Belarusian Nation-Building

Front matter

BELARUSIAN NATION-BUILDING in Times of War and Revolution

Lizaveta Kasmach S CEU PRESS

BELARUSIAN NATION-BUILDING in Times of War and Revolution

Contents

Acknowledgments

Notes on transliteration, translation, and calendars

List of abbreviations

Introduction

Barys Kit!

Over the course of the twentieth century, Belarus transformed from several provinces of the Russian Empire into a sovereign state. Belarusians profited from imperial decline and the rise of the nation-state concept in the early twentieth century, when the First World War, revolutions, and subsequent violence disrupted traditional societies throughout Eastern Europe, opening up new opportunities for the national self-determination of so-called "small" nations? Subsequently, more than seven decades of communist rule coincided with an active process of nation-building, which in the Belarusian case was directed from above. The post-Soviet period was marked by a transition to an authoritarian regime, and at the time of writing, the future poses the questions of imperial ambitions versus national affirmation once again. The peaceful protests against the rigged 2020 presidential election brought Belarusians together as a nation. Protesters quickly rallied around national symbols, prohibited and despised by the ruling regime. This demonstrated that the ideals of those who imagined Belarus over a hundred years ago still have the power to attract people and provide them with the symbolic continuity of historic tradition.*

“The nation exists only when it has its own heroes.” Barys Kit, Ciarnovy sliach: Uspaminy (Frankfurt am Main, n. p., 2001), 56.

This definition of the "small" nation rests on the assumption of its subordination toa ruling nation

S which is reflected in the social structure ofthe small nation, causing its incomplete character or atypical composition. While certain social groups dominate, national elites usually remain outnumbered by the elites of the ruling nation. See Miroslav Hroch, Social Preconditions of National Revival in Europe: A Comparative Analysis of the Social Composition of Patriotic Groups among the Smaller European Nations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 4-5, 9; Andreas Kappeler, Der schwierige Weg zur Nation: Beiträge zur neueren Geschichte der Ukraine (Vienna: Böhlau, 2003), 25. See, for instance, Tatsiana Kulakevich, “National Awakening in Belarus: Elite Ideology to “Nation’ Practice? SAIS Review of International Affairs 40, no. 2 (2020): 97-110. On the reappropriation of national symbols, see the discussion in Aliaksej Kazharski, “Belarus’ New Political Nation? 2020 Anti-Authoritarian Protests as Identity Building,” New Perspectives 29, no. 1 (2021): 69-79. https://doi.org/10.1177/2336825X20984340 (Accessed September 15, 2022).

This book is a case study of Belarusian nation- and state-building in its early stages, dating back to the Fist World War and subsequent revolution. It focuses on the path towards the creation of the first modern Belarusian state and explores in detail the roots of its duality. The proclamation of Belarusian independence on March 25, 1918, and the rival establishment of the Soviet Belarusian state on January 1, 1919, resulted in two distinct and mutually exclusive national myths, which continue to define contemporary Belarusian society. Both projects, national and Soviet, transformed into two separate concepts of alternative and official Belarusianness, respectively, which developed parallel to each other during the twentieth century.* By looking at their formative period, this book contributes to an analysis of the origins of modern Belarusian statehood and the problematic character of national identity. On a different level, it also addresses the impact of the First World War on Belarusian nation-building efforts, the reasons for the uneven development of Belarusian national mobilization in the early twentieth century, and their consequences for the future state-building process—consequences which are still felt in contemporary Belarusian society.

The story of the challenges and struggles of the modern Belarusian national project helps reveal the internal mechanisms of national mobilization and understand the nature of nationalism as an inherently modern phenomenon.’ The concept of a nation is treated here in the broad sense following Ernest Renan’s definition of “a large-scale solidarity,’ held together by two basic principles: that of the common legacy of historical memories and the present desire to live together, being in essence a “daily plebiscite.”* Methodologically, this study is based on the modernist approach to the study of nationalism, assuming the artificial nature of every national project and treating it as a product of certain conditions, which have enabled nationalism to emerge in the capacity of a political principle, advocating the congruence of political and national boundaries." Ernest Gellner, who formulated this definition of nationalism, maintained that its analysis necessitated a departure from the assumption of the “awakening” of an ancient nation, towards understanding it as a modern phenomenon?

