Abstract
Belarus is a country with a blurred identity that has not cut the umbilical cord connecting it with Mother Russia. According to a representative national survey of April 2020, only 25 percent of Belarusians would prefer to retain statehood and national sovereignty of Belarus even if their living standards worsen whereas 52 percent would opt for limited sovereignty if it is the price to pay for retaining or improving the quality of life. This may be the best-kept secret of Belarus and it has implications more serious than just economic dependency on Belarus’s eastern neighbor. Belarus used to be a contested borderland claimed by both Russians and Poles. Today, it is a country with two historical narratives and nation-building blueprints that have been confronting each other since the inception of the Belarusian national movement. While the neo-Soviet/Russo-centric narrative has held sway over the majority of Belarusians, the Westernizing narrative was hard-hit on several occasions but has been making headway since Gorbachev’s Perestroika. Pluses and minuses of two narratives and the attempts at bridging the gap between them are analyzed. There are essentially two kinds of divisions in Belarusian society: between the respective projects of nation-building and between Lukashenka loyalists and his detractors. These two divisions do not quite coincide, but there is a growing tendency to couch the ongoing political crisis in nationalist terms. The point is made that a lack of cohesive Belarusian identity is an existential threat to Belarusian statehood.
Highlights
Belarus is a country with a blurred identity that has not cut the umbilical cord connecting it with Mother Russia
The implicit or explicit followers of the so-called West-Rusism,[2] i.e., those insisting on inherent ties between Belarus and Russia that supposedly fall within a single civilization, but still seeing Belarus as a separate national community, have never been called nationalists, which does not seem to make sense
From 1596 to 1838, most, up to 70%, of locals belonged to the Uniate or Greek Catholic Church that combined Orthodox liturgy with subordination to the Vatican – the consequence of the 1596 Union of Brest that itself resulted from political authority of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and from weakened ties with Muscovy
Summary
This article contains reflections over history and unaccomplished mission of Belarusian nationalism. Following the 1905 Religious Tolerance Manifesto, many of those converts reverted to Catholicism.[1] It looks like up until the late 1920s, a niche for Belarusian nationalism that emerged at the very end of the 1800s was minuscule and fragile as “anything that used to be elevated above the illiterate peasant existence, be that church, school, or officialdom, automatically became either ‘Russian’ (and Orthodox) or ‘Polish’ (and Catholic).”[2] And that is despite the fact that folklore expeditions organized by the ideologues of WestRusism had described what they saw as Belarusian ethnicity as early as the 1860s.3. Within the BSSR, the Belarusian Westernizers (a.k.a., nationalists) and the de facto followers of West-Rusism represented two mutually hostile groups Both with local roots, they were trying to curry favor with the communist regime. Is packaged with a corresponding version of national memory as a prerequisite for shaping that future
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
