Why did Valancin Taulaj refer to himself as a jailed Communist in this poem?

Question

In his poem Last Words, Valancin Taulaj wrote:

I am a Communist! there are many like me
In this our land that from the dawn of time has growned,
Never shall magnates crush us, though they strike us,
By jails and gallows we're not overthrown!

He also refers to being condemned under laws written by the Tsar.

However, the author was born in 1914. The Tsar fell in 1918 (when he was only four), and the USSR took over Belarus in 1920 (when he was only six).

That being said, why does the author seem to be referring to himself? Was he actually a Communist, and was he actually jailed for it?

Answer 1

Valentin Tavlay was born in Western Belorussia. In the period between the two world wars, the region was part of Poland. As an ethnic Belarusian, Tavlay did not identify as Polish and resisted Polonization. With the goal of unifying Western Belarus to the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic, he joined the Komsomol, the Communist youth league, and worked as an agent of the Party. As a result, he was incarcerated by the Polish authorities and sentenced to death. Upon the Soviet invasion of Poland and annexation of Western Belorussia in September 1939, he was freed by the Red Army.

A page in the Belarusian archives about Tavlay's 110th birthday celebrations furnishes the following information:

Valentin Pavlovich Tavlay (1914–1947) was born into the family of a railway worker. He graduated from a Polish school in Lida. He entered the Slonim Teachers’ Gymnasium, from where he was expelled in 1925 for refusing to enroll as a Pole. In 1927–1929 he studied at the Vilna Belarusian Gymnasium. He was arrested for underground Komsomol activities and was in Slonim and Grodno prisons in 1929–1930. From October 1930 he lived in the BSSR (worked as an instructor for the Komsomol district committee in Rechitsa, at the newspaper «Zvyazda», and studied at the newspaper department of the literary department of the BSU). From December 1932, he was sent to underground work in Western Belarus (member of the editorial board of the Communist Party of Western Belarus, one of the editors of the Belarusian Newspaper, etc.). On January 4, 1934, he was arrested, sentenced to 8 years in prison in the Grodno prison, sentenced to death on September 22, 1939 and released by Red Army soldiers.

_{"BGAMLI took part in the opening of a joint exhibition dedicated to the 110th anniversary of the birth of Valentin Tavlay in Lida." Archives of Belarus. Accessed at https://archives.gov.by/en/news/1011181 4 August 2024.}

So yes, Tavlay is referring to himself. He was actually a Communist, and was actually jailed for it.