Belarus
| Author | Joseph Serio |
| Pages | 198-208 |
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Official country name: Republic of Belarus (Respublika Byelarus)
Capital: Minsk
Geographic description: Slightly smaller than Kansas, Belarus covers a total area of 207,600 square kilometers. It borders Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Russia, and Ukraine.
Population: 10,300,483 (est. 2005)
The outbreak of World War I in 1914 turned Byelorussia into a zone of strict martial law, military operations, and great destruction. Large German and Russian armies caused the departure of more than one million civilians from the country. The Russian government's inept war efforts and ineffective economic policies prompted high food prices, shortages of goods, and countless deaths. Discontent in the cities and the countryside led to strikes, riots, and the eventual downfall of the czarist government.
A month after the November 1917 Russian Revolution, more than 1,900 delegates to the Byelorussian Congress (Rada) met in Minsk to establish a democratic republican government in Byelorussia, but Bolshevik soldiers disbanded the assembly before it had finished its deliberations.
The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March 1918, ending World War I between the Russians and Germans, put most of Byelorussia under German control, but on March 25, 1918, the Central Executive Committee of the Rada nullified the treaty and proclaimed the independence of the Byelorussian National Republic. Later that year, the German government, which had guaranteed the new state's independence, collapsed, and the new republic was unable to resist Byelorussian Bolsheviks supported by the Bolshevik government in Moscow. The Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic (Byelorussian SSR) was established on January 1, 1919.
Vladimir Lenin's New Economic Policy (NEP), established in 1921 as a temporary compromise with capitalism, stimulated economic recovery, and by the mid-1920s agricultural and industrial output in Byelorussia had reached 1913 levels. Historically, Byelorussia had been a country of landlords with large holdings, but after the Bolshevik Revolution, these landlords were replaced by middle-class landholders; farm collectives were practically nonexistent. When forced collectivization and confiscations began in 1928, there was strong resistance, for which the peasantry paid a high
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social price: Peasants were allowed to starve in some areas and many were deported to Siberia. Because peasants slaughtered their livestock rather than turn it over to collective farms, agriculture suffered serious setbacks. However, the rapid industrialization that accompanied forced collectivization enabled the Moscow government to develop new heavy industry in Belarus quickly.
During NEP, the Soviet government relaxed its cultural restrictions, and Byelorussian language and culture flourished. But in the 1930s, when Joseph Stalin was fully in power,Moscow's attitude changed, and it became important to Moscow to bind both Byelorussia and its economy as closely to the Soviet Union as possible. This meant Russification of the people and culture. The Byelorussian language was reformed to bring it closer to the Russian language, and history books were rewritten to show that the Byelorussian people had strived to be united with Russia throughout their history. Political persecutions in the 1930s reached genocidal proportions, causing population losses as great as would occur during World War II—more than two million people.
Germany attacked Poland on September 1, 1939. Two and a half weeks later, Soviet troops moved into the western portions of Byelorussia and Ukraine. Ignorant of, or disbelieving the existence of, mass persecutions under Stalin, most Byelorussians welcomed the Red Army, only to learn quickly of the harsh reality of Communism. Arrests and deportations were common, and the so-called flourishing of national culture was strictly circumscribed by the ideological and political goals of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. About 300,000 persons were deported from western Byelorussia to Soviet labor camps between September 1939 and June 1941, when Germany attacked the Soviet Union.
By June 1941, when German tanks swept through Byelorussia toward Moscow, many Byelorussians actually welcomed the Nazis, thinking that they would free the Byelorussian people from their Communist oppression. However, the Nazis' designs for the occupied territories became known soon enough: Germanizing and assimilating 25% of the Byelorussians and either ousting or destroying the remaining 75%.
