Russian and East European Studies

Per Anders Rudling

• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780822979586
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Russian History
• Index: History

Modern Belarusian nationalism emerged in the early twentieth century during a dramatic period that included a mass exodus, multiple occupations, seven years of warfare, and the partition of the Belarusian lands. In this original history, Per Anders Rudling traces the evolution of modern Belarusian nationalism from its origins in late imperial Russia to the early 1930s.The revolution of 1905 opened a window of opportunity, and debates swirled around definitions of ethnic, racial, or cultural belonging. By March of 1918, a small group of nationalists had declared the formation of a Belarusian People's Republic (BNR), with territories based on ethnographic claims. Less than a year later, the Soviets claimed roughly the same area for a Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic (BSSR). Belarusian statehood was declared no less than six times between 1918 and 1920. In 1921, the treaty of Riga officially divided the Belarusian lands between Poland and the Soviet Union. Polish authorities subjected Western Belarus to policies of assimilation, alienating much of the population. At the same time, the Soviet establishment of Belarusian-language cultural and educational institutions in Eastern Belarus stimulated national activism in Western Belarus. Sporadic partisan warfare against Polish authorities occurred until the mid-1920s, with Lithuanian and Soviet support. On both sides of the border, Belarusian activists engaged in a process of mythmaking and national mobilization. By 1926, Belarusian political activism had peaked, but then waned when coups d'etats brought authoritarian rule to Poland and Lithuania. The year 1927 saw a crackdown on the Western Belarusian national movement, and in Eastern Belarus, Stalin's consolidation of power led to a brutal transformation of society and the uprooting of Belarusian national communists.As a small group of elites, Belarusian nationalists had been dependent on German, Lithuanian, Polish, and Soviet sponsors since 1915. The geopolitical rivalry provided opportunities, but also liabilities. After 1926, maneuvering this complex and progressively hostile landscape became difficult. Support from Kaunas and Moscow for the Western Belarusian nationalists attracted the interest of the Polish authorities, and the increasingly autonomous republican institutions in Minsk became a concern for the central government in the Kremlin.As Rudling shows, Belarus was a historic battleground that served as a political tool, borderland, and buffer zone between greater powers. Nationalism arrived late, was limited to a relatively small elite, and was suppressed in its early stages. The tumultuous process, however, established the idea of Belarusian statehood, left behind a modern foundation myth, and bequeathed the institutional framework of a proto-state, all of which resurfaced as building blocks for national consolidation when Belarus gained independence in 1991.

Chapter 1

Imagining Belarus

The manufacturing of a Belarusian consciousness took place within a context of the ideological historicizing of the past, a deliberate attempt by Belarusian intellectuals to break the Russocentric approach of the tsarist historiography of Vasilii Kliuchevskii (1841–1911), Pavel Miliukov (1859–1943), Sergei Solov’ev (1820–1879), and others. Belarusian national activists sought to establish an alternative narrative, intended to demonstrate a historical continuity of Belarusian statehood dating back to the Middle Ages. As the Belarusians had long lacked a political and cultural elite of its own, the task of constructing a continuous “national” history was daunting for the nationalist pioneers. They imagined a continuity in the “Belarusian” principality of Polatsk and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. In particular, they stressed the flourishing of the Grand Duchy in the sixteenth century as a “golden age” of Belarusian culture.¹ Yet only with difficulty can the principality of Polatsk and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania be described as “Belarusian” polities in the nationalists’ sense of the word. The Belarusian nationalists’ claim to the legacy of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was generally regarded as weaker than that of their Lithuanian counterparts, and unlike the Ukrainians, they lacked a Cossack proto-state tradition to which they could lay claim. Nationalist historiography tended to solve these issues by excluding or minimizing the experiences of others, and to ethnicize historical figures that they regarded positively and to appropriate them as heroes and integrate them as part of the national project. The Belarusian nationalists had to share many of their historical myths, saints, heroes, and cultural figures with neighboring peoples, particularly the Lithuanians.²

All societies and cultures have been influenced by interactions with their neighbors. Ideas, politics, music, literature, not to mention the phenomenon of nationalism itself, are international occurrences, results of human interactions, which do not stop at ethnic or political borders. Yet the writing of history has primarily been in the service of empires, states, and ruling elites. This is true even for states that have long vanished. Karl Marx famously observed this relationship, pointing out that “the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas: i.e., the class, which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class, which has the means of material production at its disposal, consequently also controls the means of mental production, so that the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are on the whole subject to it.”³

The Belarusian nationalists faced the same issues as other nationalists. Like other regional state projects, such as Muscovy, Lithuania, and Latvia, theirs was contested, and success was by no means given. The Latvian polity, for instance, was united only in 1919, and that for the first time in history. For the Belarusian nationalists it was a problem that theirs was the youngest of the nationalisms in the region. When national, or ethnic, consciousness reached this area, rival ethnic groups had already staked their claims to many of the same territories the Belarusian nationalists intended for their state. Unlike the weak and poorly organized Belarusian nationalists, Polish, Lithuanian, and even Latvian national activists could all argue and bargain their land claims from a position of strength. And unlike the claims of the Belarusian nationalists, theirs were recognized by the Western delegations at the Paris peace conference. The Belarusian nationalists failed in their objective, and Belarus came to develop in a manner different from its western neighbors. It would be many decades until the nationalists’ imagination of Belarus gained a more general acceptance.

