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 Belarus
tomorrow
Sakrat Yanovich
That is a commonplace knowledge that even the most detailed prognoses tend to never come true. However, it does not mean that they are senseless. Anyway, instead of waiting for the miracle to come we need both to think hard and to come up with our prognoses. As for the future of Belarus, it can be easily predicted on the basis of similarity of today which arose from yesterday.
Future of Belarus is predetermined primarily by its colonial fate. The latter, having been placed like a nut into the pliers of the two competing empires, i.e. the Polish and the Russian one, could hardly be the sovereign one. The lingual status of the Belarusians speaks vividly in favor of this assumption, i.e. it happened to balance from one fence to another, from Polonization to Russification. Although the birth of the Belarusian national culture happened to occur in the same “nineteenth century of the nations”, it still remained in its aquarium shape. The Belarusian ethnic waters were swarming with the wrong fishes.
Ethnicity of any nation is known to be initially based on peasantry and its conservative structures, the latter being too medieval sometimes. But the nation-forming process can hardly be possible without involvement of the urban population, its lower-middle class. The rural inhabitants are the individualists who have everything on their own, i.e. the farmhouse to live in, the field to plough, the cattle to breed, the well to get water from; in other words, they possess their own farms which serve as the atom of their ethnicity. The urban dwellers also have their economy but the only one for all of them, and they depend upon it in their own different ways. Fire that happens to be at a farm/homestead or in a village can hardly be compared with the one in a town. The instinct to get better organized as well as all various sorts of revolutions would come to the town citizens from the places like Paris, St. Petersburg, and not from the rural settlement like The-Middle-Of-Nowhere, the inhabitants of which hate discipline, plus their intellect and mental potential is different as well. Peasant wars happened to always be barbarian in their nature and all of them were lost. The nation, which failed to outgrow its rural mentality and way of thinking within the course of its national formation, can maximum achieve the destiny of the smaller peoples of the West (i.e. Frisians in the Netherlands, Provencals in France etc.).
Belarusians “seized” the towns not with their banners unfolded, but on the sly, hunched because they hated their fate; they showed up, full of self-destructive thinking as they realized that they were fleeing from their rural world. It is not true to say that within the post-war time peasants “occupied” the towns because runaways can never occupy anyone. To do it, they would need to possess the feeling of their values and equality. As for the real occupation, prior to formation of the Polish state, the Polish cities were occupied by the Lithuanians while the German ones – by the Latvians and the Estonians.
One can hardly speak about any kind of development of economy in the Belarusian towns of that time, knowing that not a single one of them (even Mensk) could compete with the dynamic industrial potential of the provincial Belastok, which wormed its way into the Polish industrial dynasties. Any town is known to stop its development, providing that it does not require labor force from the rural areas. Historically, towns in Belarus had become alien to the country, and that feeling of being an alien had been absorbed by the Belarusians. Belarus without Belarusian culture and the Belarusian language but with its post-colonial self-raised administration and its artificial coat of arms, artificial flag and artificial anthem (the national symbols that can hardly have a century, or at least one-century tradition) resembles the process of Africanization of the country. Belarus can not become the flourishing state, being the outskirts of some other country, whatever it can be. And I presume that it will take too much time before it changes its status. The problem is that in the age of powerful technological revolutions it simply does not pay to possess colonial territories which could supply the center of the empire with raw materials and labor force. Colonies stopped being profitable; the British were the first ones (and the Portuguese were the last ones) to have realized that. Nowadays, to double the industrial output of the country they do not need to double their labor force or to keep bringing in ships and trains full of raw materials. The Soviet Union perished not because of the ambitions and tricks of Boris Yeltsin. It was destroyed by the heavy load of the existing at that time numerous inner colonies. Having gotten rid of them, Russia will rapidly go forward to the world leadership. As for Belarus, it was abandoned and destined to survive at its own expense. It won’t be quirking anymore, staring at the Russian “chop”. Out!
