As the Soviet Union faltered, Belarus saw similar national revival movements as in the Baltic states. But as Lithuania embarked on a path towards the European Union, the democratic transition in Belarus grounded to a halt. What happened?
With the advent of perestroika in the mid-1980s, informal clubs and gatherings began to form in the Soviet republics. The first Belarusian pro-independence rallies took place in 1987, but the real breakthrough happened a year later when the struggle for historical memory began.
On June 3, 1988, when Sąjūdis, the Reform Movement of Lithuania, was founded in Vilnius, a Belarusian magazine Literature and Art published a groundbreaking report “Kurapaty – the road of death”. The authors of the article provided archaeological evidence that Kurapaty woods on the outskirts of Minsk was the NKVD’s massacre site in 1937–1941.
According to various sources, between 30,000 and 250,000 victims of Stalinist repression, including almost the entire Belarusian intelligentsia, were killed in Kurapaty by the NKVD, the internal Soviet troops.
Read more: Will Belarus lose its Soviet-era name tag in Lithuania?
The society quickly reacted to the publication. On June 19, 1988, Belarusians organised one of the first large-scale demonstrations of the revival period, drawing around 10,000 people.
On October 19 of the same year, Belarusians established the Organising Committee of the People’s Front called Revival (Адраджэньне). Its main masterminds were representatives of informal Belarusian movements.
“For some time, the so-called environmental and monument protection organisations or intellectual discussion clubs had existed [in Belarus]. They organised a Free Seimas meeting in Vilnius, where they agreed to set up an organising committee to create the Belarusian People’s Front,” said Kęstutis Bartkevičius, a Lithuanian historian researching the Soviet Union’s national movements.
On October 30, a day of commemoration of ancestors in Belarus, the People’s Front organised a mass demonstration which had to introduce the movement to the public. Although the communist government did not give permission for the rally, around 10,000 people joined.
Not as strong as Sąjūdis
The process of national revival was taking momentum in Belarus. In February 1989, the Organising Committee of the People’s Front held the first legitimate opposition rally in Minsk. According to Bartkevičius, it attracted around 40,000 people.
The historian said that the process of Belarusian People’s Front’s formation was analogous to both the Lithuanian Sąjūdis and other national movements in the Soviet Union. After the establishment of organising committees, regional units and support groups formed in the regions.
By February 1989, when the first authorised rally took place, the People’s Front had already had 360 support groups that united around 10,000 Belarusians across the country. Most of them were concentrated in the capital Minsk that was the centre of the intelligentsia, according to Bartkevičius.
Nevertheless, the Belarusian People’s Front had never reached the scale of Sąjūdis, said Gintaras Songaila, a member of Lithuanian’s Reform Movement, who closely communicated with activists in Belarus. According to him, the real Belarusian revival is happening now.
Read more: Zhyve Belarus from Minsk to Vilnius – where does the slogan come from?
According to Bartkevičius, the Belarusian People’s Front was weaker because of the greater degree of Sovietisation of its society. He reminded that Eastern Belarus became part of the Soviet Union already after the First World War.
Moreover, during the Soviet era, there was neither active anti-Soviet resistance nor a strong dissident movement in Belarus.
“Lithuania had been part of the Soviet Union for 50 years [...]. Throughout this period, there had been resistance to the regime in one way or another. That was not the case in Belarus,” the historian said.
Belarusians could also feel closer to Russians because both nations were Orthodox and subordinate to Moscow’s Patriarchate, according to Bartkevičius. In Lithuania, meanwhile, the Catholic Church actively participated in the resistance movement.
The historian added that despite perestroika, the Belarusian Communist Party elite was stagnant, which hindered change.
“The Popular Fronts were more successful in republics where the party leadership was replaced during the perestroika period,” Bartkevičius explained.
In other republics, such as Belarus and Ukraine, the communist elite opposed perestroika reforms and waited for a return to the status quo. Seeing what was happening in the Baltic republics, Belarusian and Ukrainian leaderships refused to register the national movements, the historian said.