* Nelly Bekus, Struggle over Identity: The Official and the Alternative "Belarusianness" (Budapest- New York: CEU Press, 2010), 163-64.

5 — Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983), 43; Timothy Snyder, The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569-1999 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 41.

5 Ernest Renan, “What Is a Nation?,” in Becoming National: A Reader, ed. Geoff Eley and Ronald Grigor Suny (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 52-53.

7^ Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, 1.

5 Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, 48.

Modernization alone does not explain the emergence of nation-states in the imperial context, as the imperial power’s military and economic stability in peacetime disadvantages national movements. They have a viable chance only when power shifts occur, caused by wars or military conflicts. This scenario allows national movements to accumulate strength for challenging the empire and mobilizing their followers.’ Noting that major theories of nationalism fail to account for wars as factors in the successes of national movements, Eric Lohr suggested the concept of “sudden nationalism” or “war nationalism,” departing from the view of nationalism as a linear progression and a long-term development." In a similar vein, Aviel Roshwald acknowledged the significance of the First World War which launched “the idea of national self-determination toward sudden realization across a wide range of societies."!!

This study also draws on concepts which emerged from the growing interest of historians in the complexities and peculiarities of the Great War in Eastern Europe as a whole, rather than as a catalyst of imperial decline. Klaus Richter stressed that the First World War caused the structural reformatting and fragmentation of the entire region of East-Central Europe, opening up spaces for state-building activities and national empowerment and determining the trajectory of the region’s history for the twentieth century. The “entangled history” approach can also open up new perspectives on nation and empire, by integrating transnational and regional history.? Even though it is more common for an analysis of peacetime, Mark von Hagen suggested that this approach might widen our understanding of the First World War in Eastern Europe, pointing to the inter-imperial entanglements as well as the connections of empires with ethnic and religious minorities in other empires."

? — Andreas Wimmer, Waves of War: Nationalism, State Formation and Ethnic Exclusion in the Modern World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 22.

V Eric Lohr, “War Nationalism,’ in The Empire and Nationalism at War, ed. Eric Lohr, Vera Tolz, Alexander Semyonov, and Mark von Hagen (Bloomington, IN: Slavica Publishers, 2014), 93.

1 Aviel Roshwald, Ethnic Nationalism and the Fall of Empires: Central Europe, Russia and the Middle East, 1914-1923 (London: Routledge, 2000), 3.

? Klaus Richter, Fragmentation in East Central Europe: Poland and the Baltics 1915-1929 (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 2020), 3-4.

For examples of these approaches in the analysis of Belarusian history, see Thomas M. Bohn,

Victor Shadurski, and Albert Weber, eds., Ein weiffer Fleck in Europa: Die Imagination der

Belarus als einer Kontaktzone zwischen Ost und West (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2011).

^ Mark von Hagen, “The Entangled Eastern Front in the First World War, in Lohr et al., The Empire and Nationalism at War, 9-11. During the war, this trend was particularly evident from the forced entanglement of civilian and military spheres, illustrated by Ludendorff’s aspirations towards a military utopian state in Ober Ost on the one hand, and the arbitrary military rule of Russian generals in the western borderlands under martial law on the other. Ibid., 23, 26.

Joshua Sanborn interpreted the First World War in Eastern Europe as a war of European decolonization, a complex “multiactor and multistage process,” not limited to the war's outcome at Versailles.? In this manner, he challenged the "rise of nationalism" paradigm, noting that it placed the wrong emphasis on the struggle between nation and empire, where the opposing sides supposedly aimed for liberation and control, respectively.’ Sanborn suggested that the road of national movements towards independence started with the failure of the imperial state, which, in the case of the Russian Empire, was marked by the introduction of martial law in the western borderlands in July 1914 and the retreat of the Russian armies, culminating in the February Revolution in 1917. The final stage in this decolonization scheme is linked to the state-building process, which can be defined as a continuous work in progress."

