A nation in waiting

My life’s work is literature, which has humanity at its very centre. I am therefore accustomed to viewing history not so much as an account of events but as the stories of people who create events.  

The year 2020 was for Belarus an event involving hundreds of thousands, indeed millions of people. This was the year of the August Revolution, which should have brought freedom and democracy but instead ended in slavery and tyranny. 

Could things have turned out differently? How, after 33 years of independence – even if it was in many respects merely formal – have we arrived at a point where we find ourselves on the verge of losing our country? 

Attempting to seek answers to these questions, in 2021 I began to write a novel about the people who created the events I witnessed – and then put it to one side. It was all too close and painful, a pain that induced heart spasms and tears. And you can’t write a novel in tears – or, for that matter, a history of a time that was far from being simply sad.  

After the events of 2020, my heart no longer had the strength to watch what is happening in Belarus – to witness the destruction of its language, culture and history, to see its people spreading out across the world to save themselves from repression. This can no longer be called emigration – it is an exodus. It is already obvious that the journey will be a long one. Will we even ‘return’ as Belarusians? Here I am talking not only about those who are abroad but also those at home – in itself a kind of exodus.  

House of Government, Minsk. Image: Andrey Filippov / Source: Wikimedia Commons

Departure into exile means the destruction of everything which might enable us to survive in the metaphorical desert. The most frightening thing is having no way of fighting this destruction. It’s a kind of pain that even made me envy my older colleagues, who had already gone to a better world and didn’t have to witness how everything for which they had worked, and indeed lived, was being destroyed. 

This is why I took up the offer to publish my book in Poland, after all my attempts to have it printed in Belarus had failed. I arrived in Poland and returned to the novel that I had begun in Minsk. 

A people in need of a nation

I had finished almost half of the novel when the war in Ukraine escalated into a full-scale invasion. I realized then that I wouldn’t be able to answer questions about why the situation in Belarus is like it is. I could see all the conceptual mistakes that had been made in politics in what I had written and was compelled to abandon the novel. When I began work on it anew, the war became my starting point.  

The fate of Belarus has always been determined by war. That is how it was in the 18th century (after the Seven Years’ War and the three partitions of Poland), in the 19th century (after the war of 1812) and in the 20th century (after World War I and World War II). The 21st century is no exception: the fate of Belarus is now being decided by Russia’s war on Ukraine. 

A war in which people who, not so long ago, saw themselves as brothers are now killing one another is akin to an Ancient Greek tragedy. It’s not easy to understand the producers, the actors and the set designers of these tragedies, but it is much more difficult to comprehend the chorus. In the classical tragedies by Euripides, Aeschylus and Sophocles, the chorus personified the people, whose role it was to interpret events and judge the actions of the heroes from a moral standpoint. 

When the ‘ancient chorus’ of Russia sings the praises of a fratricidal war, and in Belarus the people listen and seem to give their silent consent (‘it’s none of our business, is it?’), what kind of society are we dealing with? ‘You people, you people of Belarus, you are plain and simple, blind like moles’: these words by the poet Maksim Bahdanovich are an emotional outburst, devoid of meaning. The people are not plain and simple; they are not blind. It is simply how things have turned out historically: the people of Belarus have not become a nation. They have not fallen in love with what is theirs sufficiently to want to become a nation. 

We suffer from oikophobia: disdain for what is ours – our language, culture and history. We regard almost everything that is not ours as superior. This is essentially a sickness from which various peoples have suffered at different times in history, but in the Belarusian case it is chronic. Until we rid ourselves of this sickness, until we come to love ourselves and what is ours, there is nothing or no one to help us become a nation in the fullest sense of the word. 

In fact, it is not only Belarusians who are affected by this; so too are our eastern neighbours – perhaps to an even greater extent. No Belarusian has ever written about Belarus in the way that Russians have written about Russia: ‘It is Russia’s sole destiny to show the world how not to live and how not to do things’, wrote the nineteenth century Russian philosopher Pyotr Chaadayev.  

A question of east or west

It is generally accepted that talking about the role of love in the historical nation-building process is not something a scholar would do. But I’m a writer, not a scholar. And, as a writer, I know that the best literature is about families: John Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga or Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace. It’s true, not only in these novels but in all the novels I have read – regardless of the author’s nationality – that a family is a family only when there is love. And a people is a family, and the world is a family of peoples that rests on a foundation of love, which a fratricidal war has suddenly demolished. 