The existence of a Belarusian nation is still contested. In the 1990s, authoritative Western historians and political scientists, including Hélène Carrère d’Encausse and Kristian Gerner, questioned the existence of a Belarusian nationality or dismissed it as an artificial construct, a result of arbitrary decisions by Soviet bureaucratic planners.⁴ Over the past two decades, such statements have become increasingly rare. During nearly a quarter-century of independence, the idea of the existence of a separate Belarusian nationality appears to have gained popular acceptance. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger famously claimed that the nation itself was the greatest of all invented traditions. All states and national consciousnesses are constructed and a result of political or economic processes. If Belarus is an invented tradition or artificial construction, so by necessity are its neighbors.⁵

State, Nation, Identity: Central Concepts

A primary focus of this book is the perceptions of the concept of the nation. The word has traditionally been used in two main ways: in an ethnic and a civic sense. Ethnic nationalism describes a community of people with common origin and a common culture. Civic nationalism establishes a group of people who populate a more or less well-defined territory, recognizing the same government and obeying the same laws. The former is cultural and equivalent to ethnic groups, the latter political and describes the inhabitants in a state.⁶

Hans Kohn defines nationalism as “a state of mind, in which the supreme loyalty of the individual is felt to be due to the nation-state.”⁷ The phenomenon nation is complicated and notoriously hard to define.⁸ Ernest Renan (1823–1892) suggested cynically, “A nation is a group of people united by a mistaken view about the past and a hatred of their neighbors.”⁹ Indeed, it is useful to keep in mind the evolving, developing nature of the concept of the nation, and that it indeed is a social construct. Ross Poole, rather than taking primordial nationalist claims at face value, states that “a more empirically adequate account of the nation would not emphasize sameness of culture, but the existence of a common will: a nation is a group which—for whatever reason—wants to be treated as politically sovereign.”¹⁰ The Czech historian Miroslav Hroch stressed, “One must not determine the objective character of the nation with a fixed collection of features and attributes given once and for all, just as it is not possible to view the nation as an everlasting category, standing outside concrete social relations.”¹¹ One definition, which is sometimes used and which takes this aspect into account, is that of the young Josef Stalin, who in one of his earliest scholarly endeavors defined a nation as “a historically evolved, stable community based on a common language, territory, economic life, and psychological disposition, manifested in a community of culture.”¹² This definition takes into account the temporal nature of the nation. Benedict Anderson has expanded our understanding of the nation by emphasizing it as an “imagined political community—and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.”¹³ In covering the period when Belarusian intellectual elites began to imagine the Belarusian-speaking population as a “nation,” this book uses Kohn’s and Stalin’s definitions of nation and nationalism as working theories.

The term state is easier to define. Max Weber (1864–1920) defines the state as “a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.”¹⁴ The formation of a nation-state would mean that the political unit would correspond with the “national” unit. While the creation of such a unit would be almost impossible in practice, it is the aim of the nationalist imagination. Following Thomas Hylland Eriksen, this book defines nation building as “the creation and consolidation of political cohesion and national identity.”¹⁵ In this fundamental aspect—the desire to establish a Belarusian nation-state—the Belarusian activists, regardless of their political belonging in other matters, were nationalists. Anderson has pointed out that nationalism does not represent one coherent ideology, but appears in a number of forms: “Part of the difficulty is that one tends unconsciously to hypostasize the existence of Nationalism-with-a-big-N and then to classify ‘it’ as an ideology. It would, I think, make things easier if one treated it as if it belonged with ‘kinship’ and ‘religion,’ rather than with ‘liberalism’ or ‘fascism.’”¹⁶ We are reminded of Elie Kedourie’s observation that it is “a misunderstanding to ask whether nationalism is politics of the right or the left. It is neither.”¹⁷ Thus, unless otherwise noted, when the term “Belarusian nationalist” is used, it is applied in this general understanding of the term, meaning someone dedicated to the idea of establishing a Belarusian nation-state.

Miroslav Hroch introduced the concept of a three-stage periodization and a division of the intensity of the process of national activity. Hroch refers to these stages as phases A, B, and C. He describes phase A as signified by a heightened awareness of the cultural and national distinctiveness among the intellectual elite, whereas phase B corresponds to the introduction of nationalism as a political program and patriotic agitation. Phase C, the mobilization of the masses into a national movement, constitutes the third step in this process, when the nationalist agenda has a chance to materialize.¹⁸ Based on this methodology, this book is a study of the first two stages of national mobilization. Phase A covered the period roughly from 1906 to 1915; phase B roughly 1915–1926. The interrelated German occupation and the February Revolution became catalysts for Belarusian nationalism and made it possible to disseminate the message to a mass audience. This book is mainly a focus on phase B of Belarusian national activity: the efforts of nationalists on both sides of the border to root a national consciousness among the masses. Their success was limited, and indeed Hroch himself lists the Belarusians along with peoples like the Lusatian Sorbs and the Bretons as examples of nationalities that “did not manage to form themselves fully into modern nations.”¹⁹