Structure and Organization

This book covers the period between 1914 and 1918, tracing the Belarusian national movement in various settings: throughout the years of population displacement, in the German-occupied parts of western Belarus and Lithuania, as well as in the eastern Belarusian territories that remained under Russian rule in 1915. It looks at the achievements and failures of the Belarusian national elites as the chief agents of modernization, and their attempts to overcome the class divide and interact with the masses which preferred to cling to their pre-modern identities. The nation-building efforts of the Belarusian national activists are analyzed against the background of the changing dynamics of competition with the Polish and Lithuanian national movements on the one hand, and the lasting influences of the Russification policies on the other. Within this context, this book follows the evolution of Belarusian political thought from different federalist-based concepts towards thinking in terms of an independent state.

Notably, the First World War did not end on November 11, 1918, for Eastern Europe, as a series of local conflicts stretching over the following years overshadowed the defeat of the German Empire. However, this study covers only the pe-

5 Joshua Sanborn, “War of Decolonization, in Lohr et al., The Empire and Nationalism at War, 52. Sanborn, “War of Decolonization,’ 54.

Sanborn, “War of Decolonization,” 59, 62; Joshua Sanborn, Imperial Apocalypse: The Great War and the Destruction of the Russian Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 5-7.

In the Belarusian case, the Polish-Soviet war replaced the First World War until the signing of the Treaty of Riga on March 18, 1921. By its terms, Poland and Soviet Russia divided the Belarusian territories for the interwar period. On the need to incorporate the revolution and the subsequent riod up to 1918, since this year marks the emergence of Belarusian statehood: in March 1918, the national activists in Minsk proclaimed the BDR (Bielaruskaja Narodnaja Respublika, Belarusian Democratic Republic), while almost at the same time the Soviet state developed its own version with the Belarusian Soviet Republic. Prominent Belarusian politician Anton Luckievié described this in essence as the victory of “the idea of a Belarusian republic"? Even though he made this enthusiastic entry in his diary in January 1919, when the days of the first SSRB (Savieckaja Sacyjalistyénaja Respublika Bielarus’, Socialist Soviet Republic of Belarus) were already numbered, he was correct in noting that the idea of Belarusian statehood had taken root, even if it was to be implemented under Soviet control in the future. In this form, it survived throughout the twentieth century and eventually served as the basis of an independent Belarus after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

This book starts with the political, social, and demographic effects of the First World War in the western borderlands of the Russian Empire, analyzing the implications of the war for the situation of the ethnically Belarusian population and the nation-building process. The military conflict between Germany and the Russian Empire resulted in new territorial divisions, drawing new borders across the Belarusian territories. After 1915, the western Belarusian lands were incorporated into Ober Ost under German administration, while the eastern areas remained within the Russian Empire. Both of these new regions experienced different policies, which in turn led to diverse conditions for the national activists and their work. While the Russian Empire mobilized all resources for the war and uprooted the population in the territories adjacent to the front line, the areas under German military rule, although also tormented by wartime issues, experienced slightly more liberal approaches in the sphere of culture and education.

The following chapters deal with the positions and evolution of the Belarusian national movement in Ober Ost under the German occupation. Chapter two examines the early phase of the occupation between 1915 and 1917, when the German military administration promised equal treatment of all local nationalities in Ober Ost. Despite the lack of resources, both human and financial, Belarusian national activists managed to achieve relative progress within the parameters civil war experiences into the larger framework of the total war, see Peter Holquist, Making War, Forging Revolution: Russia’s Continuum of Crisis, 1914-1921 (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 2002), 2-6; on violence extending to the years after 1918, see Robert Gerwarth, Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End (1917-1923) (London: Allen Lane, 2016).

P? Lietuvos Mokslų Akademijos Vrublevskiy Biblioteka, Rankraséu Skyrius (hereafter LMAVB, RS), f. 21, b. 319,1.38 r.

defined by the Germans, advancing their cause of nation-building, especially in contrast to eastern Belarus during the same period. Vil'nia was a focal point of Belarusian national activism at this time, where the first schools with Belarusian as the principal language of instruction appeared as early as 1915. However, by early 1917, German Ostpolitik had already assumed a more pronounced anti-Polish and Lithuanian-oriented character, placing the Belarusian national movement on the margins. Outside of Vil'nia, the Belarusian movement was instrumentalized by the occupation authorities as a tool to undermine Polish national politics.

