anti-Jewish Violence of Polish Troops, 1918–1920: The Case of Bobruisk,” East European Jewish Affairs (2023), DOI:10.1080/13501674.2022.2162214

30. Encyclopedia.com — David-Gorodok (reproduced from Encyclopaedia Judaica)

31. 1914-1918 Online — Riga, Treaty of (Jerzy Borzęcki)

32. McGeever (2019), supra note 23.

33. YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe — Evsektsiia (Zvi Gitelman)

We are close enough to our September 1 deadline that we are beginning to receive the same question from several directions at once: What, specifically, are we looking for?

This is our attempt at an honest answer—honest enough to say some things that grant programs do not ordinarily put so bluntly in their official materials.

The Trojan horse, stated plainly

The Karski-Swyer Initiative to Promote Belarusian Studies is, at bottom, a Trojan horse—of the benign academic variety.

Two $2,000 awards will not, by themselves, reshape a field of study. What they can do is generate serious, citable work on contemporary Belarus; bring that work before universities and policy institutions; connect scholars and practitioners who should know one another; and help build the record needed to make the case for something permanent—ideally an endowed professorship in Belarusian studies.

We are trying to begin a multi-year conversation, not distribute two prizes and congratulate ourselves for having done so.

Applicants who understand this larger purpose will probably write stronger proposals. We want to know not only what question an applicant proposes to answer, but also why the answer matters, who should care about it, and where the completed work ought to be presented.

A project should be able to interest people who do not already spend their days thinking about Belarus.

The program, briefly

The Initiative is offering two parallel $2,000 awards for the 2026–2027 academic year.

Track I—Academic/Research Award. This award is open to an undergraduate or graduate student at Georgetown or another accredited institution, or to a postdoctoral researcher generally within five years of receiving a doctorate. The proposed project must address a contemporary issue involving Belarusian domestic & foreign policy (such as vis-à-vis the European Union countries, Ukraine, and the United States), government, and public opinion/sociology, with an emphasis on realistic alternative futures during the post-Lukashenka era on topics such as demographics.

Track II—Human Rights and Rule of Law Fellowship Award. This award is open to an individual—not necessarily a student—with a demonstrated record of work concerning Belarus in human rights, environmental protection, or the rule of law, including involvement in significant domestic or international legal proceedings. Candidates may apply directly or be nominated by someone else, with their consent.

Each recipient will receive $1,000 upon selection and an additional $1,000 after completing the work and presenting it, either in person or remotely, at an event hosted by an appropriate educational or nonprofit institution.

Belarusian citizenship is preferred but not required. Neither award requires a Georgetown affiliation.

Track I applicants should submit:

• a 1,000–1,200-word research proposal;

• two references, preferably professors or professional colleagues;

• a current CV;

• an academic transcript; and

• a writing sample.

Track II applicants or nominators should submit:

• a 1,000–1,200-word statement describing the candidate’s work and the relevant case, proceeding, or initiative;

• two references, such as colleagues, co-counsel, or partner organizations;

• a CV or professional biography;

• supporting documentation, when available; and

• a writing sample, if one exists.

Applicants should be prepared for a brief interview.

Applications and nominations are due September 1, 2026. Interviews will take place during September, and recipients will be announced on October 1, 2026.

Materials should be sent to ethansb@karski-swyer-belarus-initiative.org, with a copy to esb34@georgetown.edu.

Who will read the applications?

The reviewers are Peter H. Solomon, Donald N. Jensen, Victoria Leukavets, Curt Woolhiser, and Anton Saifullayeu—scholars and practitioners whose work concerns Belarus or closely related fields.

We assembled this group deliberately. A proposal about courts should reach someone who understands courts. The same should be true of a proposal involving diplomacy, human rights, national identity, or the relationship between Belarus and Russia.

Applications will be assigned according to the reviewers’ interests and expertise. Potential conflicts will be disclosed and addressed. The object is not bureaucratic uniformity; it is informed judgment.

Where might the completed work be presented?

Among the universities presently in play, we believe Georgetown is the strongest possible home for an eventual endowed professorship in Belarusian studies—and Washington, D.C., the strongest location.

That is a judgment, not a foregone conclusion. Columbia, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and the University of Toronto each have a serious claim. Good work should be presented wherever it will encounter the most demanding and useful audience.

Georgetown University

Georgetown’s case begins with Jan Karski, who taught there for four decades, but it does not end with sentiment. The University continues to preserve and teach his legacy through the Jan Karski Collection and Georgetown University Press’s edition of Story of a Secret State.[1]

The Center for Eurasian, Russian and East European Studies already supports the kind of multidisciplinary regional scholarship that Belarus requires.[2]

Washington also puts scholarship within reach of the State Department, the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center, the Wilson Center’s Kennan Institute, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and the larger human-rights and rule-of-law community.[3]

Geography is not destiny, but in this instance it is a considerable advantage.

Columbia University

At Columbia, the Harriman Institute is the most obvious home for regional work. It has already hosted programs devoted specifically to Belarus, including presentations involving the democratic uprising and Belarus’s relationship with Russia.[4]

Depending on the subject, other appropriate Columbia venues might include:

• Harriman’s East Central European Center, for work placing Belarus in its broader regional setting;

• the Institute for the Study of Human Rights, for interdisciplinary work involving repression, civil society, political prisoners, or human-rights advocacy;

• Columbia Law School’s Human Rights Institute, for projects involving international law, accountability, fair-trial rights, or the legal dimensions of authoritarian rule; and

• the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies, for work concerning Belarusian Jewish history, memory, antisemitism, the Holocaust, or the complicated relationship between Jewish and Belarusian identities.[4]

Columbia’s great advantage is not merely the number of its institutes. It is the possibility of putting different parts of the same Belarusian story into conversation with one another.

Harvard University

Harvard offers the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies and the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute.[5]

HURI is particularly relevant to the Initiative’s longer-term ambitions. Its history demonstrates that diaspora-supported fundraising can lead not merely to an occasional lecture or fellowship, but to endowed chairs, an academic institute, publications, fellowships, and a durable field of study.

Belarusian studies does not yet possess an American institutional equivalent. One purpose of this Initiative is to begin asking why not.

Johns Hopkins University

At Johns Hopkins SAIS, the Foreign Policy Institute and the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs could provide important audiences.[6]

The Kissinger Center’s emphasis on historically informed statecraft, diplomatic history, strategy, and international order makes it particularly appropriate for work on Belarus’s geopolitical position, its relationship with Russia and Europe, and the foreign-policy problems likely to confront a future democratic government.

One need not accept all of Henry Kissinger’s judgments to recognize the value of studying how history, geography, power, and statecraft interact. Belarus has suffered considerably from decisions made by larger powers that treated it as territory rather than as a country.

University of Toronto

The Munk School’s Centre for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies is another plausible venue, particularly for work combining regional expertise with public-policy analysis.[7]

Canada also has a substantial Eastern European diaspora and may provide a useful setting for work on diaspora organization, citizenship, immigration, and the relationship between exiled communities and future democratic governments.

European Humanities University

We strongly encourage applications from people currently affiliated with European Humanities University or holding EHU degrees.

EHU was founded to serve students from Belarus and the broader region. Its Center for Belarus and Regional Studies provides an independent, interdisciplinary platform for research into Belarusian history, politics, society, economics, culture, and media.[8]

Given what has happened to independent higher education inside Belarus, EHU is not simply another university that happens to teach Belarusian students. It is part of the intellectual infrastructure that a future Belarus will need.

Subjects to which we keep returning

We do not want to prescribe topics. Some of our best conversations have begun in directions we did not anticipate, and an initiative devoted to scholarship should remain capable of being surprised.

Still, the following subjects keep returning.

1. A democratic Belarus within the OSCE framework

At some point, Belarus will have a government that answers to something other than Moscow and its own security apparatus.

What would a democratic transition require in practice—not as a slogan, but as an institutional program?

Possible subjects include judicial independence, electoral law, accountable government, minority protections, civilian control over the security services, and implementation of the human-rights commitments embodied in OSCE documents.[9]

Track I projects might design or compare institutions. Track II projects might document the present regime’s departures from accepted legal and human-rights standards.

Both forms of work are necessary: one records the damage; the other begins thinking about repair.

A related question is how a future Belarus should understand its own history. In a genuinely democratic and pluralistic Belarus, figures now claimed exclusively by Poland, Lithuania, Russia, Ukraine, or Israel might also be understood—without contradiction—as belonging to the history of Belarus.

Modern borders do not have to dictate historical memory.

2. Trade and investment integration with Europe

Political independence without economic options is a fragile thing.

What legal and economic framework would allow a future Belarus to deepen its trade and investment ties with the European Union without simply exchanging one form of dependency for another?

Moldova’s and Ukraine’s Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Areas provide useful comparative models. The experiences of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Bulgaria, and Romania may also illuminate the benefits and costs of regulatory convergence, market access, and economic transition.[10]

We would welcome work that treats customs rules, technical standards, investment protections, taxation, corporate governance, and sequencing as the substance of the inquiry—not as footnotes to a geopolitical argument.

3. Citizenship and the Belarusian diaspora

Belarus has lost people for generations—to war, persecution, economic stagnation, Russification, and the ordinary centrifugal force of history.

A future government should ask how many of their descendants might be invited back into a Belarusian civic community.

Ireland permits many people with an Irish-born grandparent to obtain citizenship through its Foreign Births Register.[11] A future Belarusian government could consider a comparable route—or accelerated residence and employment rights—for descendants of people born in the territory of present-day Belarus.

This subject is personal for me. My grandfather, Solomon Pinchas Swyer, was born in Vileika, later lived in Minsk, and emigrated to the United States in 1913. Many Americans, Canadians, Israelis, and others have similar family histories, although they may not presently think of those histories as Belarusian.

Today, unlike the descendants of people who fled Germany or Poland, relatively few descendants of Belarusian Jews are likely to be seeking Belarusian citizenship. That could change if Belarus became democratic, secure, tolerant, economically attractive, and honest about its past.

Citizenship, however, is the easy half of the problem. The harder question is institutional: how does a government build a durable relationship with a diaspora rather than summon it ceremonially once a year?