Thank God we are not playing a direct role in this war. However, the repressions that began after the events of August 2020 are of a kind unheard of since Stalinist times; they constitute an act of outright war by the state upon the people who live in it. A war with ourselves. The question is: can we stop it, or will it lead us to national suicide? This would have been inevitable if we had fully joined the Russo-Ukrainian war. 

Without Ukraine, the future of Belarus is incorporation into the Russian Federation – ‘voluntary attachment’ to Russia either as six separate provinces or as a whole country called Belarus, as Putin put it in 2000, shortly after becoming president. It is of course possible to exist even after incorporation (after all, this was our situation for almost two and a half centuries, first within the Russian Empire and then as part of the USSR), but this does raise the question of the capability of the Belarusians to grow into a fully-fledged nation.  

I completed a novel called Gey ben Hinom (The Valley of the Son of Hinnom) just before Russia attacked Ukraine – something that all scholars, politicians and political pundits said would never happen. In the novel there is a dialogue between Stalin and Yanka Kupala, our national genius. Stalin says: ‘The Russian nation is a great nation, comrade Kupala. Could the Belarusians have defeated the Germans? Could the Georgians have? No. But the Russians did. They could even defeat Ukraine if they wanted to.’ To Kupala’s question, ‘Why would they want to defeat Ukraine?’ Stalin replies, ‘What do you mean, why? Because they’re Russians.’  

Of course, this is literature, not politics or political science. The dialogue itself is not even all that essential to the plot of the novel. Nevertheless, it seemed – in a flash of what art critics call creative intuition – to write itself. On the very eve of war.  

What led to the war? This war is not only about territory; in fact, it is not about territory at all, not about Crimea or the Donbas. Its cause is much deeper. It is civilizational. As one of my Ukrainian poet-friends wrote to me in a letter, ‘We are existential enemies for them, just as they are for us. Quite apart from its deep roots and its tragedy, this war is biblical in essence. It’s us or them. No more, no less.’ 

‘Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet’, wrote the English poet Rudyard Kipling, a sentiment later repeated by the Russian poet Aleksandr Blok. True, this formula is becoming slowly blurred in the world (for example in South Korea, where West and East are apparently coming together), but Russia is an exception. From the earliest stages of its statehood, Russia has chosen the East as its civilizational model, with its postulate that ‘all power is vested in one fist’. Within the ‘Russian world’ this is these days termed ‘Russian power’, a concept elaborated in the 1990s and designed to fit a single individual who stands above the law.  

This is how it was under the tsars, how it was under the Communist Party’s general secretaries, and how it has continued to be under Russia’s presidents. Vladimir Putin recently went so far as to declare that the Golden Horde was better for Russia than ‘western conquerers’. Ukraine, on the other hand, was prepared by its history to take a decisive step towards joining the flow of western civilization and its principle of the separation of powers. This may not be the primary cause of the clash of civilizations, but it is not the least of them either. 

Squandered opportunity

Russia has chosen its path, just as Ukraine has chosen one for itself. Belarus, however, has not made a choice. It is still caught between two paths.  

This led directly to the failure of the Republic of Belarus to make any use whatsoever of the independence it had acquired. At the very start, independence provided the country with the opportunity to take decisions that were free of a severely weakened Russia. This is exactly what the Baltic countries did and, by aiming for membership of the European Union, saved themselves. In Belarus there was no one to put forward such proposals – neither among the conservatives (communist and pro-Soviet) nor the democrats, nor even the Belarusian Popular Front (the largest opposition force at the time), whose leader advocated a completely independent Belarus, unattached either to the Russian Federation or the European Union. It was then that I published an article entitled ‘Between the Poles’, in which I asked how an iron filing could keep its balance between the two poles of a magnet. It’s impossible. In reply, I heard that it is impossible in physics, but possible in politics. 

This was the first political mistake that could be regarded as historical, because it was essentially the first step towards the loss of Belarus’ newly gained independence. Think of the amount of time that had to pass before even Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky – who berated Belarus for its collusion with the aggressor – could finally declare that ‘Europe is the Balkans and Moldova, and there is one day bound to be a Europe Day for Georgia and a Europe Day for Belarus’. 

 Of course, the Belarus of 1991 would not have been invited to join the European Union straight away. Time was essential for the fulfilment of the necessary conditions, just as it was for the Baltic states. However, it would not have meant losing time in our history that we have now lost. It would have been our chosen path. 

‘What about the Union State between Belarus and Russia?’ we might retort here. ‘Isn’t that a path to the East? Isn’t it a choice?’ Yes, it is a choice. But it’s not a path because it’s not a choice of civilizations. It’s a political choice. And politics can change as quickly as the weather.  

