Abstract
The Second World War has cult status in Belarus where its history is beyond questioning.
For the past three years I have been working on the topic of memory and war in Belarus. Like any visitor to that country− and I have been going there for the past 20 years regularly − I was fascinated and intrigued by the prevalence of Second World War memorials. No matter where one went, there was a war monument. The most important official occasions in the country, especially Independence Day on 3 July, are commemorations of the war. At those times, the capital Minsk hosts an elaborate military parade attended by President Alexander Lukashenko and his third son Mikalay, who was born in 2004. Both, improbably, wear the uniform of a general.
There are a growing number of historic sites of significance in Belarus. Some date from Soviet times, such as the Khatyn Memorial Complex and the Brest Hero Fortress. Others are of more recent origin, such as the Stalin Line Museum near Zaslavl, some 27km from Minsk. Monuments abound, mostly but not always in memory of partisan heroes, such as 14-year-old Marat Kazey, who died after an encounter with the German occupants, or Konstantin Zaslonov, also known as partisan leader Dyadya Kostya, who died in the village of Kupovat, Vitsebsk region, on 14 November 1942, and now has a statue in his memory at the railway station in Vorsha.
The focus on the war is hardly surprising. Belarus lost, according to official figures, about one-third of its population during the war years. It suffered a brutal occupation. Its Jewish population was virtually wiped out. Many villages and settlements were destroyed. The city of Minsk lost its entire centre.
Still, it seemed to me that the war, which ended 67 years ago, was also an instrument of nation-building. Lukashenko became president in July 1994, and has remained in place by cowing his opponents and manipulating elections, as well as by maintaining a largely state-run economy sponsored by cheap Russian imports for many years. Like many dictators or would-be dictators, one facet of his leadership has been a constant quest for legitimacy. He has found it in part by identifying his regime with the wartime Soviet republic, and by raising the war to the status of a modern-day cult, the events of which can no longer be questioned.
My study was not the usual historian’s route of heading for the National Archives and requesting permission to examine various documents, though I have done that in the past. I was more concerned with the dissemination and narratives of the war permeating through the media, school textbooks, historic sites and monuments. Most interesting of all was the question of generations: how could genuine links be formed between the remaining war veterans, who are now over 85 years of age, and schoolchildren?
I found Belarusians ready to assist at every point. Friends, acquaintances, librarians, politicians, newspaper editors and journalists all came to my aid. I visited all the sites named above, some of them more than once. I spent hours in the Museum of the Great Patriotic War in Minsk. I perused newspapers from different regions of the country to read their accounts of the war. I grabbed every school textbook on which I could lay hands, purchasing many of them in local bookstores. I watched TV documentaries, the recent Russian-Belarusian film about the Brest Fortress, visited exhibits at the Minsk Museum of History and wandered through a number of villages and towns to locate monuments. Now at the stage of writing up some conclusions, I am even more convinced that the usage of the war is largely, though not totally, state propaganda.
One point needs to be stressed at the outset. Though about one-third of Belarus’s war victims were Jews, the Holocaust is not a major topic. It is barely mentioned in school textbooks. Most of the monuments and sites do not distinguish between Jewish and general Soviet deaths, following the practices of the old USSR. Monuments to the Holocaust are usually funded from abroad. The contemporary glorification of the war is about partisans rather than Jews, though sometimes the two were synonymous, as anyone who has watched the 2008 film Defiance, starring Daniel Craig, will testify.
Another controversial issue is anti-Soviet opposition during the war. Officially approved texts contain a statement that they have the approval of the Ministry of Education. One will search in vain for any information about how the population of Belarus first received news about the war, even though many initially welcomed the invaders. Rather, one hears about the treachery of the attack, the brave response and defensive battles to slow down the attackers, and the unity of the population against the enemy. Little distinction is made between the former term ‘Soviet’ to describe inhabitants and the current ‘Belarusian’. It is as though the population of the republic were fighting for an independent state.
Admittedly this is not an ethnic entity. All sources note that various people contributed to the defense of Belarus, including Tatars, Kazakhs, and of course Russians. At the same time the Belarusian component receives emphasis, as do those ethnic Belarusians who received the coveted title of Hero of the Soviet Union.
The year 1941 was once billed as a year to be forgotten for the USSR, which appeared unprepared for the timing and scale of the invasion and lost vast territories and most of its industry to the invaders. It has now been resurrected and transformed into a time of defiant resistance. The narrative begins with the defense of the Brest Fortress, where a small group held out for a few weeks before surrendering to the Germans. It continues with the Stalin Line, which, one historian told me, delayed the Germans in their march to Moscow to the extent that Stalin was able to summon forces from the Far East and save Moscow. Succinctly put: the Belarusians saved the Soviet capital.
Among others, the German historian Christian Ganzer has largely demythologised the Brest Fortress story. The Germans had occupied Smolensk by the time it was captured. The Stalin Line is completely mythical. It had been demolished before the Germans even got there as the Soviet border moved westward after the Nazi-Soviet Pact. Historians discovered some years ago that even the destruction of the village of Khatyn, site of an infamous massacre, was undertaken by auxiliary police, allegedly as retribution for the death on this same day of German Olympic gold medalist Hans Woellke near Khatyn, at the hands of Soviet partisans.
