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rfmcdonaldThis post is the fourth in an intermittant series of posts examining closely related pairs of states which have so far resisted the tendency to unite. Previous posts include examinations of the situations of Germany and Austria, Romania and Moldova, and the two Koreas.
The intermittent Russian efforts since the fall of the Soviet Union to reunify at least parts of the Soviet state under the control of Moscow have had the greatest success in Belarus. Known as the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic in the Communist area and commonly called White Russia under the Tsars, never developing like Ukraine a strong local nationalism, apart from a brief period of pluralism early in the 1990s independent Belarus' history has been marked by the dictatorship of Alexander Lukashenko. Lukashenko--recently winner of a referendum identified by his critics as unconstitutional called to endorse his running for a third term--has presided over the establishment of a revived Communist state in Belarus, closely associated with (and eavily dependent upon) Russia.
Much recent press--for instance, Alexander Bely's April 1997 article "Belarus: a real or fictitious nation?" in History Today--has suggested that Lukashenko's relationship with Russia might signal the end of Belarus as a state. Soon enough, the writers argue, Belarus will simply be assimilated directly to the Russian federation, finis Belarusiae. They are correct about the strong degree of assimilation, I grant them that; they're wrong to equate assimilation with annhilation, though.
Imagine for a moment that after the Second World War, the territory that now makes up western Belarus and which was included within the frontiers of the Second Polish Republic was included within the frontiers of Poland. Perhaps Stalin decided to create a Red Prussia to Poland’s west and could not provide a revived Poland with enough compensatory territory in the west to get away with the annexation of the northeast of Second Republic Poland’s kresy. Perhaps, less likely, the Soviet Union is badly damaged in the course of Operation Barbarossa and Poland’s liberators come from the west instead of the east, or Stalin allows Poland to retain much of the kresy while giving it the Oder-Neisse frontiers in the hope of creating. Whatever the result, this Poland’s frontiers include the cities of Brest and Grodno now, and end just a hundred kilometers short of Minsk.
The extermination of Polish Belarus’ Jewish population, and the wartime slaughter of a quarter of the total non-Jewish population, will leave the region devastated. Already one of the poorest areas of the Second Republic, the Second World War will leave Polish Belarus thoroughly dependent on its integration in a wider economic system in order to survive. Thus, as Poland industrializes, Belarusian peasants will be drawn towards Poland’s towns both inside and outside of their homeland, as will ethnic Poles attracted by the region’s labour shortages. To a much greater degree than in the Second Republic, Polish Belarus’ economy and society will be centrally controlled from Warsaw, its economy fully integrated into all-Polish networks, and its society modelled on the ideal Polish model. To be sure, Polonization may be resisted by nationalistic Belarusians, particularly intelligensia and particularly in free or relatively free Polands; but still; the historically low status of the Belarusian language, and the relative prestige of Polish culture, will attract more ethnic Belarusians into a Polish orbit than the intelligensia will save for its nation.
The net result will be to produce a Polish Belarus that’s substantially Polonized, with Polish being the region’s main language, fluency in Belarusian declining sharply enough among ethnic Belarusians, and relatively poor prospects for autonomous nationhood even if Polish Belarus was somehow detached. If the denizens of Polish Belarus end up deciding that rather than constituting a distinct nationality they are, in fact, just one regional population within the broader Polish nation, the odds of separatism grow still more remote.
I wrote about this sort of Poland, actually, when I described the Republic of Minsk in the For All Time alternate history. Founded by republicans fleeing the establishment of a German-oriented monarchy in western Poland, the Republic of Minsk was substantially populated by Poles and by Belarusians assimilated to a Polish identity. (And, incidentally, by large numbers of Jews; that alternate history’s Germany might have been expansionistic, but thankfully it wasn’t genocidal.) The Republic of Minsk was a nation caught on the fence, with a fundamentally East Slavic heritage but with a Polish cultural heritage that tugged the nation away from its historical orientation.