Chapter three addresses the evolution of Belarusian political thinking in the context of the modified German national politics in East-Central Europe between 1916 and 1918. By looking at the interplay of regional and national interests in the Belarusian-Lithuanian-Polish borderlands, it explores why federalism, rather than a nation-state concept, enjoyed popularity among the Belarusian activists, both in western and eastern Belarus, while the Lithuanian and Polish national movements reoriented towards the nation-state concept. It concludes with an account of the Brest-Litovsk peace negotiations between Soviet Russia and the Central Powers, with particular attention devoted to the question of how the concept of national self-determination was misused by the great powers to ensure dominance in East-Central Europe.

Moving to the revolutionary period, Chapter four examines the re-organization of the Belarusian national milieu in the Russian-controlled territories of eastern Belarus between the two revolutions in 1917, when liberalization and democratization enabled the national elites across the former Russian Empire to consolidate and strengthen their national movements. Similar to other nationalities, the chief demands of Belarusians throughout 1917 remained limited to different forms of autonomy within a hypothetical future Russian federative democratic state. Reflecting on the political organization of the Belarusian movement after the February Revolution, this chapter analyzes its internal dynamics and provides an insight into the intense political competition in Minsk during 1917, while paying attention to the changing fortunes of the Belarusian national parties.

Chapter five deals with the preparations for and convocation of the First All-Belarusian Congress in December 1917 in Minsk. Often described as the

Belarusian version of a constituent assembly,” the Congress was the major event

? Ja. Varonko, Bielaruski ruch ad 1917 da 1920 hodu: Karotki abliad (Kaunas: n. p., 1920), 7; A. Cvikievié [Tsvikevich], Kratkii ocherk vozniknoveniia Belarusskoi narodnoi respubliki (Kyiv: n. p., 1918), 8.

of Belarusian national life in 1917 and, on a larger scale, one of the key events in the modern history of Belarus. The Congress marked an important transition in the thinking of Belarusian national activists. In the wake of its violent dissolution by the Minsk Bolshevik authorities, national elites started to re-evaluate their political views, abandoning their aspirations for autonomy within a federative Russian republic, which had remained the prevalent attitude throughout 1917.

Chapter six provides a comparative perspective of the early state- and nation-building efforts of the Belarusian national activists from the national and Bolshevik-friendly camps during the crucial period in the history of Belarusian statehood in 1918. It addresses the conditions under which the idea of a separate Belarusian nation-state emerged, examining its meaning for the Belarusian national movement. Dating back to resolutions of the First All-Belarusian Congress in late December 1917 and the aftermath of its dissolution, its implementation was prompted by the unfavorable international situation and, in particular, the Brest-Litovsk peace treaty signed by Soviet Russia and the Central Powers. The departure from Russia-oriented state-building concepts was evident with the proclamation of the Belarusian Democratic Republic (BDR) on March 9, 1918, which was followed by the declaration of its independence on March 25. Immediately thereafter, the Bolsheviks hurried to appropriate the Belarusian national idea and make use of it to secure the borders of the Soviet state.

This book is based on an analysis of primary sources and archival holdings from Belarusian and Lithuanian archives, complemented by collections of published archival materials in Belarusian, Russian, and German languages as well as official and personal documentation and correspondence, protocols of meetings, and analytical reports. It also refers to the writings and memoirs of prominent Belarusian national activists, including Anton Luckievic, Ivan Luckievié, Vaclaü Lastoüski, Jazep Varonka, Adam Stankievié, Aliaksandr Cvikevié, and others.”! Another type of source is the periodical press, its correspondence with officials, journalists, and ordinary readers, as well as censored materials which did not appear in print.