The Ukrainian Congress Committee of America, founded in 1940, unites national and local organizations, conducts advocacy, and participates in the Ukrainian World Congress.[12]

A useful comparative project could ask what a Belarusian-American or Belarusian-Canadian umbrella organization would need to look like—and what habits a future Belarusian government would need to learn—to make such a relationship real.

4. Belarusian identity in all its complexity

There is important work to be done in recovering the Belarusian connections of figures claimed—often exclusively—by several national traditions.

But this is not an invitation to write patriotic history with better footnotes.

Serious work must also confront antisemitism, the Holocaust and local collaboration, Soviet repression, and the effects of Polonization and Russification.

Belarusian, Lithuanian, Polish, Russian, Ukrainian, and Jewish histories overlap because the people themselves overlapped. Borders moved. Languages changed. Identities evolved. Empires classified people according to categories that did not always correspond to how those people understood themselves.

Strong scholarship should treat that complexity as the subject, not as an inconvenience to be edited out.[13]

What we do not want

We are not looking for advocacy dressed up as scholarship, conclusions in search of evidence, or a morality tale in which everyone already knows his assigned role.

Belarus has suffered enough from official narratives.

We want careful research, transparent methods, engagement with inconvenient evidence, and conclusions strong enough to withstand a skeptical room.

If a project cannot survive difficult questions, an award from us will not improve it.

The deadline, once more

Applications and nominations are due September 1, 2026. Interviews will take place during September, and recipients will be announced on October 1, 2026.

Additional information is available at karski-swyer-belarus-initiative.org.

If your proposed work does not fit neatly within one of the subjects described above, do not treat that as a warning. Surprise us—but show us why the work matters, who should hear it, and what it adds to the larger project of understanding Belarus and preparing for its democratic future.

Endnotes

[1] Georgetown University, “Medal of Freedom to Be Awarded Posthumously to Jan Karski,” https://www.georgetown.edu/news/medal-of-freedom-to-be-awarded-posthumously-to-jan-karski/; Georgetown University Library, “Jan Karski Collection,” https://findingaids.library.georgetown.edu/repositories/15/resources/10388; Georgetown University Press, Story of a Secret State, https://press.georgetown.edu/Book/Story-of-a-Secret-State.

[2] Georgetown University, Center for Eurasian, Russian and East European Studies, “About,” https://ceres.georgetown.edu/about/.

[3] Atlantic Council, “Eurasia Center,” https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/programs/eurasia-center/; Wilson Center, “Kennan Institute,” https://www.wilsoncenter.org/program/kennan-institute; Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, https://www.rferl.org.

[4] Columbia University, Harriman Institute, “About,” https://harriman.columbia.edu/about-us/; “What Does Belarus Teach Us? East European Revolutions from Warsaw and Prague to Kyiv and Minsk,” https://harriman.columbia.edu/event/what-does-belarus-teach-us-east-european-revolutions-from-warsaw-and-prague-to-kyiv-and-minsk/; Columbia University, Institute for the Study of Human Rights, “About Our Institute,” https://humanrights.columbia.edu/content/about-our-institute; Columbia Law School, Human Rights Institute, https://hri.law.columbia.edu/columbia-law-school-human-rights-institute; Columbia University, Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies, https://www.iijs.columbia.edu.

[5] Harvard University, Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, “About,” https://daviscenter.fas.harvard.edu/about; Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, “History of the Institute,” https://www.huri.harvard.edu/history-institute.

[6] Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, Foreign Policy Institute, “History,” https://www.fpi.sais.jhu.edu/history; Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs, https://kissinger.sais.jhu.edu.

[7] University of Toronto, Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, “Centre for European and Eurasian Studies,” https://munkschool.utoronto.ca/cees.

[8] European Humanities University, “About,” https://en.ehuniversity.lt/about/; “Center for Belarus and Regional Studies,” https://en.ehuniversity.lt/research/center-for-belarus-and-regional-studies/.

[9] Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, “Helsinki Final Act,” https://www.osce.org/helsinki-final-act.

[10] European Commission, “Moldova,” https://enlargement.ec.europa.eu/countries/moldova_en; “The EU’s Association Agreements with Georgia, the Republic of Moldova and Ukraine,” https://enlargement.ec.europa.eu/news/eus-association-agreements-georgia-republic-moldova-and-ukraine-2014-06-23_en.

[11] Ireland, Department of Foreign Affairs, “Registering a Foreign Birth,” https://www.ireland.ie/en/dfa/citizenship/born-abroad/registering-a-foreign-birth/.

[12] Ukrainian Congress Committee of America, https://ucca.org.

; Ukrainian World Congress, “About the UWC,” https://www.ukrainianworldcongress.org/about-uwc.

[13] Serhii Plokhy, The Origins of the Slavic Nations: Premodern Identities in Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus (Cambridge University Press, 2006), https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/origins-of-the-slavic-nations/4276E1B428693C30E0DB6B46D8A90674; Timothy Snyder, The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569–1999 (Yale University Press, 2003), https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300105865/the-reconstruction-of-nations.

The Karski-Swyer Initiative to Promote Belarusian Studies honors Jan Karski, the longtime Georgetown professor and wartime witness to the destruction of European Jewry, and Solomon Pinchas Swyer, who was born in Vileika and emigrated to the United States in 1913.

Americans generally know Kościuszko as the Polish military engineer who helped fortify West Point and later led the 1794 uprising against Russia and Prussia. [2]

Kościuszko was born in 1746 at Mereczowszczyzna, then in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania within the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and now in Belarus’s Ivatsevichy District. [3] Belarus’s first public monument to him was unveiled near his birthplace in 2018. [4] He is now commemorated as a hero in Poland, the United States, Lithuania, and Belarus.

When tourists visit Wrocław, Poland, today, they are likely to venture to see the rotunda that houses the Racławice Panorama — the monumental 15-by-114-meter cyclorama painted in 1893–94 by Jan Styka, Wojciech Kossak, and a team of collaborating artists to mark the centennial of the Kościuszko Uprising against Russian rule — and they are looking at a scene depicting an army that included Belarusian and Lithuanian recruits, led by a man whose birthplace lies well inside today’s Belarusian border. [5]

The painting was originally unveiled in Lwów (now Lviv, Ukraine) as part of the General National Exhibition of 1894, survived bombing raids and years hidden in a makeshift crate during and after the Second World War, and was considered too “politically incorrect” a subject for public display under Communist rule until it finally found its permanent home in Wrocław in 1985. Today, there is no satellite exhibit in Belarus; the Kremlin would not countenance it, but within a democratic Belarus, it could happen.

This is more than a biographical curiosity. It illuminates the layered history that the Karski-Swyer Initiative exists to explore.

People whose identities do not fit modern borders

For centuries, most of the lands of present-day Belarus belonged first to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and then to the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. The region was multiethnic and multireligious. Polish became the principal language of much of the nobility and educated elite; East Slavic vernaculars that contributed to modern Belarusian were widely spoken among the rural population; and Jewish communities became central to the life of many towns. [6] A modern Belarusian national movement emerged mainly in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Applying today’s national categories mechanically to earlier centuries therefore risks anachronism.

Adam Mickiewicz, generally regarded as Poland’s national poet, began Pan Tadeusz with the invocation “Lithuania, my homeland!” He was born near Navahrudak, in present-day Belarus, wrote in Polish, and understood “Lithuania” as the historical homeland of the former Grand Duchy rather than the modern Lithuanian nation-state. [7] Ignacy Domeyko, born near Nyasvizh, participated in the 1830–31 Polish uprising before becoming a renowned scientist and university reformer in Chile; Poles, Belarusians, Lithuanians, and Chileans all commemorate him. [8]

Napoleon Orda, born near present-day Ivanava, documented the architectural heritage of the former Commonwealth. Stanisław Moniuszko, born at Ubiel near Minsk, became a foundational figure in Polish national opera. Eliza Orzeszkowa spent most of her life in Hrodna and became one of the leading Polish-language novelists of the nineteenth century. [9] These lives resist exclusive national ownership.

Kościuszko presents the same problem. He led an uprising of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and is buried in Wawel Cathedral, yet his birthplace is in present-day Belarus. It is safer to describe him as a figure of shared Polish, Lithuanian, Belarusian, and American heritage than to assign him a single modern nationality for every purpose.

The region’s Jewish history makes the inadequacy of modern territorial labels even clearer. Chaim Weizmann was born in Motal and became Israel’s first president; Menachem Begin was born in Brest; Shimon Peres was born in Vishnyeva; and Marc Chagall was born in Vitebsk. [10]

They are principally remembered as Jewish, Israeli, or—in Chagall’s case—French and Jewish cultural figures. Calling them merely people who “happened” to be born in Belarus, however, would understate the importance of the places, languages, communities, and landscapes that shaped them.

There were also nineteenth-century figures who consciously helped create a distinct Belarusian literary and political tradition. Kastuś Kalinoŭski (Konstanty Kalinowski), a leader of the 1863–64 uprising, published Mużyckaja praŭda, one of the earliest periodicals in Belarusian. [11] Vincent Dunin-Marcinkievič (Vintsent Dunin-Martsinkyevich) wrote in both Polish and Belarusian and is regarded as a founder of modern Belarusian literature. [12] Their work shows that Belarusian identity was developing through choices about language, political allegiance, and audience—not appearing suddenly from a historical vacuum.

A major Jewish homeland destroyed by the Holocaust

No account of these lands is complete without the scale of their Jewish history. Before the Holocaust, Jews formed a large share of the population in many Belarusian towns and cities; in some places they were a majority. In the Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic, Yiddish was one of four official languages—alongside Belarusian, Russian, and Polish—from the 1920s until 1938. [13] Nazi Germany and its collaborators murdered most of Belarus’s Jewish population. The World Jewish Congress estimates that nearly 90 percent were killed. [14] The Jewish population of Belarus today is only a small fraction of its prewar size.

("Dr. Chaim Weizmann" — Library of Congress (Bain News Service)

The list of globally influential Jewish figures born on this territory is extraordinary. In addition to Weizmann, Begin, Peres, and Chagall, it includes Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, a central figure in the revival of spoken Hebrew; historian Simon Dubnow; painters Chaim Soutine and Ossip Zadkine; songwriter Irving Berlin; retailer Michael Marks; labor leader David Dubinsky; and mathematician Issai Schur. [10] The details of birthplace and self-identification vary, so each biography should be stated with care rather than assembled under a single, retrospective nationality.

