Belarusian Review :: Influences on Belarusian Nationhood: Soviet Institutionalization Or Direct Russification?

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Influences on Belarusian Nationhood: Soviet Institutionalization Or Direct Russification?

According to a widespread view within the Western political theory, particular Soviet policies and institutions facilitated the emergence of nationalism in the former Soviet republics. For instance, at the beginning of 1990s social scientists Rogers Brubaker and Ronald Suny developed the concept which adhered to a modernist approach of conceptualizing the nation as an “imagined community” and stressed the role of Soviet policies and institutions in the “crystallization” of nations within the USSR.

They both emphasized the contribution of these nations to the dissolution of the Union. Particularly, during the late 1980s nationalistic uprisings shook the structure of the state when national elites demanded a full independence from the center. Suny and Brubaker, therefore, argue that founders and leaders of the USSR unintentionally laid the foundation of nationalism’s rise in their state by reinforcing national identities through the set of policies which will be discussed below.

One of the main features of Brubaker’s analysis is the focus onthe institutions and policies of the Soviet era without considering the preceding historical period. Brubaker argues that the nation is not a “sharply bounded social group” which allows him to presuppose that in the pre-Soviet period nations virtually did not exist. Some historical developments concerning the national aspirations of the people of the Russian Empire, however, cannot be ignored since in many respects they determined the course of initial Soviet policies.

Let us consider the case of Belarus. In Tsarist Russia the area was called North-Western Territory (Severo-Zapadnyi Krai), the people were denied any national aspirations and the use of the Belarusian language was prohibited in 1867. This fact, nevertheless, gave the language an additional significance and moral strength, and the area of its use expanded. During World War I the Belarusian nationalist movement surged which led to the First All-Belarusian National Congress in December 1917. The broadly represented Congress (some 1800 delegates) made a decision to proceed with full sovereignty, and on March 25, 1918 the independence of the Belarusian People’s Republic (Belaruskaya Narodnaya Respublika – BNR) was proclaimed. Although, the Republic “held no general elections, and self-appointed administration lacked the elements necessary for broad international recognition”, arguably, the mere fact of its existence did not allow Bolsheviks to ignore Belarusian national aspirations and eventually led to the creation of the Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic (BSSR). Therefore, one can extend the scope of any theoretical argument by including the analysis of pre-Soviet processes which directly influenced the Communist policies of the first post-revolutionary years. The moment of the independence proclamation is crucial and should not be disregarded since, as Suny fairly noted, “the very experience of a brief statehood had a profound influence on future developments.”

Brubaker lists the features of Soviet nationality regime which presumably facilitated institutionalization of the nations and nationhood on the territory of the Union, such as “the cultivation of a large number of distinct national intelligentsias; the cultivation of distinct national cadres; the cultivation and codification of a large number of national languages; and the development of an elaborate system of schooling, including higher education, in non-Russian languages”. Certainly, the “constitutive” influences of these features can be traced in the experiences of different Soviet nations. But whereas some of the policies might have helped to institutionalize the perception of the nation in other republics, it was hardly the case in Belarus.

As for the national cadres, in 1929 Belarusian staff comprised only 49.5 percent of the Party’s apparatus at the republic level. Among the heads of Belarusian Communist Party there was only one Belarusian and eleven non-Belarusians during 1920-1953. Overall throughout the existence of the Party there were twenty heads, eight of them Belarusians, and all eight of them were invariably born in the most Russified Eastern provinces.

The Belarusian language was officially reformed in 1933. The first codification, however, took place in 1918 by the prominent Belarusian linguist Branislaw Tarashkevich who published his “Belarusian Grammar for Schools.” It can be argued that in 1933 the language was not codified but reformed specifically in the context of a process of Russification. Several unique features of the Belarusian language were abolished in order to bring it closer to Russian. For example, in the new Russian-Belarusian dictionary which was published in 1937 words different in two languages were deliberately discarded and replaced by Russian ones in Belarusian transcription. Interestingly, so-called “tarashkevitsa” (grammatical variant of the language introduced by Tarashkevich) is still widely used by nationally oriented Belarusians nowadays, instead of “narkamauka” which represents the officially reformed variant of 1933. National Belarusian system of schooling was actively promoted only during the 1920s on the wave of “nativization” and later curtailed. As a result, there were no Belarusian schools available in the cities by the 1970s.
Both Brubaker and Suny underscore the importance of nativization (korenizatsia) in the process of reinforcing Soviet nationalities. Indeed, until the early 1930s the consolidation of nationalities proceeded by the support of the native language and culture, by creating national intelligentsia and political elite. The Belarusian nation, however, did not reap the fruits of this process. Stalin’s purges of late 1930s undermined the sense of “Belarusization” by wiping out the national intelligentsia and the national political elite. For example, on October 29, 1937 during only one night, 103 Belarusian writers, poets, professors and scientists, all of them arrested on faked charges of nationalism, were shot in the KGB jail in Minsk. Thousands more were purged during 1930s and 1940s. Brubaker argues that all over Soviet Union the repression of nationalism went hand in hand with the consolidation of nationhood and nationality. In Belarus, nevertheless, the repressions took one of the severest forms. Moreover, those annihilated represented the minority of population who expressed at least some national sentiments. Although the Communists did institutionalize the nationality by issuing passports and attaching people to the place of residence, a distinct national elite did not emerge in Belarus, primarily because Soviet regime violently undermined its human base.

