Belarusian Nationalism Research Articles

Belarus as an object of Poland's foreign policy

The article analyzes the evolution of foreign policy approaches of Poland towards Belarus and Belarusian nationalism. The main purpose of the article is to identify the evolution of approaches to Belarus in Polish political thought and practices of the Polish state. The ambiguous attitude of Polish political figures to Belarusian nationalism and the very idea of Belarusian statehood is demonstrated. This attitude has changed significantly over time from active rejection of Belarusian nationalism to readiness to use and support it in the foreign policy interests of Poland. The article shows that Poland’s contemporary approaches towards Belarus are based on the Giedroyc-Mieroszewski doctrine and involve the establishment of “soft” ideological, political, cultural and economic dominance of Poland in the former lands of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth without formally changing existing borders. It is noted that the success of these methods of Polish foreign policy in relation to Belarus is significantly lower than in relation to Ukraine. This is primarily due to the peculiarities of the political development of Belarus in the post-Soviet period, as well as the limited ability of Poland to influence the target audience within Belarusian society. The author draws attention to the fact that Polish policy towards Belarus should be the object of close attention of Russia, since the strengthening of Polish influence in the countries of the common neighborhood may pose a threat to Russian national interests.

Unsettling Borderlands: The Population Exchange and the Polish Minority in Soviet Belarus, 1944–1947

The article examines the Soviet nationality policy in Belarus in 1944–1947 during the population exchange between the Soviet Union and Poland. Unlike in Lithuania and Ukraine, the authorities in Belarus prioritized keeping the labor force over national homogenization, determined nationality by territory of birth, and attempted to keep the people by designating them as Belarusians irrespective of their self-identification. The article argues that in Belarus, the population transfer was a combination of an exodus of refugees with the expulsion of Poles by the state. Although the declarations about the voluntary character of the resettlement were false, the direction of the compulsion varied, and this ambivalence opened up a space of limited autonomy in which the people could exercise agency. The Soviet ethnic cleansing remained incomplete in Soviet Belarus because of the competing urge to keep the labor force. Paradoxically, much of the demographic de-Polonization of new western territories of Soviet Belarus was achieved without the state’s commitment to ethnic cleansing and without the involvement of Belarusian nationalism.

Belarusian Nationalism: Taking Stock of Its Accomplishments

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.

Belarusian Nationalism in the 2010s: a Case of Anti-Colonialism? Origins, Features and Outcomes of Ongoing ‘Soft Belarusianisation’

Abstract The past decade has seen the emergence of a new type of nationalism in Belarus, a process labelled as ‘soft Belarusianisation’. This trend differs from earlier, mostly top-down (elite-led) episodes of nation-building – the Belarusisation of the 1920s, the nationalists’ movement that followed perestroika, and the ‘Creole nationalism’ incarnated by A. Lukashenko since the mid-1990s. Instead, soft Belarusianisation seems to be a bottom-up process stemming mostly from civil society. It would be wrong to consider it as a traditional revivalist or genuinely grassroots phenomenon however. Yet it appears as an anti-colonialist process, one meant to avoid further assimilation of Belarusians within the Russian whole. Whereas signs of a timid national awakening appeared back in the early 2010s, two sets of factors contributed to shaping and accelerating soft Belarusianisation in recent years. First were exogenous drivers, notably Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014. Among the endogenous drivers is the Belarusian authorities’ benevolence towards soft Belarusianisation. Although they can exploit the rally-around-the-flag potential that the process entails for mobilising society in support of independence, the fact that soft Belarusianisation is perceived as anti-Russian in Russia proper creates a challenging situation for them. Should Belarusian nationalism overstep a red line, the likely consequences would be to put Belarusian sovereignty and national identity under a greater threat than it already is now.

Russian-speaking Belarusian Nationalism: An Ethnolinguistic Identity Without a Language?