To no small extent, Polish Belarus’ experience in the above counterfactual scenario—and, of course, the experience of the Republic of Minsk in For All Time—mirrors that of the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic after the Second World War. The decimation of Belarus’ Jews on both sides of the interwar Polish-Soviet frontier and the expulsion of ethnic Poles accentuated a shortage of labour in the republic, soon to be filled by hundreds of thousands of Russian immigrants. The failure to achieve even a brief independence in the interwar years like Latvia or Estonia had robbed the country of a chance to formulate a sense of nationhood, while the annhilation of Belarus’ traditional nationalist intelligensia-—in the east under Stalin, in the west under Hitler-—made it difficult even after Stalin to articulate a sense of Belarusian identity. The west of the country, traditionally populated by Eastern Rite and Roman Catholics closely linked to Poland and the rest of Latin Christendom, was certainly less Sovietized than eastern Byelorussia, in much the same way that the west of Ukraine was populated by Roman and associated Catholics and escaped the Sovietization of the Stalinist era. However, western Ukraine was an Austrian territory before the restoration of Poland’s independence, and the Ukrainian peasantry had been almost encouraged to develop a local nationalism by their Hapsburg rulers; western Belarus was Russian, however, and Belarusian nationalism was resisted by the Tsars as much as Polish nationalism.
It didn’t help the cause of Belarusian separatism that few people saw a substantial gap between Belarusians and Russians. Most Belarusians—with the partial exception of those in the west of their new republic—were of Orthodox Christian background, just like the Russians. The experience of the Second World War was held in common by Belarusians and Russians, who suffered equally as East Slavic victims of Hitler’s imperialism and who shared in the common Soviet victory over Nazi Germany. Perhaps most importantly, in urban settings Belarusian language and peasant culture defaulted not to an urbanized Belarusian mass cuture but to a Soviet mass culture that was de facto Russian.
The official efforts to build a Belarusian national identity distinct from Russia occupied barely four years, in the period 1990-1994, and were left incomplete by Lukashenko’s assumption of power. It’s interesting, though, to see what Belarus’ nationalists tried to do in the brief time that they ruled.
They weren’t able to formulate a clear Belarusian national tradition. For instance, many Belarusian nationalists pointed to a large Belarusian diaspora. Much of this diaspora, though, is made up of Jews who identify with Belarus only as a geographical expression, identifying their ancestors instead as Jews from the Russian Empire, or perhaps as Jews from the Litvak community. Others include people who have been assimilated to other national traditions, chiefly the Polish and the Russian. Assimilating individuals from these three separate traditions to a newly-constructed one was rather difficult. Similarly, efforts to assimilate the Grand Duchy of Lithuania as a Belarusian phenomenon, based upon the location of the Grand Duchy’s territorial and linguistic core in Belarus, failed, likely given the presence of an independent Lithuania which did a much better job.
The language question was equally important, and depressing. In the Baltic States, the sharp differences-—in comprehensibility, in states, in rates of fluency across ethnolinguistic communities—-between Baltic languages catalyzed local nationalist movements. Particularly in Estonia and Latvia, where the native languages were at a notable disadvantage, membership in the national community was made contingent upon fluency in the national language. In Moldova, where the Russian language had gained acceptance as a high-status language of wider communication even among ethnic Romanians, the status of Romanian was divisive. Even in Ukraine, where a near-majority even of ethnic Ukrainians speaks Russians natively or at least predominantly, the post-Communist governments have consistently claimed to promote the use of the titular language. Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Romanian, even Ukraine—all these languages had extensive written and spoken traditions, lacked by Belarusian. Belarusian was, if anything, seen as a dialectal form of Russian. Russian is the dominant language of Belarus’ cities, and of the central and eastern portions of the country, and despite efforts at revival—hindered, it must be said, by Lukashenko’s hostile atttitude towards the Belarusian language in education and government—the trend is strongly negative. Far from having aspirations towards being a universally-spoken national vernacular, Belarusian can hope at best for privileged minority status like Welsh in Wales; more realistically, it might meet the fate of Irish in Ireland.
