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Nanovic Institute for European Studies
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1. A Quiet Collapse: Belarus and the Fall of the Soviet Union Historian Andrew Wilson once described the Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic (BSSR) as “the most Soviet of republics.”1 For centuries, Belarus had lacked statehood, governed by entities such as the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Russian Empire.2 In existence from the early 1920s, the BSSR was another chapter in Belarus’s stateless history. Despite early attempts to forge a cohesive identity, the BSSR and its people lacked a shared sense of what it meant to be Belarusian for most of the almost 70 years that the state existed. The idea of a Belarusian nation was not prevalent and was often confined to small, intellectual circles—a likely factor in the conspicuous lack of dissidence against the government by its citizens throughout the country’s twentieth-century history.3 In the 1920s, the government of the BSSR initiated a process of Belarusization (belarusizatsiia) as part of a Soviet-wide campaign of “nativization” (korenizatsiia), including the classification of Belarusian as the polity’s official language and the founding of the Institute of Belarusian Culture in 1921.4 Belarusization flourished until the mid-1930s when the USSR’s new constitution focused on Russification to achieve unity.5 While the idea of the Belarusian nation still existed, a national identity struggled to take hold due in no small part to the Belarusian language being confined to government documents rather than being in widespread household use. In so far as a Belarusian national identity did exist, this was the direct result of Soviet attempts to create it.6 The lack of a common 1
Andrew Wilson, “Politics Either Side of Independence, 1989-1994,” in Belarus: The Last European Dictatorship, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021), 143. 2 Jan Zaprudnik, Belarus: At a Crossroads in History (Boulder, San Francisco, Oxford: Westview Press, 1993), xiv-xv. 3 Andrew Savchenko, “Borderland Forever: Modern Belarus,” in Belarus—A Perpetual Borderland (Boston: Brill, 2009), 149. 4 Nelly Bekus, Struggle over Identity: The Official and the Alternative “Belarusianness” (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2010), 72-73. 5 Ibid, 75. 6 Ibid, 80.
University of Notre Dame | Keough School of Global Affairs