This essay examines the development of a form of Russian-speaking Belarusian national identity. While Belarus’s early post-Soviet nationalists relied upon Belarusian as the central pillar of national identity, this has been challenged by more ‘pragmatic’ nationalists using the ‘language of the people’, namely, Russian. Analysing history textbooks and popular history books that represent three key identity projects in Belarus, this study sheds light on the specific programmatic ideas of a new Russian-speaking Belarusian nationalism. Despite the emergence of the geopolitically-motivated Russian World (Russkii Mir) concept, some Russian-speaking nationalists have articulated a programme that paradoxically draws upon Russian neo-Eurasianist thought, but which is simultaneously anti-Russian.

The Rise and Fall of Belarusian Nationalism, 1906–1931, written by Rudling, Per Anders

The Rise and Fall of Belarusian Nationalism, 1906–1931, written by Rudling, Per Anders

The Rise and Fall of Belarusian Nationalism, 1906–1931 by Per Anders Rudling

The Rise and Fall of Belarusian Nationalism, 1906–1931 by Per Anders Rudling

Forgotten occupation: Germans and Belarusians in the lands of Ober Ost (1915–17)

ABSTRACTThis article discusses Belarusian national activism during the First World War in the western borderlands of the Russian Empire, in the areas occupied by the German army in 1915. Chronologically, it is limited to the period between 1915 and 1917, before the German administration adopted a clear Lithuanian-oriented strategy for Ober Ost. The author examines both German and Belarusian perspectives, concentrating on the evolution of German attitudes to Belarusians as a separate ethnicity in Ober Ost as well as on the challenges for the Belarusian nation-building process in this period. Despite restrictive and exploitative German policies, Belarusian national elites in Ober Ost were able to articulate their goals and engage in practical nation-building activities. In contrast to the eastern Belarusian provinces, which remained under Russian rule and experienced a surge of national politics only after the February Revolution, in 1915 Ober Ost Belarusians were already pioneering the national cause through publishing, charities, and schools. They were able to secure partial support from the German occupation authorities, yet the latter merely instrumentalized Belarusian nationalism as a tool of their anti-Polish policies.

Per Anders Rudling. The Rise and Fall of Belarusian Nationalism, 1906-1931

<p><strong>Per Anders Rudling. <em>The Rise and Fall of Belarusian Nationalism, 1906-1931. </em></strong>Pitt Series in Russian and East European Studies. Ed. Jonathan Harris. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014. xii, 436 pp. Notes. Works Cited. Index. US$ 29.95, paper. E-book.</p>

The Rise and Fall of Belarusian Nationalism, 1906–1931 by Per Anders Rudling

The Rise and Fall of Belarusian Nationalism, 1906–1931 by Per Anders Rudling

The Rise and Fall of Belarusian Nationalism, 1906–1931 - The Rise and Fall of Belarusian Nationalism, 1906–1931. By Per Anders Rudling. Pitt Series in Russian and East European Studies. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015. xii, 436 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Illustrations. Photographs. Tables. Maps. $29.95, paper.

The Rise and Fall of Belarusian Nationalism, 1906–1931 - The Rise and Fall of Belarusian Nationalism, 1906–1931. By Per Anders Rudling. Pitt Series in Russian and East European Studies. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015. xii, 436 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Illustrations. Photographs. Tables. Maps. $29.95, paper.

The Rise and Fall of Belarusian Nationalism, 1906–1931, written by Per Anders Rudling

The Rise and Fall of Belarusian Nationalism, 1906–1931, written by Per Anders Rudling