If, on the eve of Tsardom’s fall, Belarusian identity was as well-articulated as the Ukrainian, or—better still—the Lithuanian, then the post-Soviet Belarusian state would have had at least a more independent fate. It didn’t, though; the residents of Belarus waited too long, and were never committed to the project at any rate.
If Belarusian identity is so weak and so strongly Russophile, why hasn’t the country disappeared?
The earliest suggestion in print I’ve read of this goes back to General Sir John Hackett’s Third World War books, in which a conventional NATO-Warsaw Pact war is ended by a two-stage nuclear exchange, the Soviet Union destroying Birmingham and the Anglo-Americans razing Minsk. The Soviet satellite states quickly break away; the Balts and Ukrainians witness Minsk’s destruction and secede to ensure their national survival; Russia collapses into chaos; the Central Asians look anxiously to America for protection against the Chinese. Belarus splits into a Catholic west which promptly joins Poland, and an Orthodox east which seeks to join Russia. Unfortunately, the disappearance of the Russian state makes the fate of east Belarus problematic in this alternate history.
In our own history, Lukashenko’s strong foreign-policy orientation towards Russia and the intense economic cooperation between Russia and Belarus—most recently demonstrate by the construction of pipelines bypassing Ukraine—has been taken as a sign that, soon, Belarus will be Russian again.
Admittedly, by almost all conventional standards the Belarusian nation is weak. The Belarusian state, though, has a long history indeed, almost as long as that of the Baltic States. A Belarusian soviet socialist republic was formed in 192x, and despite the changing territories and populations under its control it continued to exist despite Stalin’s genocidal purges, despite Hitler’s genocidal invasions, despite the continued integration of Minsk as a prosperous industrialized core of the Soviet economy. Belarus is strongly Sovietized, to be sure; this Soviet identity, however, also gave lip service to Belarusian independence. Belarus’ Russification is simply demonstrable proof of the survival of many elements of Soviet identity, which was to a certain degree a transnational identity as Ken MacLeod observed back in September.
Lukashenko isn’t fond of the symbols of Belarusian nationhood—the language, the history. He does refer to Belarus’ Soviet past, though, and to the existence of Russian-Belarusian camaraderie dating back to the Soviet Union and previously in the era of the Tsars. Lukashenko does not equate Belarusians with Russians; he identifies the two peoples as equal partners in common projects. When Russia, as the larger and wealthier country of the two, becomes overbearing, he retreats from these common projects.
Besides, Belarus and Belarusians have a strong interest in retaining their sovereign and independent state. Whether one speaks of nationalists who still want to create a Belarusian nation-state or of conservatives invested in the idea of Belarus as a partner in various transnational projects, there is no obvious logic calling for the obliteration of an autonomous Belarus.
What, exactly, is Belarus’ future?
The full integration of Belarus into the Russian Federation, whether as a collection of six disarticulated provinces or (marginally more likely) as an autonomous republic on the model of Tatarstan, is unlikely. The full independence of Belarus from the Russian sphere of influence, perhaps affiliating with the European Union’s “Wider Europe” program or even joining the Union itself, is also unlikely.
The Lukashenko regime may or may not survive the next decades, but Belarus will remain bound by is current geopolitical environment (an adjoining European Union reluctant to expand further into eastern Europe in any sense, a culturally similar and economically powerful Russia to the east, a Ukraine facing the similar if lesser constraints to its south). Barring wild cards like (say) the development of Poland into a formidable regional power with a First World economy capable of drawing its eastern neighbours from the Russian orbit, or alternatively some sort of catastrophic collapse in Russia, Belarus may well find that its road to "Europe" has to swing through Moscow before reaching Brussels. Barring the discontent of a vocal minority, there’s not necessarily any reason to mind this. If Belarusians don't want to associate their country with the European Union, and are willing to accept Lukashenko's continued dictatorship as a lesser evil, that's their choice.