Failed unification
Just like the protests today, pro-independence events in Soviet Belarus featured historical symbols, including white-red-white flags and the Pahonia coat of arms, dating back to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, of which present-day Belarusian territories were part.
But as the Soviet Union was nearing its end, questions of historical legacy and Vilnius region’s ownership could have become causes of conflict between Lithuania and Belarus.
At the end of 1980s, a Belarusian historian Mikola Yermalovich published a study that claimed that Belarus’ land between Vilnius and Minsk formed the nucleus of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and that Belarusians or Litvins were the real founders of the state. Such a theory was called Litvinism.
According to Songaila, however, the democratic Belarusian opposition reasonably dealt with the question of Vilnius’ territoriality and had never shown ambition to incorporate it into Belarus.
“They only asked to acknowledge that it was their capital and cultural centre as well. I would say that their position was smart,” Songaila said.
At the time, Russian actors propagated litvinist ideas to stir conflict between Lithuanians and Belarusians, he added. But such a tactic was not successful because Sąjūdis recognised their neighbours’ equal right to the Grand Duchy’s legacy and traditions, according to Songaila.
Other Lithuanian activists, however, were more suspicious of the Belarusians.
Lithuania's former Foreign Minister Petras Vaitiekūnas, who coordinated freedom movements’ publications in Vilnius, said that while talking to representatives of Belarusian People’s Front, he felt strong nationalistic tendencies “that were quite dangerous for us”. He admitted, however, that given the historical circumstances, he might have been too cautious.
Meanwhile, Songaila said that the relationship between Sąjūdis and Belarusian People’s Front was friendly. In their rallies, Belarusians often demonstrated solidarity with Lithuanians.
“People [from the Belarusian national movement] came to Vilnius. They participated not only in the rallies but also in January events. [...] As far as I can remember, on January 13, 1991” – when the Soviet forces killed 14 civilians in Vilnius – “there were also protests in Minsk,” Songaila said.
But the 1990 Supreme Council elections in Belarus were disappointing for the democratic opposition. In the 360-seat parliament, People’s Front’s representatives won just a few dozen mandates. Nevertheless, the Soviet Belarusian parliament managed to adopt a state sovereignty declaration on July 27, 1990.
After the failed Soviet coup in Moscow that was the final nail in the Soviet Union’s coffin, Belarus declared its independence on August 25, 1991. A month later, the Pahonia and white-red-white flag were recognised as state symbols.
But disagreements between the democratic opposition and the communist nomenklatura, large-scale Sovietisation and Russification of Belarusian society, as well as Russia's external influence, hampered the establishment of democracy in post-independence Belarus.
"After regaining independence de jure in 1991, the pro-democracy Belarusian forces failed to establish and stabilise the country [in a similar way as] Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia,” Stanislav Shuchkevich, the first head of state of independent Belarus, wrote in an article published by the Lithuanian Parliament.
“This was also because Belarusians were more influenced by communist ideas than other nations. They sincerely associated their bright tomorrow with these ideas,” he added.
Meanwhile, the democratic opposition began to fragment. In 1994, they no longer coordinated actions and failed to unite behind a single candidate in the presidential election. As such, the member of the Supreme Soviet Alexander Lukashenko celebrated victory in the 1994 presidential election.
Era of Lukashenko
Together with the Supreme Council elections, a referendum was held in May 1995, It sought to legalise new state symbols that were essentially the old Soviet signs, as well as to recognise Russian as a national language. The majority of voters supported these proposals.
Then, after the 1996 referendum, the powers of the Belarusian president were expanded. Lukashenko’s regime soon started open persecution of political opponents continuing to this day.
Many members of the Belarusian People’s Front were arrested or forced to leave the country.
In 1999, the opposition movement split into two political forces – the Belarusian Popular Front Party and the Conservative Christian Party of the Belarusian People’s Front.
Both parties oppose Lukashenko’s regime.
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