Belarusian Nationalism and Foreign Powers

Belarusian Nationalism and Foreign Powers

The rise and fall of Belarusian nationalism, 1906-1931

and of nationalism, by Per Anders Rudling, Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014, x + 436 pp., US$29.95 (pbk), ISBN 978-0-822-96308-0In his book Rise and Fall of Per Anders Rudling provides a detailed story unfolding the venture of nationalism between 1905 and 1931. rise of nationalism he associates with the organized political activism of nationalists, which became possible in the conditions of liberalization of national policy in the Russian empire after 1905. fall was marked by the end of the policy of national communism in the USSR, when the formation of national and Soviet parallel identities fostered by the Bolshevik government in the 1920s was replaced by the repressions of national elites and the advancement of a Soviet project centred on Russian language and culture.The way of presenting the history of nationalism chosen by Per Rudling is rather unusual for studies of a national project: rather than focusing on the dominant track of nationalists' arguments and their political achievements, he tends to deconstruct the context in which nationalist activists had to operate. As a result, the author navigates in a complex historical realm where nationalist intellectuals, often split among themselves along political lines, were contested by other national movements, and they altogether proved to be highly dependent on various external actors and changing conditions.Chapter 1, Imagining Belarus, reconstructs the historical context in which the idea was first taken as a political category by nationalists. Rudling shows how the composite national environment of the western borderland of the Russian Empire created the competitive ideological atmosphere for the articulation of a national project. Chapter 2, The Beginning of Nationalism, depicts barriers of a various nature that Belarusians had to overcome on their way to a modem nation: the historical legacy of blurred boundaries between ethno-linguistic groups populating the region; the consequences of western Russian discourse developed in the empire that denied the existence of ethnicity; Kraowa ideology, which highlighted the ethnic heterogeneity of lands and promoted the multinational political project; the orientalization of Belarus in the discourse of Polish nationalists, and so on.Chapter 3, Six Declarations of Statehood in Three Years, shows how national activists repeatedly attempted to achieve state independence during the chaotic period of 1917-1920. story told by Rudling to a certain extent disguises the opinion about the lack of political will to statehood among Belarusians. But it also reveals a critical level of dependency of nationalism on various external actors - German occupational forces, the Polish state, and the Bolshevik party and Soviet government - who played pivotal and often destructive roles in nation-building. Chapter 4, Nationalities Policy in Soviet Belarus, and Chapter 5, Belarusian Nationalism in the Second Polish describe the contrasting conditions for the national development of Belarusians across the border established by the Riga Treaty - the one that left Belarus divided between the Soviet Union and the Polish Republic. Instead of focusing on the dissimilar experiences of indigenization (korenizatsiia) in Soviet Belarus and Polonization in Poland, Rudling, again, brings into picture a far more complex ethnic and linguistic landscape in which nationalists had to deal not only with the state ideologies of the USSR or the Second Polish Republic, but also with competing national ideologies of other ethnic groups - Poles, Jews, Ukrainians - as well as with ideological and political splits among themselves. …

ПРОИЗВОДСТВО И РЕПРЕЗЕНТАЦИЯ “СВОЕГО” ПРОСТРАНСТВА БЕЛАРУСКИМ НАЦИОНАЛЬНЫМ ДВИЖЕНИЕМ В НАЧАЛЕ ХХ ВЕКА

The article reconstructs spatial thinking about Belarus as a national territory in the early twentieth century. Different approaches to national mental mapping, suggesting and revising boundaries with analogous national territories of other national groups (first of all, Poles and Lithuanians), were developed within the rising nationalist movement. The author reconstructs the most influential discursive practices of Belarusian nationalism by looking into political documents as well as the few national Belarusian periodicals existing at the time, belles lettres, and educational materials. Targeting the broad Belarusian public (first of all, peasantry), these literatures collectively pursued the goal of their nationalization. Intertextual analysis allows the author to discuss the rival projects of the territorialization of Belarus (including the supranational idea of restoring the ancient Grand Duchy of Lithuania as a commonwealth of Belarusians, Lithuanians, and other nationalities); various criteria of identifying belonging to a nation, with language becoming the primary factor; and the political implications of different versions of the Belarusianization of territory.

Феминистская языковая реформа как ресурс беларуского национализма: частный случай "феминизации бела­руского языка"

The article investigates how present-day Belarusian nationalism determines the quality of research and intellectual writing in Belarus. This is a case study of a book titled "Feminization of the Belarusian Language," by Uladzislaŭ Harbatski, which supposedly advocates gender equity in language and aims to introduce female versions of professional titles. The article argues that the Belarusian nationalist and anticolonial agenda overwrites the feminist message in the case of linguistic feminization. The latter is just an occasion to fight for the revival of "proper" Belarusian, which was affected by the Russification Language Reform of 1933 during Soviet totalitarianism. It is an occasion to publicly articulate the issues related to the Belarusian nationalist movement and identity. No matter how small, the book in question represents a tendency in post-Soviet Belarusian humanities to declare and employ a specific research field in order to reproduce the pro-European nationalist and anticolonial agenda.