Belarus will have to go through a long lasting course of getting rid of its peripheral mentality. There are several reasons for that, and all of them seem to be the major ones. First of all, any colonial parent state happens to be in a better situation as compared to its former colony. Russia and Moscow, however, seem to be semi-colonies themselves as they exist at the expense of selling oil and natural gas, instead of trading ready-made goods. They traditionally import western technologies that are expensive and require highly qualified personnel instead of their Ivans-drunkards. Besides spending money for purchasing the most advanced technologies, they also require much time for mastering them and, later on, for getting experience on how to compete with other manufactures of similar type to win the world market. It will take generations to succeed. Therefore, Belarusian orientation to the Russian market resembles, in my eyes, the request of a grandson to get a piece of cake from his grandmother’s table. One day the Russians will stop buying the Belarusian goods on analogy with the Belarusian potatoes, which the citizens of St. Petersburg found to be scabby and less tasty than the clean and smooth one from Brandenburg, Germany. And, what was most intriguing – the latter was less expensive. The difference between capitalism and communism lies mainly in the fact that capitalism fights by means of reduction of prices and finally kicks their competitors out the market. Under the times of communism no one bothered himself about struggling for mercy of a client. Everything was simple: get the hell out of here!
Peripheral original of Belarus will also cause lack of resources for modernization of creative potential, the latter unavoidably going down the tube of stagnation pastness. It can hardly be different under the conditions of complete isolation from the leading economic centers of Europe. Orientation of Belarusian economy only to Russia is destined to lose as Russia itself is known to technologically represent only the Third World and its goods are so clumsy that they can not be used in the civilized world. However, Russia has at least natural gas and oil and it can pay for import of modern technologies, but it does not necessarily mean that it will share them with Belarus. There is no country in the world that would work for its neighbor, i.e. everything gets calculated and nothing can be gotten free of charge. As for the miserable assortment of Belarusian goods, it is characterized by being of “low quality and expensive”. The trucks, for example, are not as reliable as the Japanese ones that are supplied with an eight-year warranty.
Taking into account the fact that Russia’s involvement in the world commodity circulation comprises about two per cent and only three/third of one per cent in the Western one (that sounds like a real joke!), one can hardly seriously speak about the Belarusian trace in the world economy. The way out of this marginal abyss is the only one, i.e. attraction of foreign investments to the national economy; the western or the American ones would be the best ones in this case. However, we do not visualize too many “good guys” with sacks of dollars who would be willing to give their investments away to the criminal financial state bodies, the latter being able to swallow whatever capital you like, even the one equal to the USA budget. That was only President Putin, who honestly admitted that the miserable Russian budget equaled the one of the microscopic Netherlands or the London megapolis. And it is not worth even speculating on how much capital they keep in the Minsk shelters, i.e. what can the colony, having the inferiority and orphanhood complex but no guts and wish to become independent, possess? It sounds like a joke that political Minsk is developing its strategy towards the West. I wonder, whether the West is too naïve to trust the soviet word? There are no such fools who could rush to Belarus, which is waving the red-and-green Stalin flag, as if to obtain there the legendary Golden Fleece. Even the neighboring Poland keeps complaining that the rich Europe is afraid of it and its bumpy roads, indiscipline, bribe-taking from top to bottom, socialist working class that keeps worshiping its main principle “to contribute less but to get more”. Belarus is not capable of becoming the jumping-off place that would lead to the giant Russian market; the Lukashenka guys and their taxation system will suffocate anyone, like that very Austrian businessman, who could hardly get back home safe and sound, and the only “profit” he got out of his long ordeal was the book, in which he described all his sufferings and made a fortune out of its sales.
I have a feeling that Belarus is really not willing to catch up with the civilized world; “a glass of vodka and a piece of fried fat”, as a symbol of a happy collective farmer, is more than sufficient for it.