(Picture after the arrest of Menachem Begin in September 1940 by the NKVD (the picture was located in KGB archives).

Čeština: Fotografie Menachema Begina pořízená po jeho zatčení sovětskou tajnou službou NKVD.

The Bielski brothers—Tuvia, Asael, and Zus—formed a partisan group after the murder of members of their family in the Nowogrodek ghetto. More than 1,200 Jews survived under the group’s protection in the forests of western Belarus, one of the Holocaust’s most remarkable rescue operations. [15]

It is from this same historical landscape—Vileyka, then in the Russian Empire and now in Belarus—that Solomon Pinchas Swyer came. He later lived in Minsk before emigrating to the United States in 1913. The Karski-Swyer Initiative was founded in part to honor his memory.

It is

Why this matters for the Initiative

The Karski-Swyer Initiative to Promote Belarusian Studies takes its name from two men connected to this terrain of overlapping identity and catastrophe: Jan Karski, the Polish underground courier who carried eyewitness reports about the destruction of European Jewry to Allied leaders and later taught for four decades at Georgetown University; and Solomon Pinchas Swyer, born in Vileyka and shaped by a borderland that passed through several political orders before he left for the United States. [16]

A democratic and secular Belarus should be able to embrace this inheritance without forcing historical figures into a single modern category. It need not insist that Kościuszko, Mickiewicz, Weizmann, or Chagall was “really Belarusian” in today’s national sense. It can say instead: these people came from this land; their identities were Polish, Jewish, Lithuanian, Belarusian, imperial, local, or some combination of those; and their achievements form part of a shared history.

Such an embrace also requires honest scholarship about antisemitism, the Holocaust, local collaboration and resistance, Soviet repression, Polonization and Russification, and the gradual formation of Belarusian national consciousness. None of those histories should be reduced to a patriotic morality tale.

The Initiative’s two inaugural $2,000 awards—one for academic research on Belarus and one for human-rights and rule-of-law work concerning Belarus—are intended to support precisely this kind of careful inquiry and engagement.

Applications and nominations for the inaugural Karski-Swyer Awards will be reviewed starting September 1. No award decisions will be finalized before September 25, and all applicants will be notified by October 1.

https://karski-swyer-belarus-initiative.org.

Endnotes

[1] New York State Department of Transportation, “Kosciuszko Bridge Project,” https://www.dot.ny.gov/kbridge/; National Park Service, “Thaddeus Kosciuszko,” https://www.nps.gov/thko/learn/historyculture/kosciuszkobio.htm.

[2] National Park Service, “Kosciuszko’s Will,” https://www.nps.gov/thko/learn/historyculture/kosciuszkoswill.htm; National Archives, “Last Will and Testament of Thaddeus Kosciuszko,” https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-30-02-0125.

[3] U.S. Army Europe and Africa, “Tadeusz Kościuszko (1746–1817),” March 13, 2025, https://www.europeafrica.army.mil/Who-We-Are/Mission-History/Heroes-of-Two-Nations/Army-250-Biography-view-page/Article/4118670/tadeusz-kociuszko-1746-1817.

[4] “Tadeusz Kosciuszko and the Un-Soviet Heroes of Belarus,” BelarusDigest, June 14, 2018, https://belarusdigest.com/story/tadeusz-kosciuszko-and-the-un-soviet-heroes-of-belarus.

[5] Panorama Racławicka, “About the Panorama,” https://panoramaraclawicka.pl/en/about-the-panorama.

[6] Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Grand Duchy of Lithuania,” https://www.britannica.com/place/grand-duchy-of-Lithuania; YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, “Belarus,” https://encyclopedia.yivo.org/article.aspx/Belarus.

[7] Culture.pl, “Adam Mickiewicz,” https://culture.pl/en/artist/adam-mickiewicz; Palace of the Grand Dukes of Lithuania, “Lithuania, My Homeland … Adam Mickiewicz and His Poem Pan Tadeusz,” https://www.valdovurumai.lt/en/exhibitions/i/7533/lithuania-my-homeland-adam-mickiewicz-and-his-poem-pan-tadeusz.

[8] National Archives of the Republic of Belarus, “Ignacy Domeyko,” https://archives.gov.by/en/welcome-to-the-archives-of-belarus-website/subject-guides-to-archival-records/famous-people/ignasy-domeyko/ignasy-domeyko-2; and Culture.pl, “Ignacy Domeyko: The Philomath of Chile,” https://culture.pl/en/article/ignacy-domeyko-the-philomath-of-chile.

[9] Culture.pl, “Napoleon Orda,” https://culture.pl/en/artist/napoleon-orda; Culture.pl, “Stanisław Moniuszko,” https://culture.pl/en/artist/stanislaw-moniuszko; Culture.pl, “Eliza Orzeszkowa,” https://culture.pl/en/artist/eliza-orzeszkowa.

[10] YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, “Belarus,” https://encyclopedia.yivo.org/article.aspx/Belarus; and World Jewish Congress, “Community in Belarus,” https://www.worldjewishcongress.org/en/about/communities/BY. Individual biographical entries should be consulted when precise birthplaces or identities are material.

[11] Mikołaj Gliński, “Kastuś Kalinoŭski & the Rise of the Political Idea of Belarus,” Culture.pl, September 13, 2023, https://culture.pl/en/article/kastus-kalinouski-the-rise-of-the-political-idea-of-belarus; Aliaksandr Smaliancuk, “Kastuś Kalinoŭski and the Belarusian National Idea: Research Problems,” The Journal of Belarusian Studies 8, no. 1 (2015), https://belarusjournal.com/article/kalinouski-and-the-belarusian-national-idea-research-problems.

[12] Jan Zaprudnik, Historical Dictionary of Belarus (Scarecrow Press, 1998), entry on Vintsent Dunin-Martsinkyevich; Belarusian Institute of Arts and Sciences, Canada, “Vintsent Dunin-Martsinkyevich,” https://binim.org/index.php/this-day-in-history/1808-02-04.

[13] YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, “Belarus,” https://encyclopedia.yivo.org/article.aspx/Belarus; World Jewish Congress, “Community in Belarus,” https://www.worldjewishcongress.org/en/about/communities/BY.

[14] World Jewish Congress, “Community in Belarus,” https://www.worldjewishcongress.org/en/about/communities/BY.

[15] United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Encyclopedia, “The Bielski Partisans,” https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-bielski-partisans.

[16] United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Encyclopedia, “Jan Karski,” https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/jan-karski; Georgetown University, “Jan Karski,” https://karski.georgetown.edu/karski.

This guide outlines expectations for prospective applicants and peer reviewers for the Karski-Swyer Belarusian Studies and Fellowship-Support Grants. Its structure is modeled on the Fulbright Foundation Specialist Program framework.

Your Role as a Reviewer

• Time commitment and compensation: Service on the review panel involves only a modest time commitment per application and is uncompensated.

• Assignment: Attempts will be made to assign applications to panelists based on their areas of interest and expertise.

• Turnaround: Once you confirm your availability to review a given application, please submit your completed evaluation within two weeks.

• Conflicts of Interest: Given the relatively small number of people actively engaged in the study of, or in activities relating to, Belarus, merely knowing an applicant does not, by itself, disqualify a reviewer from evaluating that application. If you know an applicant, please disclose that fact to the panel coordinator (Ethan S. Burger), and you may proceed with your review so long as you believe that you can evaluate the application objectively. However, a reviewer may not evaluate an application if the reviewer is serving as a reference for that applicant, has provided a letter of recommendation or nomination on the applicant’s behalf, or is related to the applicant by family or a similarly close personal relationship that could reasonably call the reviewer’s impartiality into question. In such circumstances, the reviewer should immediately notify the panel coordinator and recuse himself or herself from the evaluation of that application. You are not required to disclose the nature of the relationship, or your self-assessment of your objectivity, to the applicant. You remain free to decline to review an application for this or any other reason.

• Basis for evaluation: Please base your evaluation only on the materials provided to you (application/nomination materials, references, and supporting documents), not on outside information.

Applicant Information

Applicant Name:

Track (I or II):

Disclosure of Acquaintance with Applicant

• ☐ I do not know this applicant.

• ☐ I know this applicant (briefly describe the relationship below) and believe I can evaluate this application objectively.

• ☐ I am recusing myself from this evaluation because I am serving as a reference for this applicant, have provided a letter of recommendation or nomination on the applicant’s behalf, or am related to the applicant by family or a similarly close personal relationship. (I have notified the panel coordinator separately and am returning this form without completing the evaluation below.)

This disclosure is for the panel coordinator’s records only and will not be shared with the applicant.

Track I — Academic/Research Award: Evaluation Criteria

Complete this section only if the applicant applied under Track I (enrolled student or postdoctoral researcher; contemporary research proposal on Belarusian politics, history, government, or economics).

Criterion

Score (1–5)

Academic and Professional Qualifications — the applicant’s academic record, prior research or publications, and other credentials demonstrate the ability to carry out the proposed project.

Quality and Feasibility of the Proposed Project — the research proposal is well conceived, clearly written, and can realistically be completed within the intended timeframe.

Contribution to Belarusian Studies — the project addresses a genuinely contemporary topic concerning Belarus and would meaningfully advance knowledge in the field.

Quality of References and Supporting Materials — the letters of reference and writing sample support the applicant’s qualifications and the merits of the proposal.

Overall Potential Impact — the applicant’s project, if completed, is likely to be of value to Georgetown’s Belarusian studies programming (e.g., CERES, the Center for Jewish Civilization) and the broader field.

Track II — Human Rights and Rule of Law Fellowship Award: Evaluation Criteria

Complete this section only if the candidate was nominated or self-nominated under Track II (demonstrated record of human rights, environmental protection, or rule-of-law work concerning Belarus).

Criterion

Score (1–5)

Professional and Advocacy Qualifications — the candidate’s professional record and prior involvement in relevant legal cases, litigation, or advocacy demonstrate significant experience in the field.