Unfortunately, documentation pertaining to Belarusian national activism during the First World War is not preserved in full, leaving voids which cannot

For instance, see Anton Luckievic, Da historyi bielaruskaba ruchu; Anatol Sidarevit, ed., Pra Ivana Luckievita: Uspaminy, sviedéanni (Minsk: Knihazbor, 2007); Julijana Vitan-Dubiejkaüskaja, Maje üspaminy (Vilnius: Niezaleznaje vydaviectva Technalohija, 1994); Cvikievit, Kratkii ocherk; F. Turuk, Belorusskoe dvizhenie: Ocherk istorii natsionalnogo i revoliutsionnogo dvizheniia belorussov (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatelstvo, 1921); Adam Stankievi¢, Z Boham da Bielarusi: Zbor tvorati (Vilnius: Instytut bielarusistyki, 2008); Varonko, Bielaruski ruch.

be filled in. For instance, BDR-related source materials suffered a difficult fate throughout the twentieth century. The location of some key documents is unknown and they are inaccessible for researchers. These include, but are not limited to, documentation concerning the All-Belarusian Congress in 1917, the protocols of its Executive Committee, which continued operating after the dissolution of the Congress, and documents reflecting the early activities of the BDR government. From late 1918, the archives of the BDR were in the custody of different people and some materials were either lost or destroyed after the BDR institutions were forced to leave Minsk in December 1918. Currently, the majority of the surviving documentation is scattered between the National Archive of the Republic of Belarus (NARB) and the Lithuanian Central State Archive (LCVA). The latters BDR files were published in a two-volume document collection in 1998.” Recently, it has been expanded with another important collection of BDR documents from the State Archive of the Russian Federation.?

Historical Background of the Belarusian National Movement

After the final partition of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1795, the Russian Empire incorporated most of the ethnically Belarusian territories. It was still cautious with the newly acquired lands in the first half ofthe nineteenth century, aiming to coopt the local elites into the administrative structure and prioritizing the integrity of the empire." However, the Russian authorities started giving up on this approach after the November Uprising of 1830-31, while the January Uprising of 1863 marked a definitive turn in the imperial nationalities policies. Their primary aim shifted towards depriving the Poles of their influence in the western borderlands which became the site of assimilatory nationalities policies.”

2 Fora more detailed summary regarding the fate of the BDR archives, see Hanna Surmaé,

“Bielaruski zahraniény archii,’ Bielaruskaja Miniuüscyna, no. 1 (1993): 18-23; Siarhiej Supa, “Bielaruskaja Narodnaja Respublika i jaje archivy’ in Archivy Bielaruskaj Narodnaj Respubliki, ed. Siarhiej Supa (Vilnius: Bielaruski instytut navuki i mastactva, 1998), v-xviii; Janka Zaprudnik, “Da zahadki dziarZaünaha archivu BNR u Mikoly Abraméyka,’ Zapisy, no. 32 (2009): 450-76. 5 Aliaksandr Horny and Andrej Buča, eds., Archivy Bielaruskaj Narodnaj Respubliki, vol. 2, bk. 1 (Minsk: Knihazbor, 2021).

On the integration and Russian administration of the former territories of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the first half of the nineteenth century, see Jorg Ganzenmiiller, Russische Staatsgewalt und Polnischer Adel: Elitenintegration und Staatsausbau im Westen des Zarenreiches (1772-1850) (Cologne: Bohlau Verlag, 2013).

Alexei Miller refers to these territories as a “laboratory of nationalisms” in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. See Alexei Miller, “The Role of the First World War in the Competition between

More confrontational and uncompromising than elite cooptation, these policies affected various national groups in different ways. For instance, there was a consensus that Poles could not be assimilated, while Belarusians, on the other hand, became the primary target of Russification policies. In the case of Lithuanians, there was a less clearly expressed intention toward full assimilation, which allowed for more leeway in the activities of the national movement, as compared to the Belarusian case.”

The Polish-Lithuanian-Belarusian region became the arena of struggle between the Russian Empire and the Polish national movement. While the latter aimed to advance a modern national project with vertical ties uniting the elites and the masses, the Russian imperial government focused on the idea of Slavic unity, in particular the notion of the tri-partite Russian nation, where the Great Russian, Little Russian, and White Russian nationalities were conceived as branches of the same tree. Therefore, de-Polonization was treated as an essential tool for depriving the Polish nobility of their influence in the region, and asserting Russian dominance over the Eastern Slavs. The turn towards assimilation manifested itself, among other things, in the Russian approach to religion. The Uniate Church was liquidated by 1839 and former Uniates were forced to convert to Orthodoxy.”