Minor Nation

In the twentieth century, nationalism has become an unwritten yet strong hegemonic rule that prescribes and defines cultural configurations of statehood. In the context of post-socialist and post-colonial transformations in “expanding” Eastern Europe, nation building is a complicated and incoherent process: the nation’s canonic attributes may contradict the cultural and historical “circumstances” of the development of a particular nation. This article questions a complicated dynamic between theoretical frameworks of nationalism and their applications in Eastern European states, such as in Belarus. More specifically, it argues against the discursive conceptualization of Belarus as a “nonexistent” or “undeveloped” nation. This article suggests rethinking nation building in Belarus in relation to the notion of major/minor developed by Deleuze and Guattari. The author implies that the unusual mode of Belarusian nationalism is not only a part of a struggle for domination between different intellectual groups in Belarus; it is also an issue of relying on traditional scholarly paradigms of nationalism that may no longer suffice.

Culture Wars, Soul-Searching, and Belarusian Identity

Attaching political labels to a situation whose roots transcend politics constitutes a critical weakness of Western policies vis-à-vis Belarus. The contemporary nationalist discourse in Belarus allows one to discern three “national projects,” each being a corpus of ideas about Belarus “the way it should be”: (1) Nativist/pro-European, (2) Muscovite liberal, and (3) Creole. While the projects' nametags are debatable, the trichotomy is a useful abstraction, as it reflects the lines of force in the “magnetic field” of Belarusian nationalism. The article analyzes the strengths and weaknesses of each project, cultural wars between them, the role of a civilizational fault line that runs across Belarus and the attendant geopolitical divisions that underlie multiplicity of national projects. The idea is expressed of a desirable consensus based on the most viable aspects of the national projects.

Unfinished Nation-Building in Belarus and the 2006 Presidential Election

A U.S.-based geographer interprets the results of the March 19, 2006 presidential elections in Belarus as a contest among three emergent strands of Belarusian nationalism. The study is based on national surveys conducted by an independent research/polling organization, analysis of websites of Radio Liberty's Belarusian Service and opposition-minded and official media outlets, as well as field observations and selected interviews. The author begins by examining polling results believed to reflect mass attitudes of rank-and-file Belarusians; the three strands of nationalism (personified by the three major presidential candidates) are then described in detail. He argues that lack of national consolidation presents a far greater problem for Belarus than the much-reviled Lukashenka regime, particularly in the context of recent disputes with Russia over oil and gas transit and pricing. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: O18, P20, Z00. 5 tables, 70 references.

Belarusian Nationalism and the Clash of Civilizations

:Belarus belongs to Huntington’s “cleft countries.” A religious split of its population into the Orthodox majority and the Catholic minority has been–and remains–a serious problem for the Belarusian national movement. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Belarusian national leaders intended to restore Greek Catholicism (the Uniatefaith) as the national creed. In the 1920s their high hopes focused on the growing neo-Protestantism. Neither of their activities produced lasting results before 1939. For fifty years after the end of World War II, all of Belarus, including its western part, was a Soviet republic within the Soviet Union, where the Soviet authorities forcefully promoted atheism and a pan-Soviet patriotism (lack of nationalism) for all citizens. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Belarus became a sovereign state. Political power was at first held by the Catholics until the 1994 presidential elections. Alaksandr Lukashenka, the newly elected president, who is still in power, presented himself to the nation as an “Orthodox atheist.” Since then Belarus has remained firmly in the political sphere of Eastern (Russian) and Orthodox orientation. The decade of state sovereignty produced religious renewal in Belarus. In addition to the Orthodox and Catholic faiths, neo-Protestantism has been revived and continues to grow at a rapid pace. It is quickly becoming the third major creed in Belarus. There are reasons to believe that this religious trichotomy may have an important and benefiCial impact on the further development of the Belarusian national movement and on both the internal and international stability of Belarus.