Autosovietization. Migration, Urbanization and Social Acculturation in Western Belarus

Abstract

This article analyzes the Sovietization of Western Belarus after 1944 as a consequence of the region’s Soviet and German occupations. Both occupational regimes inflicted mass violence on the region and deeply altered its urban social structures. During the following decades, most of the local rural population migrated to Western Belarusian destroyed cities and remade the sociospatial structure of the region. The article argues that Sovietization was grounded in the violence that occurred during and after WWII. Yet Sovietization also triggered a long-term process of social acculturation, described in the article as autosovietization. The paper explains how and why rural urbanites actively participated in the creation of a new Soviet West. Eager to partake in the Soviet modernization project, most of these rural migrants voluntarily adopted Russian, the main urban language. To a large extent, this readiness to adopt Russian was an attempt to leave the village and its symbolic heritage behind. This dynamic was strengthened by Soviet folklorization practices, which transformed some elements of rural heritage into new urban forms that strictly bound Soviet Belarusianness to the village. This concept of titular culture in the Belorussian Social - ist Soviet Republic fell in line with the negative self-perception of most migrants, who perceived Belarusian vernacular as a major marker of their rural descent. The mass switch from speaking vernacular to speaking Russian in public spaces is interpreted as a symbolic act of social acculturation. At the same time, newly Soviet towns hosted hybrids of rural and urban cultural practices. In the linguistic field, the strong domination of Russian in public went hand in hand with the emergence of mixed idioms such as the Belarusian- Russian trasianka in private spaces. Based on oral histories and archival records, this text argues that exploring the interplay between the violent dimension of Sovietization and the soft power of the Soviet modernization project is central to understanding the Sovietization of the post-WWII periphery of the Soviet Union.