The intermittent Russian efforts since the fall of the Soviet Union to reunify at least parts of the Soviet state under the control of Moscow have had the greatest success in Belarus. Known as the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic in the Communist area and commonly called White Russia under the Tsars, never developing like Ukraine a strong local nationalism, apart from a brief period of pluralism early in the 1990s independent Belarus' history has been marked by the dictatorship of Alexander Lukashenko. Lukashenko--recently winner of a referendum identified by his critics as unconstitutional called to endorse his running for a third term--has presided over the establishment of a revived Communist state in Belarus, closely associated with (and eavily dependent upon) Russia.
Much recent press--for instance, Alexander Bely's April 1997 article "Belarus: a real or fictitious nation?" in History Today--has suggested that Lukashenko's relationship with Russia might signal the end of Belarus as a state. Soon enough, the writers argue, Belarus will simply be assimilated directly to the Russian federation, finis Belarusiae. They are correct about the strong degree of assimilation, I grant them that; they're wrong to equate assimilation with annhilation, though.
Imagine for a moment that after the Second World War, the territory that now makes up western Belarus and which was included within the frontiers of the Second Polish Republic was included within the frontiers of Poland. Perhaps Stalin decided to create a Red Prussia to Poland’s west and could not provide a revived Poland with enough compensatory territory in the west to get away with the annexation of the northeast of Second Republic Poland’s kresy. Perhaps, less likely, the Soviet Union is badly damaged in the course of Operation Barbarossa and Poland’s liberators come from the west instead of the east, or Stalin allows Poland to retain much of the kresy while giving it the Oder-Neisse frontiers in the hope of creating. Whatever the result, this Poland’s frontiers include the cities of Brest and Grodno now, and end just a hundred kilometers short of Minsk.
The extermination of Polish Belarus’ Jewish population, and the wartime slaughter of a quarter of the total non-Jewish population, will leave the region devastated. Already one of the poorest areas of the Second Republic, the Second World War will leave Polish Belarus thoroughly dependent on its integration in a wider economic system in order to survive. Thus, as Poland industrializes, Belarusian peasants will be drawn towards Poland’s towns both inside and outside of their homeland, as will ethnic Poles attracted by the region’s labour shortages. To a much greater degree than in the Second Republic, Polish Belarus’ economy and society will be centrally controlled from Warsaw, its economy fully integrated into all-Polish networks, and its society modelled on the ideal Polish model. To be sure, Polonization may be resisted by nationalistic Belarusians, particularly intelligensia and particularly in free or relatively free Polands; but still; the historically low status of the Belarusian language, and the relative prestige of Polish culture, will attract more ethnic Belarusians into a Polish orbit than the intelligensia will save for its nation.
The net result will be to produce a Polish Belarus that’s substantially Polonized, with Polish being the region’s main language, fluency in Belarusian declining sharply enough among ethnic Belarusians, and relatively poor prospects for autonomous nationhood even if Polish Belarus was somehow detached. If the denizens of Polish Belarus end up deciding that rather than constituting a distinct nationality they are, in fact, just one regional population within the broader Polish nation, the odds of separatism grow still more remote.
I wrote about this sort of Poland, actually, when I described the Republic of Minsk in the For All Time alternate history. Founded by republicans fleeing the establishment of a German-oriented monarchy in western Poland, the Republic of Minsk was substantially populated by Poles and by Belarusians assimilated to a Polish identity. (And, incidentally, by large numbers of Jews; that alternate history’s Germany might have been expansionistic, but thankfully it wasn’t genocidal.) The Republic of Minsk was a nation caught on the fence, with a fundamentally East Slavic heritage but with a Polish cultural heritage that tugged the nation away from its historical orientation.
