Студенты-белорусы Университета Стефана Батория в Вильно в свете статистических и персональных данных: состав, социальное происхождение, национальная идентичность
ENThe article is devoted to the study of the community of Belarusian students of Vilnius University in the interwar period. The quantitative structure of this group was studied based on the university’s statistical data. Despite the fact that members of this community constituted no more than 3% of the total number of students, this group is primarily distinguished by its Belarusian national consciousness, i.e. it was the carrier of the Belarusian national identity and actively participated in the Belarusian national movement in Western Belarus. The social bac k g round of the Belarusian students was also studied based on their personal data in the university’s archives. This study showed that a great part of the students did not descend from peasants, but from a higher social class (group). Students of peasant origin often came from families who had abandoned the traditional rural way of life as a result of migration, or because of their status as refugees during the war. This horizontal or vertical social mobility in family histories of those students explains why they had the most evident national identity. At the same time it explains the small size of this group, as the majority of students from ethnographic Belarus indicated their nationality as Russian or Polish, so they either had been assimilating or did not have any national identity. They defined themselves on the basis of religion, class, state, etc.
