Belarus As Part of The Russian Empire
In the late 18th and 19th centuries Belarusian szlachta were active participants of anti-Russian uprisings on the territory of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Tadeusz Kościuszko (Tadevush Kastsyushka), a nobleman from what is now Belarus, was leader of the Kościuszko Uprising in 1793. Kastus Kalinouski was the leader of January Uprising on the territory of the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania.
By the 19th century polonization of the szlachta on one hand and russification and violent introduction of Russian Orthodoxy to the peasantry on the other hand led to a situation where the social barrier between aristocracy and peasantry on Belarusian lands became in many aspects an ethnic barrier. In the 19th century, the era of nationalism, local intellectuals of peasant origin and some szlachta people like Francišak Bahuševič and Vintsent Dunin-Martsinkyevich contributed to the forming of modern-day Belarusians as a new nation of Slavonic-speaking inhabitants of the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania and basing on the historical and legacy of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and previous Ruthenian kingdoms of Polatsk and Turau. At the same time Baltic-speakers of the lands of modern Republic of Lithuania formed into modern-day Lithuanians and the historical unity of Ruthenians and Lithuanians fell apart.
Read more about this topic: Belarusian Nobility
Famous quotes containing the words part, russian and/or empire:
“If we were doing this in the Falklands they would love it. It’s part of our heritage. The British have always been fighting wars.”
—British soccer fan. quoted in Independent (London, Dec. 23, 1988)
“A criminal trial is like a Russian novel: it starts with exasperating slowness as the characters are introduced to a jury, then there are complications in the form of minor witnesses, the protagonist finally appears and contradictions arise to produce drama, and finally as both jury and spectators grow weary and confused the pace quickens, reaching its climax in passionate final argument.”
—Clifford Irving (b. 1930)
“Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, “This was their finest hour.””
—Winston Churchill (1874–1965)