In Europe nationalists often belonged to the emerging middle class, but their social background varied from country to country. While Czech, Slovak, Finnish, and Norwegian nationalists often came from the bourgeoisie or petit bourgeoisie, the case was different for their Estonian, Lithuanian, and Belarusian counterparts, who were overwhelmingly rural. In the Lithuanian case, less than 5 percent came from cities.²⁰ Like the Lithuanians, the Belarusians were peasants, not workers, and overwhelmingly rural. As Andrew Wilson has noted, “Belarus had middling peasant strata, but hardly any middle class.”²¹ Indeed, in 1897, only 1 percent of Belarusians lived in cities with a population of over twenty thousand.²² Very few lived in Vil’nia (today Vilnius, Lithuania), which the national movement regarded as their historical and spiritual capital. According to the official Polish census of 1931, the Belarusian share of that city’s population was only 0.7 or 0.9 percent, whereas in the surrounding areas Belarusians made up over 50 percent of the population.²³ In Minsk, the nationalists’ second choice for Belarusian capital, the Belarusians made up 9 percent of the population in 1897. The absolute majority, 51.2 percent of the residents of Minsk, spoke Yiddish.²⁴ Yet it was urban life that awoke the Belarusian national consciousness, as it was in the cities that the Belarusians encountered Jews, Poles, and Russians. Having left their Belarusian-speaking villages for the city, where they contrasted their culture and language against those of others, a small group of intellectuals started to define themselves as a distinct national group. This emerging national identity had a clear class component, as the Belarusian was also identified as a muzhyk, or peasant, as opposed to a pan, or gentleman, which often meant an ethnic Pole, or a Polonized Belarusian or Lithuanian.

By 1926 the predominant Belarusian political organization appeared on the verge of turning into a mass movement. Combined with the significant successes of the Belarusian national communists in the BSSR, it could be argued that Belarus was indeed entering phase C of Hroch’s model. The years 1924–1930 constituted the peak years of Belarusian national, political, and social activism. Between 1924 and 1927 Belarusian nationalists forced the Belarusian question onto the agenda of a number of successive Polish minority governments, uncertain how to deal with the new phenomenon.²⁵ The Second Polish Republic’s ineptitude in handling national minorities contributed to the discrediting of the Grabski government and built momentum for Piłsudski’s coup in 1926. Piłsudski’s return to power marked the beginning not only of a new political system but also of a different approach to the national question. The years 1927–1930 saw a government crackdown on the emerging Belarusian movement in Poland. Whereas government agencies and commissions created state symbols, “national” holidays, and celebrations in the BSSR, on the other side of the border, in the absence of a Belarusian government or even cultural autonomy, the invention of a national mythology had the character of a grassroots project, articulated on the pages of rather limited West Belarusian publications.

Ethnic and Civic Nationalism

The principle that the nation should constitute the basis for internationalism has been part of the classic liberal tradition since Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832). Universalist values and international organizations appeared at the same time as modern nationalisms had their breakthrough in Western Europe.²⁶ Yet European nationalisms fall into two categories, each with their own intellectual traditions. The tradition that has been predominant in Eastern and Central Europe is based upon language and ethnicity. Following Kohn, many studies of nationalism have made a distinction between an inclusive, “Western” democratic civic nationalism and an exclusive, “Eastern” ethnic authoritarianism based upon blood and ethnicity.²⁷ Kohn saw the enlightenment version of nationalism as part of the liberal, inclusive, and universalistic tradition of the French and American revolutions, based upon the idea of the sovereignty of the nation, as opposed to the sovereignty of autocrats. This he juxtaposed with ethnic particularism, authoritarianism, and conservatism, which originated from the Romantic tradition and in opposition to the Napoleonic occupation and the multiethnic empires of Central and Eastern Europe.

According to this model, Western European nationalism was inclusive and non-ethnic, whereas Central and Eastern European nationalism centered on the issue of self-determination, which was to be obtained when all ethnic groups achieved independence to create their own nation-states, that is, when the geographic distribution of the ethnic boundaries of the nations coincided with their political borders. Thus, the eastern model of nationalism would aspire to popular sovereignty and self-determination through the establishment of ethnically based nation-states, which in the Wes...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. Imagining Belarus
• Chapter 2. The Beginnings of Belarusian Nationalism
• Chapter 3. Six Declarations of Statehood in Three Years: Origins of a New National Mythology
• Chapter 4. Nationalities Policy in Soviet Belarus: Affirmative Action, Belarusization, and Korenizatsiia
• Chapter 5. Belarusian Nationalism in the Second Polish Republic
• Chapter 6. Opposition to Belarusization
• Chapter 7. The Suppression of Belarusian Nationalism in the Second Polish Republic, 1927–1930
• Chapter 8. Soviet Repression in the BSSR: The Destruction of Belarusian National Communism
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index