Significance of the Human Rights / Rule-of-Law Work — the specific case(s) or initiative(s) described are substantial and relevant to human rights, environmental protection, or the rule of law as it concerns Belarus.

Quality of References and Supporting Documentation — the references, case citations, press coverage, or other documentation credibly support the candidate’s record.

Personal Qualities — the candidate demonstrates the professionalism and commitment appropriate to representing this award and its subject matter.

Overall Potential Impact — recognizing the candidate is likely to be of value to Georgetown’s Belarusian studies programming (e.g., CERES, the Center for Jewish Civilization) and to raising the visibility of Belarus-related human rights and rule-of-law work.

Scoring

Please score each applicable criterion above using the following five-point scale:

• 5 – Strongly agree with the statement

• 4 – Agree with the statement

• 3 – Neutral; neither agree nor disagree with the statement

• 2 – Disagree with the statement

• 1 – Strongly disagree with the statement

Overall Recommendation

Please select one:

• ☐ Recommend — I believe this applicant/candidate is a strong choice for this award.

• ☐ Not Recommend — I do not recommend this applicant/candidate for this award.

If you select “Not Recommend,” please provide a brief comment explaining your assessment:

Additional Comments (Optional)

Reviewer Certification

I certify that the evaluation above reflects my own independent assessment of the applicant, based solely on the materials provided to me.

Name:

Email Address:

Date:

Submitting your evaluation: Please return this completed form by email within two weeks of confirming your availability to review this application. If you have any questions, please contact Ethan S. Burger at ethansb@karski-swyer-belarus.initative.org and esb34@georgetown.edu.

Two new $2,000 awards have been established to support contemporary intellectual and political engagement with Belarus. The awards honor the late Jan Karski, the Polish underground courier who carried eyewitness accounts of the Holocaust to the Polish government-in-exile and the Western Allies, was recognized by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations, and taught for forty years at Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service — and Solomon Pinchas Swyer, born in Vilyeyka (then in the Russian Empire, later Polish, now in Belarus) and a later resident of Minsk, before emigrating to the United States in 1913. These inaugural awards precede the planned permanent fund, identifying strong first recipients and building a track record toward that longer-term effort. The Program is administered by the Karski-Swyer Initiative to Promote Belarusian Studies (the “Initiative”).

The Program consists of two parallel award tracks:

• Track I — Academic/Research Award: for an enrolled student or postdoctoral researcher conducting contemporary research on Belarus.

• Track II — Human Rights and Rule of Law Fellowship Award: for an individual with a demonstrated record of human rights, environmental protection, or rule-of-law work concerning Belarus, including prominent legal cases or proceedings.

Among the Initiative’s aspirations is durable, multi-institutional support for the study of Belarus — including, over time, sponsored research positions, fellowships, or programming at partner institutions — in conjunction with the European Humanities University (EHU).

Prospective Institutional Partners

Georgetown University remains the Initiative’s preferred academic partner and intended eventual home for an endowed chair in Belarusian Studies. Jan Karski taught at Georgetown for forty years, and the University maintains programs connected to his legacy. Its Center for Eurasian, Russian and East European Studies (CERES) and School of Foreign Service (SFS) maintain relevant teaching and research capacity; its Center for Jewish Civilization (CJC) honors Solomon Swyer in parallel; and Georgetown Law is directly relevant to Track II’s focus. The institutions discussed below remain valued prospective partners while a formal Georgetown relationship develops. The Initiative also encourages applications from Columbia, Johns Hopkins/SAIS, and Harvard in the U.S. and the University of Toronto in Canada, in recognition of their commitment to excellence and interest in the region.

Among the suitable forums for the presentation of a grantee’s written work are Georgetown’s CERES, SFS, and CJC, and then the Atlantic Council, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Columbia University (through its Harriman Institute for Russian, Eurasian and East European Studies — originally established as the Russian Institute — and its East Central European Center), the Congressional Research Service, Harvard University (through its Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies and the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute), Johns Hopkins University (through its Foreign Policy Institute and its Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs), the Kennan Institute, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, among others. No formal commitment has been made; the choice of venue will depend on which is best positioned to host it.

The intended template for both tracks is a small, named, current-use line added to a partner institution’s existing infrastructure, without a new committee, endowment, or accounting system — for example, a designated line within an existing scholarship, fellowship, or public-programming activity. Any host institution’s incremental cost or burden is expected to be de minimis, limited to hosting a panel or event and, where applicable, processing a recipient’s access to research resources.

Recipients under both tracks need not be enrolled at any particular institution — for example, a recipient may be affiliated with EHU or an institution listed under Prospective Institutional Partners above, or may be unaffiliated. As part of each award, the recipient will prepare a written work, and the Initiative and recipient will identify a suitable presentation venue together, drawing on those same partner institutions, in person or remotely. Both tracks are open to applicants of all citizenships. Where a recipient’s work is hosted by a partner institution, associated costs are expected to be de minimis. An applicant’s or nominee’s EHU affiliation will be regarded as a positive factor in evaluating candidates and proposals under both tracks.

Each award panel will have two members: Ethan S. Burger and one individual reviewer active in Belarusian studies or an adjacent field such as Polish, Russian, or Ukrainian studies. Prospective panelists include:

1. David Marples,

2. Don Jensen,

3. Curt Woolhiser,

4. Anton Saifullayeu, and

5. Peter Solomon.

Review Process for Applications

Applications under both tracks are reviewed by panel members. Participation involves only a modest time commitment per application and is uncompensated.

• Assignment: Attempts will be made to assign applications to panelists based on their areas of interest and expertise.

• Turnaround: A panelist who confirms availability to review a given application commits to completing and submitting a written assessment of that application within two weeks of confirming availability.

• Conflicts of interest: Given the small number of people active in Belarusian studies, a panelist knowing an applicant need not end that panelist’s review. The panelist must disclose the relationship to the coordinator (Ethan S. Burger) and may proceed if they believe they can evaluate objectively; neither the relationship nor that self-assessment is disclosed to the applicant. A panelist remains free to decline review, for this or any other reason.

Each panelist completes the Reviewer Evaluation Form for the applicable track, setting out assessment criteria, a scoring scale, and an overall recommendation. These written assessments inform, but do not constitute, the final award determination.

Award determinations — the decision to grant an award — are made by Ethan S. Burger together with one approved Initiative Reviewer, informed by the panel’s written assessments. Final approval of each recipient’s completed work — confirming it merits the second $1,000 installment — is likewise made by Burger together with one approved Initiative Reviewer. The same Reviewer need not serve in both roles; the reviewer who approves the award and the reviewer who approves the completed work may differ.

Successful applicants may be given access to research resources at a partner institution for the duration of their funded work, as arranged between the Initiative and that institution. [Confirm access scope with the institution prior to distributing funds.]

Track I — Academic/Research Award

Award Amount and Structure

• $1,000 upon selection and announcement of the winner

• $1,000 upon completion of the academic work and the recipient’s participation in a panel or event at a venue drawn from the institutions listed under Prospective Institutional Partners — in person or remotely

Eligibility

• Applicants must be an enrolled student (undergraduate or graduate) at an accredited institution, or a postdoctoral researcher (generally within five years of the doctorate). No particular institutional affiliation is required.

• Belarusian citizenship is preferred but not required.

• The proposed project must address a contemporary topic concerning Belarus in the areas of politics, history, government, or economics.

• Applicants with an affiliation to European Humanities University (EHU) will be viewed favorably by the panel in the evaluation process.

Application Requirements

Applicants must submit:

5. A research proposal of 1,000–1,200 words describing the project and its contribution to the field.

6. Two references (preferably professors or colleagues active in the field) with current contact details; applicants should be ready for a brief (~10-minute) Google Meet interview.

7. A current resume/CV.

8. An academic transcript.

9. A writing sample of prior academic work.

Track II — Human Rights and Rule of Law Fellowship Award

Award Amount and Structure

• $1,000 upon selection and announcement of the recipient

• $1,000 upon completion of the academic work and the recipient’s participation in a panel or event at a venue drawn from the institutions listed under Prospective Institutional Partners — in person or remotely

Eligibility

• Candidates need not be enrolled students; this track recognizes individuals with a demonstrated record of work in human rights, environmental rights, and/or the rule of law as it concerns Belarus.

• Relevant experience includes involvement in prominent legal cases, litigation, prosecutions, or tribunal proceedings relating to Belarus — for example, human rights defenders, lawyers, judges, legal journalists, or civil-society leaders.

• Candidates may be self-nominated or nominated by a third party (e.g., a colleague, employer, or partner organization); nominations should include the nominee’s consent to be considered.

• Belarusian citizenship is preferred but not required.

• Candidates with an affiliation to European Humanities University (EHU) will be viewed favorably by the panel in the evaluation process.

Application/Nomination Requirements

Applicants or nominators must submit:

10. A statement of 1,000–1,200 words describing the candidate’s human rights, environmental rights, or rule-of-law work, including the specific legal case(s) or initiative(s) involved and their significance.

11. Two references (preferably colleagues, co-counsel, or partner organizations familiar with the candidate’s work) with current contact details; candidates should be ready for a brief (~10-minute) Google Meet interview.

12. A current resume/CV or professional biography.

13. Where available, supporting documentation of the relevant legal case(s) or advocacy work (e.g., case citations, press coverage, published filings, or reports).

14. A writing sample (e.g., a legal brief, published article, report, or comparable work product), if available.

Timeline (Both Tracks)

• Application/nomination deadline: September 1, 2026

• Interviews: Between September 1 and October 1, 2026

• Winners announced: October 1, 2026

• Deadline for completed work and panel participation: [Insert date]

How to Apply

Applications and nominations under either track, and all correspondence, should be directed to Ethan S. Burger at ethansb@karski-swyer-belarus-initiative.org and esb34@georgetown.edu.

Sponsor

These awards are administered by the Karski-Swyer Initiative to Promote Belarusian Studies and sponsored by Ethan S. Burger in memory of Jan Karski and Solomon Pinchas Swyer. Although Georgetown University is the Initiative’s preferred eventual institutional for a future endowed chair in Belarusian studies, the Initiative is independent and is not affiliated with Georgetown University or any other institution named in this document; it is not a separate legal entity and does not hold U.S. IRS 501(c)(3) status.

