a new regulation was passed allowing for the Belarusian language to be used officially both in courts and in schools. Obligatory teaching of Belarusian was introduced in all Polish gymnasia in areas inhabited by Belarusians in 1927. In the 1921–1926 period Poland did not have a consistent policy towards its ethnic minorities. Belarusian schools, not being subsidized by the Polish government, were facing severe financial problems already by 1921. After an early period of liberalization, tensions between increasingly nationalistic Polish government and various increasingly separatist ethnic minorities started to grow, and the Belarusian minority was no exception. A Belarusian organization, the Belarusian Peasants' and Workers' Union, was banned in 1927, and opposition to Polish government was met with state repressions. Nonetheless compared to the (larger) Ukrainian minority, Belarusians were much less politically aware and active, and thus suffered fewer repressions than the Ukrainians. Increasingly, Belarusians in Poland faced extensive Polonization. After the 1930 elections in Poland, Belarusian representation in the Polish parliament was reduced and in the early 1930s the Polish government started to introduce policies intended to Polonize minorities. In 1935, after the death of Józef Piłsudski, a new wave of repressions was released upon the minorities, with many Orthodox churches and Belarusian schools being closed. In 1938 about 100 Orthodox churches were destroyed or converted to Roman Catholic ones in the eastern parts of Poland, the majority of them in ethnically Ukrainian territories. Use of Belarusian was discouraged. Not a single Belarusian school survived until the spring of 1939, and only 44 schools teaching Belarusian still existed in Poland at the beginning of World War II. Belarusian leadership was sent to Bereza Kartuska concentration camp. Earlier, Belarusian political leaders reported to the League of Nations of tens of thousands being flogged by police, and subject to torture in interrogations. According to Belarusian accounts, sixty to seventy peasants were hanged daily during anti-guerrilla campaigns. After the August 1939 Nazi-Soviet Pact and pursuant German and Soviet invasion of Poland in September 1939, portrayed by Soviet propaganda as 'liberation of Western Belarus and Western Ukraine', many Belarusians welcomed unification with Belorussian SSR. Since 1939, with the exception of a brief period of Nazi occupation, almost all Belarusians previously living in Poland would live in the Belorussian SSR. It was initially planned to move the capital of the Byelorussian SSR to Vilnius. However, the same year Joseph Stalin ordered that the city