Abstract

The article, based on a wide range of archival documents, reveals the features of the Soviet national policy in the field of press in the Byelorussian SSR in the mid–late 1930s. The author emphasizes that changes in publishing activities occurred after the adoption in 1933–1934 of the resolutions of the CC of the VKP(b) on the national issue, which were considered by many local workers to be aimed at expanding the scope of the use of the Russian language and ending the service of Belarusian, Polish, Hebrew and other peoples in their native languages. Since the mid-1930s, there was a tendency to decrease the proportion of books, newspapers and magazines in the Belarusian language, and the languages of national minorities (with the exception of Russian). At the same time, the leadership of the BSSR took a course to gradually increase the output of printed materials in Russian in order to further distribute it among the working population of different nationalities. The author concludes that at the end of the 1930s the BSSR authorities refused to publish books, newspapers and magazines in Polish, Latvian, Lithuanian and other languages. The release of literature in Yiddish was limited.