The Brest Church Union as Depicted in Belarusian School Textbooks Published in 2017–2021

The article examines the content   of   Belarusian school textbooks, particularly focusing on how they depict the establishment, functioning, and abolition of the Brest Church Union. The timeframe for textbook publication (2017–2021) is specified to reflect the current educational materials used by Belarusian schoolchildren at the time of writing the article. The teaching of history in Belarusian schools is divided into two main directions. The first direction (grades 5–9) presents history at a simpler level, focusing more on facts, dates, and event descriptions. The second direction approaches history at a more theoretical level, emphasizing cause-and-effect relationships and trends. To comprehend the portrayal of the Brest Church Union in school textbooks, it’s essential to analyze texts from both educational directions, comparing their presentation of the material and summarizing the findings. Textbooks for the 7-th (1st direction) and 11-th (2nd direction) grades consider the introduction of the Brest Church Union and its spread until the end of the 18th century. Both textbooks provide similar assessments of the union. They acknowledge that the union was forcibly imposed on the local Orthodox population and cite historical documents as evidence. However, both textbooks attempt to justify the negative reaction of the population towards the union by citing the excessive use of violence by the Uniates and the Polish government. Both textbooks suggest that if the union had been introduced through more humane methods, there would have been less mass resistance to its adoption. This contradicts historical sources, which provide examples showing that resistance to the union began immediately, even before the Polish government had fully implemented coercive measures. The claim that the union served as a barrier to Polonization and Catholicization lacks support from historical documents. Both textbooks exhibit contradictions when attempting to substantiate these assertions. The claim in textbooks that the union preserved the linguistic and cultural traditions of the people is also unsubstantiated. The textbooks for the 8-th (1st direction) and 11-th (2nd direction) grades depict the evolution of the union from the late 18th to the first half of the 19th century, culminating in the Polotsk Church Council of 1839. The textbook for the 8-th grade follows the ideological narrative established in the 7-th-grade textbook. To support the argument that the majority of Uniates were unwilling to convert back to Orthodoxy in the late 1830s-, the authors rely on documents from an earlier period and reference historical sources detailing specific instances, attempting to generalize these cases as indicative of broader trends. There are no documents confirming widespread resistance to the decisions of the Polotsk Church Council. Therefore, the textbook may utilize documents from other eras or specific cases to illustrate this point. The textbook for the 11-th grade provides a more accurate depiction of the Polotsk Church Council. It was published following the Belarusian authorities’ decision to revise the school history curriculum in response to the mass protests of 2020.

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