Since the Russian invasion, Ukraine has been busy cleansing the country of remnants of the Russian and Soviet presence.
Statues of Russian rulers and cultural figures are removed from the public space, streets that bore the names of Russian personalities or Bolsheviks are replaced.
Ukraine, in other words, shuns anything related to the occupiers and celebrates its nationalism.
Amazingly, in neighboring Belarus, the opposite process is taking place: the Lukashenko regime, Putin's ally, is working to narrow and reduce Belarusian culture.
Absurdly, the Belarusian nation-state forbade war on its national culture.
Here are examples from the month of December alone: the Ministry of Justice in Minsk demanded the closure of the Voluntary Association for the Preservation of Heritage and Culture Sites, the curator of Belarusian culture in the 20th century at the National Museum was fired from her job, but the most symbolic of all was the wholesale confiscation of books in Belarusian printed by independent publishers.
The expenses themselves were closed even before that.
According to Hanadz Korshonau, former head of the Institute of Sociology at the Belarusian Academy of Sciences, today anyone who speaks or reads Belarusian, creates Belarusian music or sells Belarusian souvenirs in the private shops - is in the status of a persecuted minority.
"From the very beginning, Lukashenko perceived any expression of Belarusian nationalism as hostile," he tells Israel Hayom in a conversation in Bialystok, "the ideological basis of his regime was a return to the Soviet Union, which is in a sense supranational. That is why, for example, the historic white-red-white flag of Belarus was canceled when he took office, and the restoration of the Belarusian language was slowed down and finally disappeared. However, after 2014 (the annexation of Crimea by Russia and the start of the war in the Ukrainian Donbass, D.B.), when Lukashenko realized that Putin and his imperial concept were a threat to him as well, the glass ceiling on the national : souvenir shops began to appear that sold the Belarusian, and in the textbooks the history did not begin in the USSR but went all the way to the Grand Principality of Lithuania."
Hanadz Korshonau, former head of the Institute of Sociology at the Belarusian Academy of Sciences,
The Belarusian renaissance was abruptly cut short in August 2020, when the Lukashenko regime rigged the election results, and hundreds of thousands took to the streets.
"Even back then, there were cases when demonstrators who spoke Belarusian would be arrested, given a special marking on the head and then beaten several times more than others," Korshonau recalls.
Since then, Lukashenko sought to suppress any sign of nationalism associated with the independent civil society: tour guides in Belarusian were imprisoned, the historical flag was outlawed, and the list of inflammatory materials has not stopped growing since then, swallowing more and more materials related to Belarusian culture, the Belarusian language, and civic activity in Belarusian.
1,000 organizations were closed
To be clear: in the last two years, about 1,000 organizations have been eliminated or are in the process of being eliminated, starting with the Association for the Belarusian Language and ending with organizations without any political sign, such as ecological associations, aid organizations for the disabled - or even general book publishers.
The story of Yanushkevich Publishing is an example of this.
Andrei Yanoshkevich founded it in 2014 and it was a huge success in Belarus, when it brought to its readers both original Belarusian literature and literature translated into the language of the small nation for the first time, such as Orwell's "1984", Orhan Pamuk's "Istanbul" and three of the "Harry Potter" books.
"The first signs of repression began back in November 2021, but only after the start of the war, in March 2022, did the attack on the publisher begin," Janushkiewicz says in a conversation from Warsaw, "We were told to evacuate the offices within two days. I thought this might still be an opportunity to get out of the comfort zone, And on May 16, we opened a store of the publisher with the books in Belarusian. It opened at 11:00 a.m., during the lunch break regime propagandists came to visit, and at 6:30 p.m. it was closed by order of the General Prosecutor's Office due to 'complaints from concerned citizens.'"
Bookstore in the Belarusian language, photo: Andrey Yanoshkevich
With a bitter laugh, Yanushkevich recalled how the officers of the unit for fighting organized crime collected the suspicious books, including even a children's book by Yosif Brodsky, "Ballad of the Little Tugboat".
The reason?
The color of the tugboat on the cover ("such a dark orange") seemed suspicious to them and reminded them of the white and red colors of the national flag.
Yanushkevich himself was arrested for a month and after his release he left for Poland.
"This government does not need Belarusian culture, but as marginal folk art. This is a complete anti-Belarusian policy. Instead, it is planting the 'Russian world' in Belarus and turning Belarus into another realm in Western Russia."
Integration with Russia
Yanushkevich is referring to the growing presence of Putin's Russia in Belarus.
It is not just a question of using its territory to attack Ukraine, but of opening "Russian culture houses", propaganda of "traditional values", increasing cooperation between education systems, and above all promoting nostalgia for the USSR and the Soviet past shared with Russia - in propaganda, at public events , and the teaching of history. Only recently, children from the city of Hummel were required to write letters to Russian soldiers at the front, as if they were Soviet children, writing to their defenders against the Nazis.
"I don't know any examples of a nation-state eliminating its national culture," says the sociologist Korshonau, "there are close examples, such as North Korea preserving the Soviet regime. Lukashenko's uniqueness is that he did not invent his own ideology. Theoretically, it should have been national-oriented , but he is afraid of everything Belarusian like a demon. He wants to go back and change the establishment of Stalinism."
Supporters of the Soviet Union demonstrate in Belarus,
How parallel is this to Putin, who also promotes a certain version of Stalinism?
"Putin jumps into the past even further. His idols are not so much Stalin, as the emperors Peter I and Ekaterina II. Lukashenko jumps back 100 years, Putin - 300. Also, Lukashenko is a supporter of socialism and internationalism, so from his point of view Belarus, Venezuela, Russia and North Korea should be equal. From Putin's point of view, on the other hand, Russia is an empire and one must enter it with the status of subjugation."
"Belarusians do not want to be part of the Russian Empire," insists Alina Kovshik, a representative of the Belarusian Transitional Cabinet (the government-in-exile of the Democratic Forces, which won the 2020 elections, D.B.), which is responsible for questions of national revival. The cabinet has declared this year as the year of the Belarusian language. This year, the cabinet will, among other things, promote online Belarusian studies, try to establish a network of Belarusian language schools for the children of the exiles in Poland (up to 150 thousand Belarusians fled to the country after the suppression of the protest) and work to print books in Belarusian.
"The initiative comes from below, from the Belarusians themselves, and we only support it," says Kovshik, "Language can be a source of strength and national identity, and also a defense against the 'Russian world'. To be honest, every year should be the year of the Belarusian language."
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