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A Partisan Reality Show

11.05.2005

The greatest challenge to Lukashenka’s almost Stalinist version of World War II may lie in simply representing Belarusians as ordinary people desperate for peace.
If anyone thought Russia’s celebration of the World War II victory anniversary was an ideological showcase, they should look at Belarus. Red flags everywhere. Pompous military parades so numerous that that easily outscore those from the Soviet era. Giant billboards with cut-outs of military decorations on all main buildings. Veterans from all over the former the former empire. Speeches and proclamations reciting the slogans of 1941 verbatim. Celebrations of Victory Day in Belarus are often described as the best indicator of how far the former Soviet republic is returning to the past. The reality is that it never really left the past.

NO BELARUSIAN OTHER THAN A SOVIET BELARUSIAN

Without World War II – the Great Patriotic War, as Belarusians know it – it is utterly impossible to understand Belarus, the mentality of its people, and the politics of the state. There are numbers that will never evaporate from the collective memory. More than 2.5 million Belarusians perished in this war – every fourth Belarusian. Some estimates even suggest every third resident died. This is more than French, British, and American casualties combined. Six hundred villages were burned, together with their residents; life never returned to 200 of them. An entire country – that is, every single major city – was left in ruins. The population returned to its pre-war level only in the mid-1970s. This horror of war transformed and created ‘the Belarusian mentality’ as it is known today: ingrained in the collective psyche is a deep, subconscious fear not just of war but of any conflict. “At least, there is no war” is a typical reaction of a typical Belarusian to a typical day-to-day hardship. “As long as everything remains quiet” is a typical thought about the future.


But the public memory stores and succors figures not just of death and destruction. Over 300,000 guerillas, known as partisans, who took to the forests to fight Nazis. Two-thirds of Belarusian territory under guerilla control for most of the war. Heavier German casualties than on the entire western front (at least, that is what official historians claim). And innumerable names of defiant heroes immortalized ever since, names such as: Kanstancin Zaslonau, organizer of the ‘railway war’ that cost the Germans a gigantic amount of ammunition and manpower; Marat Kazei, a 13-year-old who blown himself up with a grenade rather than be captured by the enemy; and Minaj Shvyrou, ‘Father Minaj’, commander of partisan units, whose four children were taken hostage and executed after their father refused to turn himself in. Innumerable poems and novels studied at high school, movies and documentaries watched on TV, obelisks in every town and village – all these tributes to the war are kept alive not only the memory of fear, but also pride.

This fear and pride has become crucial in forming what some historians and political scientists refer to as the “Soviet Belarusian nation.” For a multitude of historical reasons, Belarusians, unlike most of their neighbors, never succeeded in developing a strong sense of national identity. Domination by external powers, centuries-old policies first of Polonization, then of Russification, left the collective memory without a sense of the past. The Soviet regime filled that gap with its own ideology, mixing the communist doctrine with the heroics of the guerilla resistance during World War II. According to one scholar of Belarus, Kathleen Mikhalisko, “resistance fighters and Red Army liberators filled the role of the missing popular heroes of Belarusian history, and that, in turn, abetted the process of forging a strong national identity at the mass level."

Seen from the official point of view, the communist regime gave Belarusians everything. It created their state in 1919, in the form of the Soviet Socialist Republic of Belarus. It unified Belarus in 1939. It saved the nation from annihilation by the Nazis. And it rebuilt the republic afterwards into the most prosperous part of the Soviet Union, giving Belarusian their golden age in 1965-80, under the rule of party leader Piotr Masherov.

Masherov was an immensely popular and charismatic personality, a man who himself had been a guerilla and was awarded the star of a Hero of the Soviet Union at the age of 26. He is still revered by Belarusians for Belarus’ unprecedented prosperity during the Brezhnev era. It was Masherov who transformed the partisan war into a national myth and made it a trademark by which Belarus is still identified – at least in the former Soviet Union. It was during his rule that some of the most gigantic World War II monuments emerged. These include an almost 200 foot high spear-headed man-made Mount of Glory on the outskirts of Minsk; an immense concrete monolith to commemorate the defense of the Brest Fortress; and perhaps the most human war memorial of all – a breathtaking architectural tribute to the villagers of Khatyn burned by the Nazis with their residents inside a barn. In the center of the memorial, there is a symbol of shocking simplicity and laconism: three birch trees, with an eternal fire instead of a fourth tree – a tribute to the one in every four Belarusians who died at war. (Human it may have been, but the memorial was also deeply political: this site to commemorate all the villages that perished in the inferno was chosen to be easily confused with Katyn, the site near Smolensk where Stalin’s secret police, the NKVD, executed many thousands of Polish officers.)

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