The dangers of improvisation

The second mistake was made by the rulers of the independent Republic of Belarus when they were signing the Belovezha Accords, the 1991 treaty that formally abolished the USSR and established the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) in its place. 

 I was quite well acquainted with Gennady Burbulis, the Russian foreign minister at the time; we had met back in the early 1980s in Sverdlovsk, when I was reading poetry to the students of the Urals Polytechnic there, and he was delivering lectures on Marxist-Leninism. I asked him if, during the signing of the Accords (in which he was directly involved), there had been any kind of consideration of the consequences – political, economic, social – of the document to be signed. He replied that there had been nothing of the kind; just a bit of ‘thinking on the fly’. That is exactly what he said, I’ll remember it for as long as I live, ‘thinking on the fly’. This thinking on the fly produced the formula ‘The USSR hereby ceases to exist as a subject of international law and as a geopolitical reality.’  

All well and good: it ceases to exist. But what then? The accords were signed with no conditions or addenda, with no guarantees from the initiators of the document (the Russian leadership). Most importantly, there were no guarantees of the integrity of the Belarusian and Ukrainian states. Yeltsin and Burbulis may not have thought about this. After all, they were trying to solve a power problem: they were unable to remove Gorbachev as head of the Soviet state, so they removed the state he ruled from underneath him. 

However, this was something the signatories from Ukraine (Leonid Kravchuk and Vitold Fokin) and Belarus (Stanislav Shushkevich and Vyacheslav Kebich) should have thought of. They knew history, they knew Russia, they knew that Russia’s foreign policy had always been the seizure or ‘return’ of lands that were ‘historically Russian’ – even allowing for the fact the country was then in the throes of a political and economic crisis and so unable to indulge in anything like that. However, it was foolish not to ask what would happen next. What guarantees were there that Russia would not return to its old imperial idea of ‘gathering the lands’? This is precisely what Russia has returned to. It is now ‘gathering the lands’. 

There are those who might say that Russia would have broken any guarantees it gave anyway, just as it broke the agreements contained in the Budapest Memorandum. Yes, that’s possible. However, I am not talking of Russia’s responsibility, but of the responsibility of those to whom the people of Belarus and Ukraine had entrusted their fate.  

Yeltsin was desperate to remove Gorbachev and would have signed any kind of guarantees. However, the Belarusian and Ukrainian heads of state proposed nothing. Later, they let everyone know what wise politicians they were. If it hadn’t been for the agreements, they said, there would have been war! So what they did in Belovezha in 1991 was effectively to sign off on a war in Ukraine in 2014. 

Sabotaged by self-interest

The third historical mistake was made during the campaign to elect the first president of Belarus. Instead of agreeing on one single candidate for election, the democratic opposition parties started fighting each other. As a result, Hienadź Karpienka, a deputy of the Supreme Soviet, was removed from participation in the elections. This was a politician who possessed charisma and the air of authority that came naturally to a man with sound managerial skills: he had been director of a large factory and was at the time mayor of a city. He could have won the election. And then Belarus would have won. 

There are many who maintain that Belarus would have won if Zianon Paźniak had been victorious in the country’s first presidential election in 1994, followed by Karpienka in the next election. They include the former member of the Supreme Soviet of Belarus Siarhei Navumchyk in his reminiscences of 1994. This is political fantasy. How could a nationalist have won in a Sovietized country with no sense of nationhood? It could have happened the other way round: first the tolerant Karpienka, followed by the radical Paźniak. But things didn’t turn out either way, because the other participants in those events weren’t thinking about Belarus. They were thinking about themselves. They thought up a way of keeping Karpienka out of the elections; a way that, to put it mildly, was not exactly decent.   

Aleh Trusaŭ, the chairman of Stanislav Shushkevich’s electoral team, persuaded 14 members of the social-democratic party Hramada to withdraw their signatures nominating Karpienka for the presidency. Moral questions aside, the electoral law did not allow for such an ‘initiative’. Together with Alaksiej Dudaraŭ, the head of Karpienka’s electoral team, I tried to persuade him to stand up for his rights – in the electoral commission and in the courts, which at that time were still real courts. He categorically refused, though he was not categorical by nature. He would not go to court. Indeed, he would not even talk about Trusaŭ’s ‘initiative’. ‘Anything that starts with malice will end in the same way,’ he said. ‘And I do not want to have anything to do with it.’ 