Imperial authorities started to interpret the Belarusian past in terms of Russian dominance in opposition to the Poles. The turn towards full assimilation appeared to be an impediment to the Belarusian nation-building process. It prevented the emergence of sufficient numbers of dedicated activists supporting and promoting the national project, defined exclusively in Belarusian terms. Combined with the predominantly peasant character of society and the linguistic closeness of Slavic languages, these factors collectively accounted for the belated

Belarusian nation-building. At the same time, comparisons with the Ukrainian

Ukrainian and All-Russian Nationalism, in Lohr et al., Tbe Empire and Nationalism at War, 73. On Russification, see also Serhii Plokhy, Lost Kingdom: The Quest for Empire and the Making of the Russian Nation from 1470 to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 2017), 85-104; Darius Staliünas, Making Russians: Meaning and Practice of Russification in Lithuania and Belarus after 1863 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), 297; Andrew Savchenko, Belarus: A Perpetual Borderland (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 53.

6 Stalitinas, Making Russians, 302-5.

7 Fora detailed analysis of Russian imperial confessional policies, see Theodore Weeks, “Religion and Russification: Russian Language in the Catholic Churches of the “Northwest Provinces’ after 18637 Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 2, no. 1 (2001): 87-110; M. D. Dolbilov, Russkii krai, chuzhaia vera: Etnokonfessional'naia politika imperii v Litve i Belorussii pri Aleksandre II (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2010).

? Rainer Lindner, Historiker und Herrschaft: Nationsbildung und Geschichtspolitik in Weissrussland im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1999), 71.

situation reveal that despite similar social structures, Ukraine had more favorable conditions due to the presence of universities in its cultural life and its different history of partitions.” Since all ethnically Belarusian territories were administered by the Russian Empire, the chance that a significant emigre community would emerge to initiate and uphold alternate projects was rather limited,” unlike in the Ukrainian and Lithuanian cases.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, the imperial authorities tried to prove the close connections and common historical roots of all East Slavic peoples in the newly constructed imperial region. This approach eventually led to the emergence of West-Russism ideology.?! Belarusian identification within this framework was subordinated to the larger All-Russian project and had to remain within its regional boundaries.? However, from another angle, the Russian imperial nationalities policies also had an important side-effect in the unintended recognition of local Belarusian, Ukrainian, and Lithuanian? nationalisms, contributing to a process of cultural accumulation?! and the subsequent strengthening of corresponding national movements. More importantly, from a long-term perspective, even the controlled interim construction of new regions and identities from above within a colonial context created a space and premise for an "imaginable" project of modern Belarus,” facilitating the task of the emerging national elites.

Modern Belarusian national discourse developed parallel to the imperially promoted West-Russism, demonstrating the inherent duality of the modern Belarusian project already in its early formative period. Rainer Lindner terms these two competing positions as integrative and national conceptions, noting that both had a political dimension.” The latter gradually gained strength in the second half of the nineteenth century, separating the history of the Belarusians from their neighbors and creating myths of a “golden age,” as for instance Adam Kirkor did by idealizing the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.

Valer Bulgakov, Istoriia belorusskogo natsionalizma (Vilnius: Institut belorusistiki, 2006), 151.

? Dolbilov, Russkii krai, chuzhaia vera, 195.

Alexei Miller, “The Romanov Empire and the Russian Nation,” in Nationalizing Empires, ed.

Alexei I. Miller and Stefan Berger (Budapest- New York: CEU Press, 2015), 330-31.

Ales’ Smalianéuk, “Licvinstva, zachodnierusizm i bielaruskaja ideja XIX-pacatak XX st,’ in

Bialorus w XX stuleciu: W kręgu kultury i polityki, ed. Dorota Michaluk (Toruń: Wydawnictwo

Naukowe Uniwersytetu Mikolaja Kopernika, 2007), 60.

55 P. V. Tereshkovich, Etnicheskaia istoriia Belarusi XIX-nachala XX v. v kontekste Tsentralno- Vostochnoi Evropy (Minsk: BGU, 2004), 187.