The partisans are a different matter. Belarus was certainly the centre of the partisan movement, but there is no consensus on when and how it began. Ultimately it was subordinated to the NKVD, and the Belarusian party leadership under Panteleimon Ponomarenko, one of Stalin’s cruellest and most devoted henchmen. If one adds up figures from official accounts of partisan destruction, one learns that they destroyed 28 trains and killed 1,500 Germans daily in 1943–4. No further comment is needed.
Second World War memorial in the former village of Khatyn, northeast of Minsk, 7 May 2011
Credit: Vasily Fedosenko/Reuters
By the summer of 1943, the partisans had grown into a mass movement. The following year they coalesced into the Red Army, which destroyed the German Army Group Centre in Operation Bagration. Without doubt they played an important role. But how were they regarded by the local population, which had to feed and billet them?
In 2010, local historian Illya Kopyl published a lengthy and critical series about the partisans in the opposition newspaper Narodnaya Volya, focusing on their exploitation of local residents. The result was a picketing of the offices of the newspaper by veterans (some of whom appeared to be too young to have served in the war) and members of the Belarusian Union of Patriotic Youth, an organisation loyal to the president. The newspaper received a warning from the Ministry of Information for ‘Disseminating false information that discredits the guerilla movement in Belarus, [and] actions of the Red Army during the Great Patriotic War’. Kopyl was guilty of ‘historical revisionism’.
I studied this term at some length because it appears often. Belarusian officials, particularly from the Ministry of Defence, will make comments to the effect that the memory of the war must never be forgotten, but some people would like to change the facts and rewrite its history. They are historical revisionists who should be condemned because the history of the war is sacred and cannot be altered.
This sort of rhetoric sounds laughable but it has serious consequences. It means first of all that it is very difficult for Belarusian historians to attempt serious studies of many facets of the war. To do so means risking their careers and incomes, and being designated as hostile to the prevailing line, ie the view perpetuated by the Lukashenko regime, which can be described as the Soviet line with a Belarusian angle.
In challenging the official view of the war, historians are potentially undermining the entire history curriculum in schools, which regards the war as the defining event in the Belarusian past, to the virtual exclusion of all others. In most areas of life, the Republic of Belarus is a very different place from Soviet Belarus, but not in the field of 20th-century history. Opponents of the Soviets were bourgeois nationalists, collaborators with the enemy, people who sought to undermine Soviet power, just as the modern opposition in Belarus is often dismissed by the phrase ‘enemies of the people’ or a ‘fifth column’ (most recently linked to Germans and Poles).
Revisionists are also challenging a linkage between the Belarusian state of 1945 and the modern version. One Belarusian historian has noted that the word ‘repressions’ has been removed from textbooks. In the same way, the crimes during Stalinism have also been largely concealed. After the war, many Belarusian partisan leaders were treated with suspicion. The Minsk underground was suspected of treachery. On the orders of Ponomarenko, hundreds of underground defenders of Minsk were arrested after the war and spent up to 15 years in labour camps. Not until after the death of Stalin were Belarusian ‘achievements’ in the war recognised. Minsk did not receive its current status of ‘hero city’ until 1974, 30 years after its liberation from the occupants.
But the Lukashenko regime refuses to focus on Stalinist crimes, such as the executions at Kurapaty (1937-41), where the NKVD executed up to 250,000 people. It denied until recently that the Katyn massacres of Polish officers in Russia included any Polish prisoners from Belarus. Yet recent research by Natalia Lebedeva has confirmed that 1,996 Poles from Western Belarus were among the NKVD victims executed at camps in Kozelsk and Ostashkov (Russia), and Starobelsk (Ukraine).
Lukashenko himself has always seemed ambivalent about Stalin, and reluctant to divulge the extent of the purges in Belarus. The bust of Stalin at the entrance to the Stalin Line Museum is usually adorned with wreaths. The logical deduction is that exposure of the enormity of Stalinist crimes may undermine the myths of the Great Patriotic War in which so many loyal Stalinists served. The regime itself continues to enhance the power and scope of the operations of the KGB. Belarus is thus maintaining the Stalinist legacy.
This summer I had hoped to make a concluding visit to Belarus for the purposes of this study. But my visa application to the Belarusian Embassy in Ottawa was refused. I never did find out why, despite several requests for an explanation. Either it was something to do with the nature of this study, or else my name was added to a ‘blacklist’ of those to be refused entry, along with the list of undesirables (mostly opposition members) prevented from leaving the country.
In several respects the ‘Partisan Republic’ is still fighting enemies, real and mythical, in a world that seems detached from reality. Like Stalin, Lukashenko imagines himself surrounded by enemies and hostile forces. By controlling the publicity and interpretations of the Great Patriotic War, the regime hopes to create its own legacy as a destroyer of fascism, while denying much of the Belarusian past, culture, and continuing the Soviet neglect of the native language. It is a slippery slope, and will be even more precarious once, as is inevitable, the veterans pass on and there is no one to take part in the ritual of parades and commemorations.