Another psychological barrier of Belarusians deals with their imaginary siege and spying mania, as if the spies would be interested in doing their job in such a bedraggled and slovenly Middle-of-Nowhere, not to mention about love of Belarusians to misery. In this respect I recollect the “Mosfilm” movies about Bolsheviks and the “whites”. I can hardly remember any of my schoolmates who would be willing to bear a resemblance to the commissar or Chapayev; we had aversion for their stupidity and rags. Each of us wanted to be the White Guards colonel who was neat, well-dressed, logically thinking and well-built. As far as I realized at that time how the soviet mentality would work, that tidiness was supposed to compromise the White Army. Here, in the area of the Belastochchyna, the reaction of viewers was absolutely adverse as they did not know too much about the red ragged ones and their immorality. We would hate the Soviets for their disrespect towards people, alcoholism, stealing and fraud. Shaliapin once wrote: “They keep lying all the time, no matter whether they need to or not”. This is the actual nature of their character, i.e. they can hardly survive through the day until they have not cheated someone. This is the Power of Grand Lout. It is real comic to feel pity towards the wolf because of it being a wolf.
The path of Belarus to normal life should be measured in generations and not in years, using the Bible measure and waiting for birth of the children whose mentality would not be damaged by the psychologically slavish atavisms of their parents. It had not been a long transitional period between the times of the panshchyna to the soviet reality, i.e. they had run away from the pan’s lash but where to? Belarusians are fond of serving somebody and they can hardly get rid of the feeling of miserable losers. Under such conditions Lukashenka, even not being aware of it, tends to play both the tragic and the comic role, i.e. whatever you say, it does not change the fact that he is the first modern private owner of Belarus, who at the same time is screaming and dreaming about getting some position in the Kremlin and serve there. But the irony of fate is that nobody needs him at all! And it is not a problem that he is a vassal; in his eyes he is still the owner of the country and not some kind of a governor of a province, appointed by the center or the former first secretary of the all-republican party Central Committee. With every coming day we hear more often about the “country” rather than the “republic”. Did anyone call Belarus the “country” at the times of the Soviet Union? Do you like it? Definitely! Symptoms resemble bacteria, i.e. at the initial stages they are almost invisible.
The Polish proletarian Lech Walesa said: “I do not want to become the president of the country but I have to…” But he did not dream about the Kremlin.
Thinking about the future of Belarus, let us take a closer look at the origin of the current state power of Belarus. Independence came to this country in a pretty comic way. The Soviet Union collapsed, everyone around Kremlin had become independent and the political Minsk began to cry as an orphan. Belarusian independence is an independence of an orphan, i.e. we do not want it but have to be independent and sovereign. We have kneeled down in front of Moscow and, my Lord, what did it do? It keeps kicking us between our eyes with its boot and cursing and swearing like a trooper… Nobody expected that kind of treatment here as we were accustomed to be underneath someone. That was our history and that was our fate.
There was not a single person who was destined to have died during the initial fight for its independence, or at least would have spent some time in prison and have gotten kicked into his teeth during interrogations at the KGB office. There was practically a small group of “whisperers” who could hardly be understood as they were speaking the “inhuman language”, i.e. Belarusian. The KGB guys counted only seven of them in Belarus who were loyal to their ideas and who were even making love and speaking Belarusian. “Holy s…ugar! How disgusting!”
Nothing has changed until now. Probably psycho-social attitude towards everything Belarusian has changed a bit. For example, there is an impression that the Belarusian word has become sacralized and sounds liturgical, festive and resembles the Old Church Slavonic, edited by Moscow, but does not sound as the one created by Cyril and Mefodiy. There are two Belarusian languages in Belarus today, i.e. the “commonly-understood” and the “national” one, the latter being like a toy for a child. It took me some time to have finally realized why the sincere Belarusian patriots were not so eager to invite me to be their family guest, i.e. to be able to socialize/converse with their families. I though that they probably did not have anything to treat me with but they did not resemble the poor ones… Finally, it dawned upon me: in their families the “grand and powerful Russian” was flourishing. I have nothing against Russian but I am against of dumping the Belarusian language. I am totally against lies, against deceitfulness and hypocrisy. In their eyes I resemble a fool. They obviously think: “OK, moron, if you want Belarusian, we can create you such a pleasure; but at home, with our wives and children we will be “absolutely normal people””.