It is important to remember that the Soviet Union was not fully formed immediately after the 1917 Revolution, gradually annexing new territories over the course of twenty plus years. For example, Baltic republics were annexed in 1940, as were the western parts of Ukraine and Belarus at the end of 1939. This fact is particularly interesting because one can observe the experience of the country of which the eastern part was influenced by Soviet policies for nearly a generation, and the other, the western part, was not. Even though Western Belarus did not undergo such processes as nativization, radical economic and social transformation, and though a passport system was introduced here much later, the level of nationalist sentiments was always higher there than in Eastern Belarus. More people supported independence, spoke Belarusian, and became members of national (anti-Communist and anti-Fascist) resistance during World War II in western areas of the republic.

One part of Brubaker’s argument is that Soviet institutionalization of nationhood not only facilitated the disintegration of the USSR but also had enduring consequences and continued to determine the domestic politics of the fifteen successor states. Belarus, in this regard, is an interesting case to explore. The rise of nationalism in the republic in the 1980s started as a grass-roots movement of historical-cultural associations and was small in numbers. In 1988 more organized nationalist force – the Belarusian Popular Front (BPF) was formed. Its leadership was comprised of writers, teachers, workers, and scientists. There were no representatives of Communist nomenclature. The head of the Front became Zianon Pazniak, an archeologist and art critic.

In 1991 a small faction of the BPF in the Belarusian Supreme Soviet secured the passage of the Declaration of Independence owing to the indecision and disorientation of the much more numerous Communist deputies. The Belarusian ruling elites at that time were overwhelmingly anti-nationalistic. Most of them, apparently, would not have objected if Belarus were to stay in the Soviet State or to become a part of Russia. The course of history, however, could not be affected. The Russian Republic itself had already declared its independence in 1990 and in December 1991 the Belavezha Accords were signed which declared the Soviet Union to be dissolved. Although the first elected president of independent Belarus was not initially the candidate of the former Communist nomenclature, his rise to prominence reflected the attitudes of the society in general and the elites, in particular. Alexander Lukashenka, formerly a low-ranking Soviet apparatchik, became popular on an openly anti-national and populist platform by offering the bureaucrats and the nostalgic population a sort of “return to the past”. Lukashenka needed a second round to finally win a land-slide victory in presidential elections of 1994 and has remained in power ever since.

Thus, in the case of Belarus, the institutionalization of nationhood did not nurture a numerous national elite let alone national sentiments among the rest of the population. Belarus is the only successor state which has restored an official Soviet-style emblem and flag. Russian was introduced in 1995 as a second state language, but in practice is used everywhere at the expense of Belarusian. Belarus is the only post-Soviet country whose authoritarian leader formed a Union with Russia as early as 1996, and as yet unratified. Today, there are virtually no national-oriented parties in Belarus, except for the Belarusian Popular Front (a remnant of the broader movement of the 1980s) which is supported by a tiny fraction of the population, as are all the other opposition parties. On the other hand, government’s course on the closer economic ties with Russia is supported by nearly half of Belarusians, a position strongly influenced by state-controlled media.

Clearly, Belarus is an exception, which did not develop in the way predicted by the analysis of Soviet policies/institutions. Although the theories introduced by Brubaker and Suny can be applied to other ex-Soviet republics, Belarus, arguably, should be seen through a different prism. The forces of Russification which started in the 19th century appeared to influence the development of the country more strongly than the specific Soviet policies of 1919-1991. In fact, the Russification has never stopped, and continued to be implemented somewhat through the Soviet institutions and policies. The language reform, severe repressions, the absence of national schooling, the system of placing Russians in executive positions, all these steps effectively undermined the growth of subjective awareness of being Belarusian among the republic’s ordinary people and prevented the emergence of a substantial distinct national elite by the end of 1980s.

Ilya Kunitski is a historian from Belarus, now studying Political Science with a focus on International Relations at New York University.

Endnotes:
1. Ronald Suny, Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution and the Collapse of the Soviet Union, Stanford University Press, 1993.
2. Rogers Brubaker, Nationhood and the National Question in the Soviet Union and Post-Soviet Eurasia: An Institutionalist Account, Theory and Society (February 1994).

This article appeared in
Belarusian Review, Vol. 21, No. 1
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Illya Kunitski


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