To no small extent, Polish Belarus’ experience in the above counterfactual scenario—and, of course, the experience of the Republic of Minsk in For All Time—mirrors that of the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic after the Second World War. The decimation of Belarus’ Jews on both sides of the interwar Polish-Soviet frontier and the expulsion of ethnic Poles accentuated a shortage of labour in the republic, soon to be filled by hundreds of thousands of Russian immigrants. The failure to achieve even a brief independence in the interwar years like Latvia or Estonia had robbed the country of a chance to formulate a sense of nationhood, while the annhilation of Belarus’ traditional nationalist intelligensia-—in the east under Stalin, in the west under Hitler-—made it difficult even after Stalin to articulate a sense of Belarusian identity. The west of the country, traditionally populated by Eastern Rite and Roman Catholics closely linked to Poland and the rest of Latin Christendom, was certainly less Sovietized than eastern Byelorussia, in much the same way that the west of Ukraine was populated by Roman and associated Catholics and escaped the Sovietization of the Stalinist era. However, western Ukraine was an Austrian territory before the restoration of Poland’s independence, and the Ukrainian peasantry had been almost encouraged to develop a local nationalism by their Hapsburg rulers; western Belarus was Russian, however, and Belarusian nationalism was resisted by the Tsars as much as Polish nationalism.
It didn’t help the cause of Belarusian separatism that few people saw a substantial gap between Belarusians and Russians. Most Belarusians—with the partial exception of those in the west of their new republic—were of Orthodox Christian background, just like the Russians. The experience of the Second World War was held in common by Belarusians and Russians, who suffered equally as East Slavic victims of Hitler’s imperialism and who shared in the common Soviet victory over Nazi Germany. Perhaps most importantly, in urban settings Belarusian language and peasant culture defaulted not to an urbanized Belarusian mass cuture but to a Soviet mass culture that was de facto Russian.
The official efforts to build a Belarusian national identity distinct from Russia occupied barely four years, in the period 1990-1994, and were left incomplete by Lukashenko’s assumption of power. It’s interesting, though, to see what Belarus’ nationalists tried to do in the brief time that they ruled.
They weren’t able to formulate a clear Belarusian national tradition. For instance, many Belarusian nationalists pointed to a large Belarusian diaspora. Much of this diaspora, though, is made up of Jews who identify with Belarus only as a geographical expression, identifying their ancestors instead as Jews from the Russian Empire, or perhaps as Jews from the Litvak community. Others include people who have been assimilated to other national traditions, chiefly the Polish and the Russian. Assimilating individuals from these three separate traditions to a newly-constructed one was rather difficult. Similarly, efforts to assimilate the Grand Duchy of Lithuania as a Belarusian phenomenon, based upon the location of the Grand Duchy’s territorial and linguistic core in Belarus, failed, likely given the presence of an independent Lithuania which did a much better job.
The language question was equally important, and depressing. In the Baltic States, the sharp differences-—in comprehensibility, in states, in rates of fluency across ethnolinguistic communities—-between Baltic languages catalyzed local nationalist movements. Particularly in Estonia and Latvia, where the native languages were at a notable disadvantage, membership in the national community was made contingent upon fluency in the national language. In Moldova, where the Russian language had gained acceptance as a high-status language of wider communication even among ethnic Romanians, the status of Romanian was divisive. Even in Ukraine, where a near-majority even of ethnic Ukrainians speaks Russians natively or at least predominantly, the post-Communist governments have consistently claimed to promote the use of the titular language. Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Romanian, even Ukraine—all these languages had extensive written and spoken traditions, lacked by Belarusian. Belarusian was, if anything, seen as a dialectal form of Russian. Russian is the dominant language of Belarus’ cities, and of the central and eastern portions of the country, and despite efforts at revival—hindered, it must be said, by Lukashenko’s hostile atttitude towards the Belarusian language in education and government—the trend is strongly negative. Far from having aspirations towards being a universally-spoken national vernacular, Belarusian can hope at best for privileged minority status like Welsh in Wales; more realistically, it might meet the fate of Irish in Ireland.