They have missed the last very chance to de-Russify Belarusians when Stanislau Shushkevich lost his power. At that time there still lived the generation that did not treat Belarusian like something childish or redundant. Belarusian schools and the tradition of publishing books in Belarusian were returning back. They had personnel who could live in the Belarusian way. At that time I used to travel to Minsk very often. Many people hated me but at the same time they “understood” me. Now in Minsk they do not hate Belarusian as they simply can not understand it. Why don’t I feel angry at a gipsy? For one simple reason – usually I do not understand his Russian which resembles the speech of a Chechen.
As for the Belarusian nationalism, it is a pure invention of the Moscow “gentlemen” and the Warsaw “pans”. Is it possible to have nationalism for the nation which does not exist in reality? The same is about the Belarusian nation, i.e. it practically does not exist. It was in the process of formation (similar to the Negroes from Congo) and that process was terminated in the second half of 1990s. The presence of national elite is known to be only one of the preconditions for the rise of the nation. Besides national nationalism, science is aware of the existence of the economic one. Well, it does exist in Belarus, but it is so feeble that it would take only one battalion of commandos and a long summer night to get rid of it. As a joke, the same very Belarusian nationalists would be ready to surrender and cover the costs of commandos’ activities, at the same time thanking the latter for having liberated them from the sorrows of independence…
Reasoning of the Minsk elite about the essence of the nature of the present day Belarusians does not contain even the slightest sincerity. They say that they are facing a problem associated with the current status of the Belarusian language in the country. And the tragedy of its disappearance they treat as a regular problem. Only Akudovich is not afraid to tell the truth. The Belarusian language has been buried by the working people and their native authorities; only a small archipelago has survived where they speak the natural national language. Yan Maksimiuk from Prague is sure that the Belarusian word will survive as an esthetic category and mainly in literature. Of course, one can always see better from the distance. The discovery, made by Maksimiuk, has been really proven by the development of the national literature, i.e. all the best works have been recently created in Belarusian, not in Russian. That is a real strange thing: the Russian-speaking nation creates artistic works in Belarusian. The reason for that should be clear even to the dumbbells, i.e. genius of Belarusian literature has developed within their ethnic environment. You can hardly find analogous cases in Ireland or Scotland as English has already become their native language.
For how long will the Belarusian-based literature of the Russian-speaking people survive? The literature of people who self-liquidate Belarusian secondary schools; there are higher or secondary Belarusian schools in the country anymore. There is only one per cent of the rural schools that are in the process of dying out today. There is no Russification in the country as the process of self-Russification is in full swing. The enclave of the real Belarusians, residing in the Belastok area, will not resolve the problem. They will simply turn into the new Belarusian nation of Europe and the European Union. This is how the situation will develop. How black should your dreams be for you to be able to see in them that Poles are doing everything possible to avoid speaking Polish or Lithuanians – their native Lithuanian? As for Belarusians, they have successfully achieved that with a one hundred per cent success (well, OK, let it be 98 per cent, who cares?). Those forty per cent of the population, who specified Belarusian within the course of population census as their native language, had obviously meant their linguistic origin but not the fact that they spoke Belarusian on the daily basis. President Lukashenka can easily go ahead with his plans to build the Russian-speaking republic. He won’t speak Belarusian because will there be anyone left to address in this language to? Go outdoors and listen to the crowd of people. You will hear that “grand and powerful language” in any corner of the country.