Later in the war, when the eastern front began moving westward, many Byelorussians had to choose between two evils: life with the Soviets or departure into exile with the Nazis. Many Byelorussians decided to flee, and tens of thousands of them found themselves in Germany and Austria toward the end of World War II. Some of those who had been deported as forced laborers to Germany agreed to go back to Byelorussia, only to be deported again by the Communists to Siberia or other remote places in the Soviet Union. All those who fled voluntarily to the West eventually settled in Germany, other European countries, or overseas.
The wartime devastation of Byelorussia—the loss of people, homes, animals, public buildings, educational and cultural resources, roads, communications, health care facilities, and the entire industrial base—was complete. To make up for the industrial loss, Stalin ordered the building of new factories and plants, more efficient than most of those elsewhere in the Soviet Union.
The Byelorussian language was unofficially banned from official use, educational and cultural institutions, and the mass media; Byelorussian national culture was suppressed by Moscow. This so-called cultural cleansing intensified greatly after 1959, when Nikita Khrushchev, the leader of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union at the time, declared in the Byelorussian capital, "The sooner we all start speaking Russian, the faster we shall build communism."
All the Soviet events of the postwar period, from 1945 up until Mikhail Gorbachev, were reflected in Belarus. It came through the end of Stalinism, the Khrushchev "thaw," the stagnation of the Leonid Brezhnev government, the cold war, and Gorbachev's perestroika.
The resistance of some students, writers, and intellectuals in Minsk during the 1960s and 1970s was met with harassment by the Committee for State Security and firing from jobs rather than arrests.
In April 1986 a new tragedy was visited upon Byelorussia—the disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear plant equal to the explosion of 150 Hiroshima atomic bombs. Though the station itself was situated in Ukraine, the winds blew in the direction of Byelorussia. As a result, 70% of all radioactive fallout is believed to have landed on Byelorussian land, turning one-fifth of it into a zone of radioactive contamination. This resulted in a dramatic increase in cancers, genetic mutations, and leukemia.
Following the August 1991 attempted overthrow of Gorbachev, the Supreme Soviet in Minsk declared the independence of Byelorussia on August 25, 1991, by giving its Declaration of State Sovereignty the status of a constitutional document and renaming the country the Republic of Belarus.
With independence, Belarus got a new start under less than favorable conditions. The economy was in disastrous shape, inflation was spinning out of control, unemployment increased dramatically, and the influence of organized crime was felt in every corner of the country. The election of Alexander Lukashenko as President only worsened the situation.
Lukashenko had been manager of a state farm in the 1980s before being elected to the Supreme Council in 1990. He came out on top in the presidential election of 1994, declaring an anti-inflation and anticorruption
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agenda. Following his election, Lukashenko reintroduced Soviet price controls, moved the economy back into Russia's sphere of influence, and introduced an authoritarian constitution.
Soon after the 100-day mark of his presidency, Lukashenko launched an attack on the independent mass media in Belarus. Many popular TV shows and newspapers which did not always approve of the President's actions were discontinued; in others, editors were replaced by more loyal ones. The editor of the most popular newspaper was replaced and the opposition newspaper was forced out of the country.
Lukashenko succeeded in muzzling the media, limiting most public expressions of dissatisfaction among the population, and perpetuating a police state that moves rapidly to suppress any signs of protest. Human rights abuse by law enforcement agencies is commonplace. The Ministry of Internal Affairs, State Security, and other law enforcement agencies are little more than enforcers for the President, frequently disregarding laws on the books, flouting the constitution, and ignoring due process.
In 1996 Lukashenko disbanded Parliament, which had been seeking to impeach him, and also strengthened his control over the judiciary. The new Parliament that emerged was handpicked and subsequent elections in 2000 were widely condemned by observers as rigged. Meanwhile, many former allies and government ministers have either fled abroad or joined the opposition. High ranking officials, such as a former Deputy Prime Minister and a former Minister of Internal Affairs, have simply disappeared.
President Lukashenko has essentially ignored the legislature and has ruled by decree. Protests by legislators are largely ignored but sometimes brutally suppressed, as was the case with a group of democratic deputies who held a hunger strike in the parliament building in protest of a referendum on...
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