Introduction II

During the 1863 Uprising, the insurgents started to use the Belarusian language as a means of political struggle in an attempt to mobilize the support of the peasantry. Kanstancin (Kastus’) Kalinoüski, who commanded the uprising in Belarus and Lithuania, tried to reach out to the broad masses with the irregular newspaper MyZyckaja Pratida (Peasant Truth). Shortly after the defeat of the uprising, his Listy z-pad sybenicy (Letters from beneath the Gallows) addressed the issue of the Belarusian language and its suppression by the educational system.** Kalinoüski would become an important symbolic figure within the Belarusian national discourse in the future. Most likely, the uprising caused the evolution of his views from support for the regional patriotic allegiance to the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania towards the national concept.”

The last decades of the nineteenth century represented the key turning point for modern Belarusian nationalism. Between 1880 and 1900, the anticolonial counter-narrative espoused by the lawyer and poet Francisak Bahusevié marked this transition.? Bahuševič framed the Belarusian national idea in the introduction to his poetry volume Dudka Bialaruskaja.^ Mediating between the past and the present, he established the tradition of the Belarusian Revival/Renaissance, based on the interpretation of Belarus as the core of the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania, glorifying its history and emphasizing the value of the Belarusian language.? These steps were instrumental in creating a common legacy of memories for Belarusians. The French theorist of nationalism, Ernest Renan, considered such images of heroic history, great men, and past glory to be at the core of a national idea.?

In an attempt to convey the national message to the broad masses, Bahusevic constructed the ideal type of its recipient, a Belarusian peasant with a distinctly differing identification from Russians and Poles.“ However, the major drawback of this narrative, adopted later by the emergent Belarusian national elites, was the focus on peasant culture. In fact, it was unattractive not only for the nobles, who were unlikely to identify with peasant culture, but for the broad masses as well,

Kastus’ Kalinoüski and Henadz’ Kisialoü, Za nasuju vol'2asc* tvory, dakumenty (Minsk: Bielaruski

Aleksandr Kravtsevich, Aleksandr Smolenchuk, and Sergei Tokt, Belorusy: natsiia Pogranich'ia

4 Bulgakov, Istoriia, 233.

4! Maciej Buraczok, Dudka Bialaruskaja (Kraków: WŁ. L. Anczyc i Ska, 1891). The book was published in Belarusian using the Latin script.

? Bulgakov, Istoriia, 226-27, 229.

*$ Renan, "What Is a Nation?’ 52.

^ Bulgakov, Istoriia, 267; Tereshkovich, Etnicheskaia istoriia, 133.

since the latter were more inclined to strive for inclusion into the cultural world of nobles and intellectuals (Polish or Russian) in hopes of future social mobility.“ The lack of social groups dedicated primarily to the modern Belarusian project, especially in a situation where religion was a divisive factor rather than a unifying one, slowed down the process of nation-building. The ban on the Uniate Church back in 1839 deprived the future Belarusian movement of its potentially active social base,** especially as, in the subsequent decades, religious identifications tended to be equated with national ones, where being Roman Catholic or Orthodox often meant being identified as Polish or Russian, respectively.

The final project of the modern Belarusian nation was also heavily influenced by the colonial discourses of West-Russism and modern Polish nationalism,” which presented Belarus as a marginalized region with a predominantly peasant culture. The political context of the second half of the nineteenth century, along with the assimilatory pressures on Belarusians and Ukrainians, slowed down the development and evolution of their respective national movements.** National movements of largely peasant nations were highly dependent on the coincidence of confessional, social, and political antagonisms,? most of which were not pronounced in the Belarusian case, as demonstrated by the religious divide between the masses and the national activists, who belonged to different confessions and social strata.

Similarly to the Ukrainians, the Belarusians were more receptive to socialist rather than nationalist slogans, due to their peasant-dominated society. In this respect, the convergence of social and national demands could be used as an effective means of mobilizing the masses, which explains the popularity of the socialist parties within the Belarusian national milieu. On the other hand, the socialist character of the leading Belarusian political parties and their emphasis on social liberation rather than national self-determination precluded the inclusion of all social strata in the process of modern nation construction. Socialists focused on