Why do we treat supporters of Lukashenka like fools? They are simply the soviet people for whom Belarus is a small fragment of their native country, stretching from Brest to the Sakhalin Island, and not a Holy Motherland. Only their grandchildren will feel what such a motherland means to them, not earlier. They try to protect Belarus not because of them being patriots, no. The reason for that is that the Russians issue no insurance arrangements. They became patriots because of fear to lose a piece of their daily bread. And no more. If they were the real patriots with the Belarusian culture in their souls, they would never ever even think about suppressing the Belarusian language and tearing apart the national flag.
We are cheating ourselves, thinking that after our national language dies we will still be able to rebuild the devastated structure. This can be explained only either by our stupidity or self-delusion. Any language, buried into the ground, can never resurrect again. History does not now such examples but for the Yiddish language. Numerous languages have been neglected for a long time (like, for example, the Czech one), but they have not been trampled as the Belarusian one today. Even the rural people stopped using it. That is a real joke to even think about their dialects: in some ten years they will disappear forever. Our grandchildren will be leafing through the Atlases to learn about the former dialects of the former language.
The authors of the Russian-based literature of the Russian-speaking Belarus have been growing up already. They will be using a non-Russian Russian both in writing and their oral speech. It will resemble something like the world Englishes, i.e. American English, Australian English, Irish English etc. The emerged Russian-Belarusian language is now in the rudimentary state.
The issues of the language and development of the national literature, based on it, will be the decisive ones in prognosis of the future of Belarus. Russification can be compared to the peripheral status of the country; it will mean the loss of ethnic epicenter, promotion of everything what is strange, not native. Any invader aims to assimilate the occupied population. This enables him to strengthen his invasion, which, some time later, (again, thanks to the same kind of assimilation) gets adopted and “estranged”.
A still Russified Belarus will remain forever a part of a bigger whole. An as any part it will remain without any inner energy, i.e. like an amputated arm. The essence of the national idea can be formulated as striving for better life or opposition to alien exploitation and unwillingness to work for an ethnic neighbor. Such response can not be expected from the classic colonies. Their inhabitants are always happy because the colonialist happens to improve their way of life by means of creating better conditions for his exploitation. Colonies, attached to civilization, do not become free; they simply get abandoned, and, in some cases, as the result of the struggle between the competitive empires. For example, we could hardly expect foundation of the USA without high motivation of anti-English France and its military assistance. Famous decolonization took place not because of the fact that the soviet money favored chaos and the semi-bandit partisan movement. Even a much stronger colony of Arabic Algeria had been destroyed by the French, who later on recognized and accepted independence of Algeria. So, what is the problem? If anything does not match, be sure that it goes about money i.e. that instead of bringing profit any colony becomes a burden. The world economy has changed; technological revolutions significantly decreased demand in raw materials and new labor force. It is significant that mainly England and France, i.e. the developed capitalist countries of the West, were the first ones to get rid of their colonies. The drawback Portugal and Spain kept struggling for preservation of their African colonies. Decay and death of the Soviet Union was also not caused by any enemies; that was the Russian colonialism that Russia failed to digest. Nowadays Russian politicians claim that the Russian Federation within the frame of the Soviet Union was like a “milker”. Let it be so, but who asked Russia to expose its udder and, at the same time, to occupy the whole continent? Russia has never been developing; it survived only at the expense of its invasions, annexations and permanent wars (as if the humankind was willing to destroy the Russian Land). All those lies were only good for old children. In the soviet times Russia experienced the military “boom” as well as various kinds of glorious “Magnitogorsk” projects and that was on its own initiative that numerous “black assholes” began to suck its breasts.