Professors, program directors, and partner organizations are encouraged to share this announcement with qualified students, practitioners, and colleagues.

Every family carries documents nobody quite knows what to do with — a naturalization paper, a certificate in a language most of the household can no longer read, a story repeated so many times it has been sanded smooth. In our family, those documents belong to my maternal grandfather, Solomon Pinchas Swyer. Piecing them together, alongside family memory and the historical record of the region he came from, tells the story of a man who never stopped being curious about the world he’d left behind — or the one he found in its place.

A CHILDHOOD MARKED BY VIOLENCE

Solomon Swyer was born on December 25, 1874, in Vileyka, then a small town in the Vilna Governorate of the Russian Empire — territory that today lies in Belarus. According to family tradition, he became partially deaf after a Cossack threw an explosive device during a pogrom. Whether every detail of that story has survived intact after more than a century of retelling is impossible to know for certain, but its effect on him was not in doubt: for the rest of his life, he regarded the Russian authorities as deeply antisemitic — a judgment he pointedly did not extend to the Poles and Belarusians among whom he had also lived.

After a period in Minsk, in the Nemiga neighborhood that was then the commercial heart of the city’s Jewish community, Solomon Swyer left for the United States, arriving in Boston aboard the RMS Saxonia on December 6, 1906. He eventually settled with my grandmother, Ray Rothstein, on South Pearl Street in Albany, New York — at the time the center of the city’s Eastern European Jewish immigrant community, lined with kosher butchers, Hebrew schools, and Orthodox synagogues. The two of them ran a dry-goods store there; family memory has it that Ray did most of the actual running, while Solomon mostly sat and read.

THE WORLD HE CAME FROM

The Vileyka and Minsk that Solomon Swyer left behind were, by any measure, remarkable places. In the 1897 imperial census, Jews made up roughly 37 percent of Vileyka and, by some estimates, over half of Minsk — Nemiga itself was one of the most densely Jewish streets in the empire, dotted with synagogues and small workshops dating back to the sixteenth century. That world did not survive the twentieth century. World War I brought expulsions and upheaval that had already reshaped Vileyka’s population by the time Poland regained the territory after 1918. And in the summer of 1941, within weeks of the German occupation, several hundred of Vileyka’s remaining Jewish residents were murdered in two mass actions; the Minsk Jewish community met a similar fate in the ghetto established that same year, memorialized today at the Pit (Yama). As far as the family knows, no relatives who remained in either town survived the Holocaust.

AN IMMIGRANT’S POLITICS

Solomon Swyer left the Russian Empire less than five years before the Bolshevik Revolution and never lived under Soviet rule. But he remained convinced of its dangers for the rest of his life, a conviction formed less by direct experience than by decades spent reading the New York Times, the Herald Tribune, and the Jewish Daily Forward — and later, by the reports of Stalinist repression and the Gulag that confirmed what he had already suspected. Poland occupied a different place in his affections. Despite everything he came to learn about the Holocaust, he thought of Poles as fellow victims of both German and Russian power, and he kept close Polish and Catholic friendships throughout his life. A favorite family story has a friend from the Roman Catholic Diocese of Albany joining the Swyers for Passover and teasing that if Jesus ever came back to Albany, he’d keep Passover with the Swyer family, since they were the ones who kept kosher.

Solomon Swyer attended Congregation B’nai Abraham, one of Albany’s principal Orthodox congregations, founded in 1883 at 69 South Pearl Street before moving to larger facilities as the city’s Jewish community grew.

FAITH AS INHERITANCE, NOT DOCTRINE

That story captures something real about him: a man who observed Jewish law faithfully without much conventional piety. He was fascinated by Hebrew, by Jewish history, and by the Bible — approached, in his case, as literature and history rather than settled truth. He liked to say, with a mischievous edge, that the Bible read more like a storybook written by scholars for people who didn’t know better. He also believed that keeping kosher in America was a way of preserving Jewish identity in the Diaspora — and that he would have felt no need to do so in Israel, where that identity would simply be the air one breathed. Late in life, in his seventies, he sat for and passed a formal Hebrew-language examination administered by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem — a striking achievement for a man whose formal schooling had ended decades earlier, in another country, in another language.

WHY THIS BELONGS ALONGSIDE KARSKI

Solomon Swyer almost certainly followed news of the destruction of European Jewry as closely as any American immigrant reader of the Jewish press could, and it is easy to imagine that the story of Jan Karski — the Polish courier who risked his life to carry an eyewitness account of the Holocaust to Roosevelt and the Allies, and the subject of my previous post — would have resonated with him, even though there’s no direct evidence he followed Karski’s mission specifically. Both men, in their very different ways, belonged to a generation shaped by the same collapsing world: one who left it just in time, and one who stayed to bear witness to its end.

That is the pairing behind the Karski-Swyer Initiative, which I’ve been developing at Georgetown to support contemporary scholarship and human rights work on Belarus. It honors a Holocaust rescuer who spent forty years teaching at Georgetown, and a Jewish immigrant from the same corner of the old Russian Empire who never stopped caring about the place he’d left. I’ll write more about the Initiative itself, and its award tracks, in a future post.

SOURCES

Belarus SIG — jewishgen.org — JewishGen’s community and district research resources, including Vileyka (Vilna Gubernia).

“Vileyka” — Wikipedia — The town’s population history and the destruction of its Jewish community in 1941.

“Niamiha Street” — Wikipedia — On Nemiga as one of Minsk’s oldest and most historically Jewish streets.

“The Pit (memorial)” — Wikipedia — On the Yama Holocaust memorial in Minsk.

“Minsk Governorate” — Dolgin Research Center, U. of Haifa Library — 1897 census data on Minsk’s Jewish population.

“Albany, New York” — Jewish Virtual Library — On South Pearl Street and the development of Albany’s Jewish community.

History of Congregation B’nai Abraham — Congregation Beth Abraham-Jacob — The congregation’s origins on South Pearl Street in Albany.

Holocaust Encyclopedia entry on Jan Karski — United States Holocaust Memorial Museum — Biographical background on Jan Karski.

Righteous Among the Nations profile of Jan Karski — Yad Vashem — Institutional record of Karski’s wartime activity and recognition.

In 1942 and 1943, Karski served as an emissary of the Polish Underground State. At extraordinary personal risk, he made two clandestine visits into the Warsaw Ghetto and, disguised as a guard, entered a Nazi transit camp near Izbica — so that he could carry back a firsthand account of what was happening to Poland’s Jews. He then traveled to London and Washington to deliver that account directly to Allied leaders, including a personal meeting with President Franklin D. Roosevelt in July 1943.

Before he left occupied Poland, Karski met with leaders of the Polish Jewish underground, who impressed on him the scale of what was unfolding and the urgency of getting word out. That meeting shaped the rest of his mission: Karski understood he was not simply carrying a military or political report, but the only detailed eyewitness account of mass murder that many Western officials would ever hear directly from someone who had seen it.

WHAT THE WEST DID WITH WHAT HE TOLD THEM

The reception Karski received has become its own subject of historical study. His report reached British and American officials, and in at least one well-documented instance a senior official — Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter — told Karski afterward that he did not disbelieve him so much as find himself unable to take in what he was being told. That distinction, between disbelief and simple incapacity to absorb the information, has occupied historians ever since, including in later scholarship on Allied knowledge of the Holocaust and the limits of wartime information, propaganda, and censorship.

Karski spent much of the rest of his life wrestling — in interviews, in testimony, in his own writing — with what it means to tell the truth to power and watch power fail to act on it with the urgency the facts demanded. That tension between telling and being heard, more than the mission itself, is arguably his most durable legacy.

A SCHOLAR’S SECOND LIFE

After the war, Karski settled in Washington, earned a doctorate from Georgetown in 1952, and taught there for the next four decades — courses on comparative government, communism, and international affairs. Generations of Georgetown students knew him not primarily as a Holocaust witness but as their professor, and by his own account he preferred it that way for long stretches of his life. He wrote a substantial scholarly history of Poland’s relations with the great powers between the world wars, a body of work that is often overshadowed by, but stands alongside, his wartime memoir.

RETURN TO TESTIMONY

Later in life, at the urging of Elie Wiesel and others, Karski returned to public testimony about what he had seen and done. He appears for an extended, unforgettable stretch of Claude Lanzmann’s documentary Shoah, and Lanzmann later assembled additional interview material Karski had given him into a separate film built largely around Karski’s meetings with Roosevelt and Frankfurter. Decades afterward, Georgetown’s Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics developed a one-person stage production based on his life, later adapted into a feature film starring David Strathairn that premiered nationally on PBS.

RECOGNITION, AND A LINGERING CONTROVERSY

Yad Vashem recognized Karski as Righteous Among the Nations in 1982. In 2012, President Obama posthumously awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom — a ceremony that became its own footnote in Polish-American memory politics when the President, in his remarks, referred in passing to a “Polish death camp,” a phrase historians and Polish officials objected to as obscuring the fact that the camps were German-run on occupied Polish soil. The controversy, briefly, threatened to overshadow the honor itself, and it remains a useful reminder of how contested the language of Holocaust memory can still be, even at a ceremony meant to honor a Pole who did more than almost anyone to get that history told accurately in the first place.

WHERE HIS STORY LIVES NOW

Karski’s own papers, along with an extensive collection of sound recordings, are held at the Hoover Institution Library and Archives at Stanford, spanning roughly 1939 to 2007. Georgetown’s own Booth Family Center for Special Collections holds a complementary collection documenting his teaching career, and maintains a research guide, “Professor Jan Karski (1914–2000),” that is the best single gateway into his timeline, his writing, and the secondary literature about him. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum holds extended oral-history interviews, including one conducted in 1988, and maintains a concise biographical entry in its Holocaust Encyclopedia.

A DUAL LEGACY

Karski’s life resists a single tidy lesson, but the throughline is hard to miss. As a young man, he risked everything to carry the truth to people who had the power to act on it and largely did not. As an old man, he spent decades teaching, and only late in life allowed himself to become, again, the witness the world had first met in 1943. Both roles required a version of the same discipline: telling people things they would rather not hear, and doing so patiently, repeatedly, and without much expectation that any single telling would be the one that changed the outcome.

