1. A Quiet Collapse: Belarus and the Fall of the Soviet Union

1.AQuiet 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.

Belarusian identity, national language, or political representation for most Belarusians

significantly contributed to the USSR being able to hold power within the BSSR with little

opposition.

Much of the USSR deteriorated in the late 1980s with perestroika (the policy of

restructuring the USSR’s political and economic system), but Belarus remained largely

unchanged in its pro-Soviet sentiments. Glasnost, another 1980s Soviet policy shift that was

intended to create more openness in government, also loosened censorship, allowing people in

various areas of the USSR to outwardly oppose the Union, especially through nationalism.7 This

media freedom, however, did not widely affect Belarus due to its weak national identity. The first

real currents of opposition to the mainstream communist leadership came after discoveries of the

Stalin-era mass graves of Belarusian victims at Kurapaty, leading to the formation of the

Belarusian People’s Front (BPF).8 The BPF promoted the development of Belarusian culture and

independence but lacked a clear aim for an alternative political system. The party failed to gain

any real traction, acquiring only 27 of the 345 available seats of the legislature in the 1990

elections.9 The movement was hindered, in part, due to the nature of its leaders; as Belarusian

nationalism was strongly tied to the intelligentsia, many of the leaders of the BPF were young

intellectuals who had no real political experience.10 Protests against the BSSR government did

occur after the uproar from the mass grave scandal, but these demonstrations were neither

widespread nor nationalistic, focusing on socioeconomic issues instead of calls for an

independent Belarusian state. In a 1991 referendum on whether the USSR should remain intact,

conducted throughout the entire union, 83% of Belarusians voted to preserve it, almost 10%

7 Thomas Remington,

“ASocialist Pluralism of Opinions: Glasnost and Policy-Making under Gorbachev, ” in The Soviet Union, ed. Peter Waldron (Great Britain:Ashgate, 2007), 501, 519. 8 Wilson, “Politics Either Side of Independence, ” 144; Savchenko, “Borderland Forever, ” 150-151.

9 Savchenko, “Borderland Forever, ” 155.

10 Wilson, “Politics Either Side of Independence, ” 145.