If, on the eve of Tsardom’s fall, Belarusian identity was as well-articulated as the Ukrainian, or—better still—the Lithuanian, then the post-Soviet Belarusian state would have had at least a more independent fate. It didn’t, though; the residents of Belarus waited too long, and were never committed to the project at any rate.
If Belarusian identity is so weak and so strongly Russophile, why hasn’t the country disappeared?
The earliest suggestion in print I’ve read of this goes back to General Sir John Hackett’s Third World War books, in which a conventional NATO-Warsaw Pact war is ended by a two-stage nuclear exchange, the Soviet Union destroying Birmingham and the Anglo-Americans razing Minsk. The Soviet satellite states quickly break away; the Balts and Ukrainians witness Minsk’s destruction and secede to ensure their national survival; Russia collapses into chaos; the Central Asians look anxiously to America for protection against the Chinese. Belarus splits into a Catholic west which promptly joins Poland, and an Orthodox east which seeks to join Russia. Unfortunately, the disappearance of the Russian state makes the fate of east Belarus problematic in this alternate history.
In our own history, Lukashenko’s strong foreign-policy orientation towards Russia and the intense economic cooperation between Russia and Belarus—most recently demonstrate by the construction of pipelines bypassing Ukraine—has been taken as a sign that, soon, Belarus will be Russian again.
Admittedly, by almost all conventional standards the Belarusian nation is weak. The Belarusian state, though, has a long history indeed, almost as long as that of the Baltic States. A Belarusian soviet socialist republic was formed in 192x, and despite the changing territories and populations under its control it continued to exist despite Stalin’s genocidal purges, despite Hitler’s genocidal invasions, despite the continued integration of Minsk as a prosperous industrialized core of the Soviet economy. Belarus is strongly Sovietized, to be sure; this Soviet identity, however, also gave lip service to Belarusian independence. Belarus’ Russification is simply demonstrable proof of the survival of many elements of Soviet identity, which was to a certain degree a transnational identity as Ken MacLeod observed back in September.
Lukashenko isn’t fond of the symbols of Belarusian nationhood—the language, the history. He does refer to Belarus’ Soviet past, though, and to the existence of Russian-Belarusian camaraderie dating back to the Soviet Union and previously in the era of the Tsars. Lukashenko does not equate Belarusians with Russians; he identifies the two peoples as equal partners in common projects. When Russia, as the larger and wealthier country of the two, becomes overbearing, he retreats from these common projects.
Besides, Belarus and Belarusians have a strong interest in retaining their sovereign and independent state. Whether one speaks of nationalists who still want to create a Belarusian nation-state or of conservatives invested in the idea of Belarus as a partner in various transnational projects, there is no obvious logic calling for the obliteration of an autonomous Belarus.
What, exactly, is Belarus’ future?
The full integration of Belarus into the Russian Federation, whether as a collection of six disarticulated provinces or (marginally more likely) as an autonomous republic on the model of Tatarstan, is unlikely. The full independence of Belarus from the Russian sphere of influence, perhaps affiliating with the European Union’s “Wider Europe” program or even joining the Union itself, is also unlikely.
The Lukashenko regime may or may not survive the next decades, but Belarus will remain bound by is current geopolitical environment (an adjoining European Union reluctant to expand further into eastern Europe in any sense, a culturally similar and economically powerful Russia to the east, a Ukraine facing the similar if lesser constraints to its south). Barring wild cards like (say) the development of Poland into a formidable regional power with a First World economy capable of drawing its eastern neighbours from the Russian orbit, or alternatively some sort of catastrophic collapse in Russia, Belarus may well find that its road to "Europe" has to swing through Moscow before reaching Brussels. Barring the discontent of a vocal minority, there’s not necessarily any reason to mind this. If Belarusians don't want to associate their country with the European Union, and are willing to accept Lukashenko's continued dictatorship as a lesser evil, that's their choice.