That is, in the end, what makes Karski worth returning to — not only as a Holocaust witness, but as a case study in what it costs, and what it takes, to keep telling the truth to institutions that would rather not hear it.

FURTHER READING

Story of a Secret State: My Report to the World — press.georgetown.edu — Karski’s own wartime account (Georgetown University Press, 2013 ed.), with a foreword by Madeleine Albright and a biographical essay by Timothy Snyder.

Karski: How One Man Tried to Stop the Holocaust — E. Thomas Wood & Stanisław M. Jankowski — The standard full biography, reconstructing his wartime missions, his meetings with Allied leaders, and his postwar academic career.

“Representing Jan Karski” — Beate Müller, The Journal of Holocaust Research (2024) — On how Karski became a symbol, across biography, testimony, film, and commemoration.

Shoah (1985) and The Karski Report (2010) — dir. Claude Lanzmann — Karski’s own words, on film.

Jan Karski Papers, 1939–2007 — hoover.org — The principal archival collection, Hoover Institution Library and Archives, Stanford University.

Professor Jan Karski (1914–2000) — guides.library.georgetown.edu — Georgetown University Library’s research guide — the best gateway into archival holdings, timelines, and further reading.

Jan Karski Educational Foundation — jankarski.net — Biography, educational materials, and the story of his later recognition.

This note draws on published biography, archival finding aids, and institutional records concerning Jan Karski. Corrections and additions are welcome.

European Humanities University Developments

January 1, 2025 – Present — The European Humanities University — the Vilnius-based “university-in-exile” that has educated Belarusian students since Lukashenko’s government shut it down in Minsk in 2004 — has had an eventful nineteen months. It began the period consolidating new leadership and closing in on a stable academic rhythm. It ends it (so far) formally outlawed by the Belarusian state, its students and their families facing house searches and the threat of criminal prosecution simply for having paid tuition. This is a timeline of how it got from one point to the other, and where things stand now.

Leadership Transition (Winter–Fall 2025)

The year opened with EHU formalizing new leadership after a period of transition. Dr. Vilius Šadauskas, who had served as Acting Rector since March 2024, was formally appointed Rector on January 6, 2025. A longtime member of the university’s administration since 2018, Šadauskas had previously overseen EHU’s strategic planning and research-policy reforms.^[1]

In September, the university’s governing structure was further consolidated: on September 24, 2025, the EHU Governing Board unanimously elected Dr. Mantas Adomėnas — a former Lithuanian Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs (2021–2023) and current Secretary General of the Community of Democracies — as its new Chairman. His election was framed by the university as providing “renewed momentum” at what would prove to be a critical juncture.^[2]

Through the fall, EHU carried on ordinary academic life alongside these governance changes: the 2025/26 academic year officially opened on October 1, 2025, and the university hosted a run of conferences and international visits, including the second annual “Rethinking Game Dev” conference (December 8–10) and an international heritage-studies conference (December 11–13).^[3]

The Pressure Begins to Build (Summer–Fall 2025)

Beneath the institutional business-as-usual, the Belarusian state had already begun laying groundwork against the university. On August 20, 2025, the Central District Court of Minsk designated EHU’s website and social media accounts as “extremist materials” — a lesser but still serious designation that exposed anyone engaging with EHU’s online presence to administrative arrest.^[4]

That same fall, according to EHU’s own later account, Belarusian security services began summoning students for interrogation, pressing them for information about the university, and in some cases persuading them to file for expulsion. Several students left the university after these conversations with their families; two lecturers also resigned in the fall of 2025 citing the mounting pressure.^[5]

In September 2025, the Belarusian Prosecutor General’s office — acting on a recommendation from the State Security Committee (KGB) — filed a petition with the Supreme Court of Belarus to have EHU formally recognized as an “extremist organization.”^[6]

It is worth noting the timing: this same month, Minsk was also making conspicuous overtures toward the West. Belarus hosted its quadrennial “Zapad” military exercises with Russia on September 12–16, 2025 — a notably smaller and lower-profile iteration than in past cycles — while Lukashenko sought to use the moment for what regional analysts described as a bid at de-escalation, releasing 52 political prisoners on September 11 in exchange for the lifting of US sanctions on Belavia, Belarus’s national airline. That the Prosecutor General moved against EHU in the same window in which Minsk was courting Western goodwill elsewhere is a reminder that the regime’s foreign and domestic tracks do not necessarily move in the same direction.^[7]

The Extremist Designation (April 2026)

The Supreme Court’s ruling came on April 14, 2026: it formally designated EHU, “together with its structural units,” an extremist organization, banning its activities and the use of its symbols and attributes anywhere in Belarus. The application underlying the designation alleged that EHU had “destabilized the socio-political situation” in the country, had assisted “radically politicized formations,” and had been used by foreign intelligence services to damage Belarusian interests in the political, humanitarian, and information spheres.^[8]

EHU responded the next day, on April 15, calling the decision “illegal, unjust and without any real legal force under Lithuanian and international law,” and noting it had been made in absentia, without evidence.^[9]

The practical consequences were immediate and severe. At the time of the designation, EHU had roughly 1,500 students, about 80 percent of them Belarusian, and some 100 faculty members. According to Human Rights Watch, roughly 100 students dropped out within the month following the ruling, out of fear of prosecution — on top of the students and staff who had already left the previous fall. Pavel Tserashkovich, science and education adviser to Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, characterized the designation’s purpose bluntly: not to prosecute every student, but to frighten current and prospective ones into leaving and to make the university toxic for Belarusians considering it.^[4]

International Response

The reaction from Vilnius and Brussels was swift and pointed. Lithuania’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs lodged a formal protest, calling the designation “politically motivated, unfounded and in violation of the principles of international law” and an infringement of Lithuanian sovereignty — noting that this was an unprecedented case of one country declaring a university legally operating in another country “extremist.” Vilnius stated it did not recognize the ruling’s legal force on Lithuanian territory and warned of further diplomatic and EU-level measures.^[10]

On April 20, Lithuanian Foreign Minister Kęstutis Budrys said he intended to raise the matter at the EU Foreign Affairs Council and to press for coordinated European action, including possible sanctions on the Belarusian officials responsible for the decision, alongside additional financial and political support for EHU.^[11]

The EU’s External Action Service also condemned the ruling, calling it “a blatant and unjustified attack on academic freedom” and part of “the regime’s systematic efforts to silence critical thinking, intimidate young people, and further dismantle civic space inside as well as outside of Belarus.” The EEAS noted that EU-funded scholarships and living assistance had supported hundreds of Belarusian students at EHU over the years.^[12]

Diplomatic engagement with the university continued at the institutional level as well: on November 20, 2025 — before the formal designation, but amid the mounting pressure — the Dutch Ambassador to Lithuania visited EHU’s campus for a briefing on the university’s mission and its Belarusian enrollment.^[3]

Escalation on the Ground (June 2026)

The designation’s real-world consequences deepened through the following two months. Beginning June 2, 2026, Belarusian authorities opened a wave of house searches and interrogations targeting EHU students, alumni, and their relatives — reported by the Viasna human rights center to have reached more than 40, and by some counts over 60, incidents within days. KGB officers reportedly pressured parents of current students to persuade their children to withdraw and return to Belarus within a ten-day window, and visited 2019–2025 graduates to confirm their degrees and identify who had financed their studies.^[13]

On June 10, 2026, Belarusian investigators opened a formal criminal case alleging that “unidentified individuals” had, since April 2016, knowingly collected and provided funds to support what is now a designated extremist organization — effectively criminalizing a decade of tuition payments. Conviction under the relevant articles of the Belarusian criminal code carries the possibility of years of imprisonment.^[14]

EHU responded on June 9, 2026 with an expanded package of support measures: simplified administrative procedures for affected students, accommodation options for those needing to relocate, expanded legal assistance through independent human rights experts, strengthened psychological support services, and a dedicated support hotline. The university said it had intensified cooperation with Lithuanian state institutions, diplomatic missions, and civil society organizations on visas, residence permits, and safe-passage arrangements for those who might need to leave Belarus.^[15]

Rector Šadauskas, in subsequent interviews, described the toll directly: at some faculties, up to 75 percent of Belarusian students were affected by the pressure campaign, whether through withdrawal, relocation, or family intimidation.^[16]

Where Things Stand

Despite all of this, EHU has continued to function. A graduation ceremony was held on June 25, 2026. The university opened applications for Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions postdoctoral fellowships in the spring of 2026, with a deadline of July 31. Admissions for the 2026/27 academic year are proceeding on schedule.^[3]

According to EHU’s own disclosures, the university’s institutional funders include the European Union, the Nordic Council of Ministers, the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida), and the governments of Lithuania, the Netherlands, and Iceland — a donor base that, notably, appears less exposed than many peer institutions to the sharp cuts in US foreign assistance that followed the halt of USAID programming in early 2025, though the broader European aid environment has also tightened over the same period.^[17]

What remains unresolved, as of this writing, is what — if anything — the EU will do with Lithuania’s push for coordinated sanctions against the Belarusian officials behind the designation, and whether the criminal case opened in June against a decade of EHU’s tuition-paying donors and families will result in actual prosecutions inside Belarus. Both bear close watching.

This timeline draws on EHU’s own public statements, reporting by Human Rights Watch, the Viasna Human Rights Center, Reform.news, Belsat, Nasha Niva, Meduza, and EU and Lithuanian government sources, among others. The Karski-Swyer Initiative maintains this as a living record; corrections and updates are welcome.

Sources

All links verified via web search on August 1, 2026. Because EHU’s news index (ehuniversity.lt/news) is regenerated frequently, several claims sourced to it (fall 2025 conferences, the Dutch Ambassador visit, the June 25, 2026 graduation, and the MSCA fellowship deadline) should be re-verified against the live page or archived via the Wayback Machine before publication, as no fixed permalink for those individual items was retrievable at the time of this search.