Why have I lingered for so long on what may seem like a private episode in our recent history? I have done so because, like a cancerous tumour of amorality, it metastasized. The scenario with signatures repeated itself in 1996, a dramatic year which could have become a turning point but did not. Seventy-three deputies put their signatures to a motion to the Constitutional Court to impeach the president for obvious violations of the constitution. However, twelve of them withdrew. As in the case of Karpienka, these withdrawals had no legal force, and the Constitutional Court agreed with that. But while the judges were analyzing the law, Alyaksandr Lukashenka managed to hold a referendum, the results of which gave him untrammeled power; neither the courts nor the law itself had any control over him. Not one of those who signed and then withdrew their signatures has ever shown any penitence. 

It says a lot that of the fourteen who first supported Karpienka but subsequently sold him out, only one man has ever sought forgiveness: the poet Anatol Viarcinski. For all the rest it’s water off a duck’s back. In all the elections that followed, both the regime and the opposition engaged in machinations and falsifications. In the presidential elections of 2010, only one of the nine opposition candidates succeeded in obtaining the necessary 100,000 signatures. All the rest were registered on the basis of falsified lists. It was like this in 2015, when all the opposition candidates submitted fake lists, and in 2020, when the only opposition candidate to submit a list of completely genuine signatures was Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya. That is how the opposition came to join the general deception that held the whole country in thrall.  

No recipe for revolution

There’s a popular saying that goes ‘You can lie your way through the world, but you can’t lie your way back’. It was precisely the deception employed in the presidential elections of 2020 that turned the protests into a revolution. Maybe it didn’t change the political system or the way the state was run, but it did change the mentality of a society that could no longer live with lies. 

Why did the revolution not succeed? There are several reasons. Previous mass protests in Belarus (such in 2010) had plenty of leaders but not enough ordinary demonstrators. The situation was reversed in 2020: there was no shortage of demonstrators, but few leaders. Those who did show themselves were unprepared and not ready to assume the burden, though they really should not be blamed for this (I know from my own experience how difficult it is). 

By using the kind of protest strategies (decentralization) that had been employed successfully in Armenia, the ‘new’ Belarusian opposition distanced itself totally from the ‘old’. Earlier opposition politicians had experience of organizing mass protests, yet not a single one was offered a place on the Coordinating Council, none of whose members had any such experience. All the suggestions made on the basis of that experience were viewed as an attempt to impose the strategy used in 2010, which none of the new politicians wanted to hear about. ‘We’ll come to power by peaceful means, without violence’, they said. However, in the absence of a leader (who in Armenia became head of state after the victory of the revolution), strategies of self-organization did not work. 

A successful revolution does not necessarily mean violence, barricades and shooting. In Ukraine, even before the barricades were erected, the Maidan had forced the head of state Yanukovich to offer the post of prime minister to the opposition and call parliamentary elections. However, the opposition rejected the offer. This was a mistake which inflamed the situation and ultimately led to shooting. This could have been avoided if the opposition had accepted the authorities’ proposals and kept up the pressure on them to ensure that the proposals became reality. 

Something similar could have been done (or at least attempted) in August 2020 in Belarus. It is now apparent that there was a risk attached to this. And a big one. Russia was already planning another incursion into Ukraine (something we didn’t know at the time). Russia needed Belarus as a troop deployment area. A 2010-style revolution could have given rise to aggression. There were Russian tanks lying in wait near Smolensk: the war could have begun in Belarus, not Ukraine.  

Perhaps the opposition’s attempt to take power by peaceful means saved us from bloodshed. But was the road to freedom ever taken without sacrifice? If such a thing has ever happened, it means that freedom is ‘easy come, easy go’. Freedom has no value if no price has been paid for it.  

The only path to freedom

The main reason for our current situation was outlined in the 19th century by the Russian thinker Alexander Herzen. ‘The state has established itself in Russia like an army of occupation’, he wrote. ‘We do not feel the state to be part of ourselves or of society. State and society are at war with each other. The state’s war is punitive, society wages a partisan campaign.’ Herzen wrote this a long time ago, but it is still relevant today. What has long determined the fate of Russia may now be applied also to Belarus, where the concept of ‘Russian power’ – a person above the law – is written into the constitution. 

‘Russian power’ will only disappear from Russia through civil unrest. This unrest is inevitable after the unjust, fratricidal war waged not by the people of Russia, but by the state, i.e. the army of occupation stationed in Russia. After its disappearance, a new window of opportunity will open, which we must use, avoiding the mistakes made in the early years of Belarusian independence. 

This won’t happen tomorrow. As Herzen wrote, ‘People cannot be liberated to a greater extent than they are already liberated inside.’ This is the only path to freedom, and nowhere has it ever been short.  

This translation was supported by the S. Fischer Foundation. The German translation was first published in dekoder.