[1] EHU, “Rector” (official bio page confirming January 6, 2025 appointment) — https://en.ehuniversity.lt/about/structure/rector/

[2] EHU, “Dr. Mantas Adomėnas Unanimously Elected Chairman of the EHU Governing Board” — https://en.ehuniversity.lt/news/governing_board/; Community of Democracies, “The Community of Democracies welcomes Mantas Adomėnas as its next Secretary General” — https://community-democracies.org/the-community-of-democracies-welcomes-mantas-adomenas-as-its-next-secretary-general/

[3] EHU, News index (for items without a stable individual permalink at time of writing — verify/archive before citing) — https://en.ehuniversity.lt/news/

[4] Reform.news, “100 Students Leave EHU After It Was Designated an ‘Extremist Organisation’ in Belarus” — https://reform.news/en/100-students-leave-ehu-after-it-was-designated-an-extremist-organisation-in-belarus/amp; Ethan S. Burger, “Has Victor Orban’s Decisive Electoral Defeat in Hungary So Alarmed Mr. Lukashenko...”, Law Firm Client Integrity Initiative Substack —

The past is the present, isn't it? It's the future, too

Has Victor Orban's Decisive Electoral Defeat in Hungary So Alarmed Mr. Lukashenko and His Supreme Court into an Misguided Self-Destruction Overreaction?

The Hungarian Election of 2026: A Case Study in Democratic Resistance, Geopolitical Realignment, and the Authoritarian Tendency to Suppress Hope at its Own Peril…

Read more

5 months ago · Ethan S. Burger

[5] Reform.news, “100 Students Leave EHU After It Was Designated an ‘Extremist Organisation’ in Belarus” — https://reform.news/en/100-students-leave-ehu-after-it-was-designated-an-extremist-organisation-in-belarus/amp

[6] Human Rights Watch, “Belarus: Crackdown on an Independent University” (June 12, 2026) — https://www.hrw.org/news/2026/06/12/belarus-crackdown-on-an-independent-university

[7] EUobserver, “What this week’s Belarus-Russia military drill tells us about Lukashenko’s new posturing” — https://euobserver.com/15140/what-this-weeks-belarus-russia-military-drill-tells-us-about-lukashenkos-new-posturing/; Al Jazeera, “Belarus frees 52 political prisoners after US mediation” (September 11, 2025) — https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/9/11/belarus-frees-52-political-prisoners-after-us-mediation

[8] EHU, “The Supreme Court of Belarus Has Declared the European Humanities University an Extremist Organization” (official statement) — https://en.ehuniversity.lt/news/the-supreme-court-of-belarus-has-declared-the-european-humanities-university-an-extremist-organization/; Human Rights Watch, “Belarus: Crackdown on an Independent University” (June 12, 2026) — https://www.hrw.org/news/2026/06/12/belarus-crackdown-on-an-independent-university

[9] Ethan S. Burger, “Has Victor Orban’s Decisive Electoral Defeat...”, Law Firm Client Integrity Initiative Substack —

The past is the present, isn't it? It's the future, too

Has Victor Orban's Decisive Electoral Defeat in Hungary So Alarmed Mr. Lukashenko and His Supreme Court into an Misguided Self-Destruction Overreaction?

The Hungarian Election of 2026: A Case Study in Democratic Resistance, Geopolitical Realignment, and the Authoritarian Tendency to Suppress Hope at its Own Peril…

Read more

5 months ago · Ethan S. Burger

; EHU, “The Supreme Court of Belarus Has Declared the European Humanities University an Extremist Organization” (official statement) — https://en.ehuniversity.lt/news/the-supreme-court-of-belarus-has-declared-the-european-humanities-university-an-extremist-organization/

[10] Reform.news, “Lithuania Protests Belarus Over Designation of EHU as an ‘Extremist Organisation’” — https://reform.news/en/lithuania-protests-belarus-over-designation-of-ehu-as-an-extremist-organisation

[11] Belsat, “A university, a blacklist, and a new push for EU sanctions” — https://en.belsat.eu/92825545/a-university-a-blacklist-and-a-new-push-for-eu-sanctions; Reform.news, “EHU Comments on Being Declared an ‘Extremist Organisation’” — https://reform.news/en/ehu-comments-on-being-declared-an-extremist-organisation

[12] EEAS, “Belarus: Statement by the Spokesperson on the designation of EHU as an ‘extremist organisation’” — https://www.eeas.europa.eu/eeas/belarus-statement-spokesperson-designation-european-humanities-university-“extremist-organisation”_en; EU Neighbours East, “EU condemns designation of European Humanities University as ‘extremist organisation’” — https://euneighbourseast.eu/news/latest-news/eu-condemns-designation-of-european-humanities-university-as-extremist-organisation/

[13] Meduza, “Belarus searches homes of students at ‘extremist’-branded university...” (June 2, 2026) — https://meduza.io/en/news/2026/06/02/belarus-searches-homes-of-students-at-extremist-branded-university-threatens-reprisals-if-they-refuse-to-drop-out; Mezha.net, “Belarusian authorities conducted over 40 raids on EHU associates, detained relatives” — https://mezha.net/eng/bukvy/3382028e_belarusian_authorities_conducted/; Pozirk, “Belarus opens criminal case over tuition fees paid to exiled university in Vilnius since 2016” (June 10, 2026) — https://pozirk.online/en/news/191313/

[14] Pozirk, “Belarus opens criminal case over tuition fees paid to exiled university in Vilnius since 2016” (June 10, 2026) — https://pozirk.online/en/news/191313/; Human Rights Watch, “Belarus: Crackdown on an Independent University” (June 12, 2026) — https://www.hrw.org/news/2026/06/12/belarus-crackdown-on-an-independent-university

[15] Charter’97, “ESU Has Announced Support For Students, Faculty, And Their Families” — https://charter97.org/en/news/2026/6/10/687212; Pozirk, “Belarus opens criminal case over tuition fees paid to exiled university in Vilnius since 2016” (June 10, 2026) — https://pozirk.online/en/news/191313/

[16] Mezha.net, “Belarusian authorities conducted over 40 raids on EHU associates, detained relatives” — https://mezha.net/eng/bukvy/3382028e_belarusian_authorities_conducted/

[17] EHU, “Supporters” (official donor list) — https://en.ehuniversity.lt/about/supporters/; EHU, “Trust Fund” (donor and funding-structure page) — https://en.ehuniversity.lt/about/structure/trust-fund/

Additional Background Sources (not directly cited above)

The following sources informed background research for this timeline but are not tied to a specific claim above; they are listed for reference and further reading.

[18] Belsat, “EHU labeled extremist, its activities prohibited on Belarusian territory” — https://en.belsat.eu/92630097/ehu-labeled-extremist-its-activities-prohibited-on-belarusian-territory

[19] iSANS, “Belarus’s education system in April 2026” — https://isans.org/education/education-monitoring/belaruss-education-system-in-april-2026.html

[20] Wikipedia, “European Humanities University” (background, founding, and 2004 closure) — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Humanities_University

NOTEWORTHY ORGANIZATIONS CONCERNED ABOUT BELARUS

Karski-Swyer Initiative to Promote Belarusian Studies

karski-swyer-belarus-initiative.org

Anyone trying to follow Belarus from the outside quickly runs into the same problem: the country’s own state media reports one reality, and everything that contradicts it has been driven into exile, blocked, or labeled “extremist” by a court in Minsk. Understanding what is actually happening — to the political prisoners, to the independent press, to the universities and civil-society organizations that once operated inside the country — requires knowing where to look.

What follows is a working guide to the organizations and outlets we rely on to monitor Belarus: independent and exile media, the political opposition, human rights monitors, academic and policy institutions, and — because official propaganda is itself worth tracking — the state media apparatus it opposes. We are publishing it here because these sources are useful to anyone doing this work, not just to us.

INDEPENDENT & EXILE NEWS MEDIA

Most independent Belarusian journalism no longer operates from inside Belarus. After the 2020 election and the crackdown that followed, the country’s leading outlets were declared “extremist,” their staff prosecuted or forced abroad, and their websites blocked domestically. What remains is a resilient, largely exiled press corps still reporting on Belarus from Warsaw, Vilnius, Prague, and elsewhere.

Charter 97 — charter97.org — A prominent Belarusian opposition news site operating from Warsaw; covers politics, repression, civil society, and regional developments from a strongly anti-Lukashenko perspective.

Zerkalo — zerkalo.io — The successor to the suppressed TUT.by, formerly Belarus’s most-read independent news portal; now operates from abroad and provides broad general-news coverage.

Nasha Niva — nashaniva.com — One of the oldest Belarusian-language publications; its contemporary newsroom operates in exile and covers politics, society, culture, history, and the Belarusian language.

Belsat TV — belsat.eu/en — A Polish public-service satellite and online broadcaster serving Belarusian audiences. Belarusian authorities have designated Belsat’s internet resources as “extremist,” creating serious legal risks for people inside Belarus who distribute or interact with its content.

Belarusian Partisan — belaruspartisan.org/en — A Belarus-focused news and commentary site using the name of the historically prominent independent outlet. Readers should corroborate its reporting because the current site’s ownership and editorial continuity with the original publication are not sufficiently clear.

Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty — Belarus Service — rferl.org/Belarus / svaboda.org — A major U.S.-funded provider of Belarusian-language news and analysis, with additional English-language coverage of Belarus.

Deutsche Welle — Belarus coverage — dw.com — Reporting and analysis concerning Belarus from Germany’s international public broadcaster. Because DW reorganizes its topic pages periodically, the site search is more durable than the former topic URL.

POLITICAL OPPOSITION

Office of Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya — tsikhanouskaya.org — Official platform of the exiled Belarusian democratic leader and principal opposition candidate in the disputed 2020 presidential election; publishes statements, policy initiatives, campaign updates, and international advocacy.

United Transitional Cabinet of Belarus — ut-cabinet.org — An executive body of the Belarusian democratic movement in exile, coordinating policy and international advocacy.

Coordination Council of Belarus — rada.vision/en — A representative body of the democratic part of Belarusian society, established after the 2020 election; publishes resolutions, policy positions, election materials, and organizational news.

HUMAN RIGHTS ORGANIZATIONS

Viasna Human Rights Center — spring96.org/en — Belarus’s leading human-rights organization, documenting political imprisonment, torture, ill-treatment, and other forms of state repression; publishes news, databases, and periodic situation reports.

Human Rights Watch — Belarus — hrw.org/europe/central-asia/belarus — Investigations, reports, and advocacy concerning Belarus’s human-rights crisis.

Amnesty International — Belarus — amnesty.org — Belarus — Reports on human-rights violations and campaigns for political prisoners and others subjected to politically motivated persecution.

Belarusian Helsinki Committee — belhelcom.org — A long-established Belarusian human-rights organization. Liquidated as a registered organization by Belarusian authorities in 2021, it continues its work from outside the country.

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) — Belarus — rsf.org/en/country/belarus — Documents attacks on press freedom, including arrests of journalists, newsroom raids, censorship, and the use of “extremism” laws against independent media.

Belarusian Hajun — archived project — hajun.info — An influential open-source intelligence project that monitored Belarusian and Russian military activity. It ceased operations in February 2025 following a serious security breach. Its archives remain valuable, but its former Telegram bot and channel should not be treated as active or safe reporting channels.

Freedom House — Belarus — freedomhouse.org/country/belarus — Publishes Freedom in the World, Freedom on the Net, and related country assessments for Belarus, using published comparative methodologies.

ACADEMIC & POLICY

Journal of Belarusian Studies — brill.com/view/journals/bela — Established in 1965, the oldest English-language periodical devoted to Belarusian studies; peer-reviewed and indexed by Scopus, EBSCO, ERIH PLUS, and Google Scholar. Legacy site and conference archive: belarusjournal.com. Published by Brill.

Anglo-Belarusian Society — absociety.org.uk — Founded in 1954 to advance knowledge of Belarus and Belarusian culture in the United Kingdom; it helped establish the Journal of Belarusian Studies and partners in the Annual London Conference on Belarusian Studies.

NAABS — North American Association for Belarusian Studies — belarusianstudies.org — A scholarly organization promoting research and teaching across Belarusian history, language, literature, sociology, political science, and international relations. Currently inactive; it may resume activity around the November 2026 ASEEES meeting.

Belarus Digest — belarusdigest.com — A policy-oriented analytical portal covering Belarusian politics, economics, law, and society. Publication has become irregular, but its archive remains useful.

OSW — Centre for Eastern Studies (Poland) — osw.waw.pl/en — A Warsaw-based public think tank producing well-regarded English-language analysis of Belarus in its Eastern European and regional-security context.

Carnegie Endowment for International Peace — carnegieendowment.org — Publishes analysis of Belarus’s domestic politics and geopolitical role, particularly its relationships with Russia, Ukraine, and Europe.

ASEEES — Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies — aseees.org — The principal North American professional association for the field; its annual convention includes Belarus-related panels, and it publishes Slavic Review.

EUROPEAN HUMANITIES UNIVERSITY (EHU) & SUPPORT

Among the institutions on this list, one has particular significance for our own work: the European Humanities University, a “university-in-exile” that has kept Belarusian higher education alive from abroad for more than two decades.

European Humanities University (EHU) — en.ehuniversity.lt — A Vilnius-based liberal-arts institution advancing civil society through humanities and social-science education. Established in Minsk in 1992, it became a university in exile after Belarusian authorities forced it to close in 2004. It now operates two Vilnius campuses and awards accredited European Union diplomas.

EHU Graduate Programs — EHU master’s programs — Master’s programs include international law and security, business and trade law, gender studies, urban studies, and related fields. Prospective students should consult the current program pages for languages, formats, residency requirements, and admissions information.

American Councils’ Friends of EHU — philanthropic initiatives — A U.S. charitable initiative administered by American Councils for International Education that accepts tax-deductible contributions supporting EHU and its students. Friends of European Humanities University, Inc. is a U.S. 501(c)(3) public charity (EIN 27-1938165).

American Councils for International Education — americancouncils.org — Has supported EHU for more than thirty years, from its founding in Minsk through its continuing exile in Lithuania, and administers U.S. charitable support for EHU.

NEWS AGGREGATORS & MONITORING

NewsNow — Belarus — Belarus news page — Aggregates reporting on Belarusian politics, sanctions, human rights, the opposition, and regional security from numerous outlets. Useful as a discovery dashboard, but the reliability of individual linked sources varies.

H-Belarus on H-Net — networks.h-net.org/h-belarus — A scholarly network launched in September 2025 for researchers, teachers, students, and others interested in Belarusian studies; carries calls for papers, events, fellowships, publications, and academic discussion.

OFFICIAL BELARUSIAN GOVERNMENT & STATE MEDIA

(For tracking official positions and propaganda.)

BelTA News Agency — belta.by/en — Belarus’s principal state news agency; useful for tracking official government statements and narratives.

Belarus.by — belarus.by/en — An official state information portal covering government, legislation, tourism, and diplomatic positions.

Sovetskaya Belorussiya / Belarus Segodnya — sb.by — A Russian-language newspaper published by the Presidential Administration and a leading state print outlet.

ONT Television — ont.by — A state-controlled national television network reflecting official Belarusian and frequently Kremlin-aligned narratives.

PRACTICAL NOTES

Many independent Belarusian outlets have been designated “extremist” by Belarusian authorities and are blocked inside the country. People in Belarus may face surveillance, detention, or prosecution for subscribing to, sharing, or supplying information to designated sources. Readers inside Belarus should assess the legal and digital-security risks before interacting with any outlet or Telegram channel.

For fast-moving developments, the Telegram channels maintained by established outlets such as Charter 97, NEXTA, Zerkalo, Nasha Niva, Belsat, and Viasna can supplement their websites. Telegram reporting should be independently corroborated. Belarusian Hajun ceased operations in February 2025 and should not be treated as an active or secure reporting channel. NAABS’s website was not reliably accessible during the August 2026 review; H-Belarus and ASEEES are better current points of contact for academic announcements.

The Karski-Swyer Initiative to Promote Belarusian Studies maintains this guide as a living resource. Corrections, additions, and reports of dead links are welcome — the landscape of independent Belarusian media changes quickly, and precisely because it does, it needs to be watched closely.

Jan Karski: The Witness Who Would Not Look Away

Jan Karski spent nearly forty years on Georgetown’s faculty, but he is remembered first for what he did before he ever set foot on the Hilltop. As a courier for the Polish Underground State during the Second World War, Karski was smuggled into the Warsaw Ghetto and into a transit camp so that he could carry an eyewitness account of the destruction of European Jewry to the leaders of the free world. He met with British officials, with U.S. Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, and with President Franklin D. Roosevelt himself. The warning was, by his own account, not fully heeded. That failure haunted him for the rest of his life — and it is precisely why he spent his subsequent career teaching, at Georgetown, the discipline of taking testimony seriously.

Karski went on to earn his doctorate at Georgetown in 1952 and to teach international affairs there until his retirement, becoming one of the University’s most decorated professors. He was named Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem, received honorary Israeli citizenship, and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously in 2012. His memoir, Story of a Secret State, remains a foundational document of Holocaust testimony and of the broader history of the region that produced him: the eastern borderlands of interwar Poland, now split among Poland, Lithuania, and Belarus.

Solomon Pinchas Swyer: An Ordinary Emigrant’s Extraordinary Journey

The Swyer half of this initiative’s name belongs to a much less documented life. Solomon Pinchas Swyer was born in Vileika, in what was then the Russian Empire’s northwestern territory and is today Belarus, before later living in Minsk. Like so many Jewish families from that region, the Swyers left — Solomon emigrated to the United States in 1913, part of the great wave of departures that emptied the shtetls and provincial towns of the Pale of Settlement in the years before the First World War rendered emigration nearly impossible.

Solomon Pinchas Swyer never testified before a president or received a state medal. His story is preserved the way most family stories are: through documents pieced together generations later, through a name on a ship’s manifest, through the stubborn work of a grandson determined not to let a birthplace disappear from memory. That grandson is one of the people behind this initiative.

Pairing Karski’s name with Swyer’s is a deliberate statement about whose history counts. Belarusian studies as a field has often been squeezed between Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian scholarship, treated as a footnote to its larger neighbors. The people who actually came from that ground — the resistance couriers who became world-historical witnesses, and the ordinary emigrants whose names survive only in family papers — deserve a field of their own.

Then, living on South Pearl Street in Albany, New York, through contemporary newspaper accounts, Solomon Swyer learned of Jan Karski’s largely unheeded mission to alert the world—and, in particular, President Franklin D. Roosevelt—to the ongoing destruction of European Jewry. He deeply regretted the failure of those in positions of influence to make the world fully aware of the Shoah and to pursue policies that might have saved more lives.

Why Belarusian Studies, and Why Now

Belarus rarely makes headlines except during crisis — the falsified 2020 election, the crackdown on civil society, the war next door in Ukraine. Serious, sustained academic attention to Belarusian history, law, language, and civil society remains thin at American universities, even as a determined Belarusian democratic movement continues to organize in exile and Belarusian scholars themselves face closures and blacklisting at home, including the extremist designation slapped on the European Humanities University’s Belarusian programs by Belarus’s own Supreme Court earlier this year.

The Karski-Swyer Belarus Initiative aims to help fill that gap at Georgetown, building on the University’s existing strengths — the Center for Eurasian, Russian and East European Studies, the Center for Jewish Civilization, and Georgetown Law’s long engagement with post-Soviet legal reform. The initial phase centers on modest, achievable steps: named awards recognizing contemporary scholarly and civic engagement with Belarus, a growing archive of source materials, and outreach to other educational institutions. The long-term goal is more ambitious: an endowed chair in Belarusian Studies that ensures this field has a permanent home rather than depending on the enthusiasm of any one generation. As an alternative location for the endowed chair, the Initiative would support it being located at another suitable educational institution such as Columbia, Harvard, or Johns Hopkins University in the U.S. and the University of Toronto in Canada.

What Comes Next

The Initiative is using this Substack to share information connected to its research grant and fellowship support program and on the broader case for institutionalizing Belarusian Studies in American and Canadian higher education. If you are a scholar, alumnus, or institution with an interest in this work — or simply someone who believes that the history of a country should not be told only by its neighbors — we would welcome hearing from you.

The Karski–Swyer Initiative to Promote Belarusian Studies is an emerging project dedicated to establishing an endowed chair in the United States for a distinguished scholar and advocate whose work advances good governance, human rights, international law, and tolerance in a post-Lukashenko Belarus.