Belarus was abandoned the same way as the drunkards get rid of their intrusive slot. I keep green in my memory the 1990s, the Russia of Yeltsin and the Belarusian patriots, trembling day and night… Because of their miserable educational background, they were afraid of annexation on the part of the Kremlin. Their drawback minds were still functioning on the retarded level of the past. It is true that Russians do not treat us as a nation and the Belarusian language is nothing more for them than the western dialect (actually, “trasianka” resembles the latter a bit). The integration-related fuss was in full swing, although it was clear at that time already that incorporation of the Belarusian economy would cost Russia not less than 100 billion US dollars. Russia has never had such amount of money and won’t have within the nearest time. Having loaded Belarus unto their shoulders, the Russian authorities would need to stop their war in the Caucasus, capitalization of the country and to start feeding its population with grass. As a reminder: the whole financial potential of the Russian Federation equals the one of the Netherlands; the district-size Singapore, in comparison with Russia, is the real empire that is on the list of the initial ten world powers of the world.
Doesn’t Aliaksandr Ryhoravich know about it? He knows about as good as Vladimir Vladimirovich does. However, both of them count on illiteracy rate of their electorates. And it doesn’t matter that one of them is the KGB colonel and a former spy in Europe, who is much more informed as compared to the former director of the soviet farm. The level of their offices is different as well as the intelligence rate. Once a Joe is always a Joe.
The nearest future of the English-speaking republics of Africa and the one of Belarus are quite different. The English-speaking nations look back at the global heroes like the USA while Belarus keeps staring at the Russian-speaking Third World. It keeps looking in the direction of Russia, the president of which in 2004 promised to start fighting against hunger and cold of his people while having the whole Mendeleyev’s table in the interior of his territories. With whom is Lukashenka going to become rich? They won’t have more bread as soon as they have arrested all the oligarchs in the country. It is a well-know postulate that people’s masses can not develop the economy: they do not apply the notions of the state in their thinking; they prefer to think with their stomach, using the categories of a cozy bed and a rich table. In the glorious United States only ten per cent of the population dream about setting up their own business. Ninety per cent of them would prefer to have an eight-hour working day, peaceful family life and smart kids as well as to spend their annual vacation on the Caribbean islands. Business is not a joke. It means permanent concern about what to do and how to better accomplish it; business means a troubled sleep, premature myocardial infarction and brain cancer. It seems to be much better for them to get employed and receive their good salary rather than to work their hands to the bones. Big money means big expenses. Western governments do not try to make their people happy, they do not get involved in economic activities of their states; they simply collect reasonable taxes, arrange effective work of the police, develop logical legislative system and form cabinets with the ministers who have nothing to do with the criminal activities. Over there, a primary school teacher makes more than a regular policeman. Lenin once wrote: “A police state is such a state in which a cop makes more money than a teacher.” How in the world can we not agree with V. I. Lenin?
Any country, possessing no national culture, is destined to die. There is no nation without nationally-oriented teachers. In case we do not meet these two conditions, the rest of the discussion is in vain. The Republic of Belarus is called in Moscow a “fortuitous state”. However, this spiteful statement contains the particle of truth. The labor of pushing Belarus up the Russian hill resembles the Sisyphean toil; these efforts will finally end up in Belarus’ rolling down into the swamp. According to Yanka Bryl, the bottom-located fire burns down the Belarusian spirit in schools and in education in general; one day it will turn the Belarusian Land into a desert. What will we have left here? The shadow of a Russian neighbor? He won’t come to live here because the site of the former fire stinks and it can get inhabited by various human crap. Also, why should the normal people visit the abnormal one? Not everyone can be interested in mutants.
They say it is nihilism. Of course it is. Nihilism is the idea of loafers. They always rely upon someone’s benefits. If it is difficult for you in Belarus you are welcome to flee to Russia. What? Do they want to accept you? Nobody is interested in you when stop being their guest. What for do they need you? They have enough of their own losers. The absurd aspect of the so-called integration is that they want to get something that belongs already to other party. This is not absurd, it is a primitive trick.
The Republic of Belarus is not the national state; it is rather the social one. It is sufficient to just listen for some time to the president and his governors. They are still living in the former soviet past. They are like leftovers of the soviet people. Sometimes Lukashenka uses the word “nation” but it is not quite clear whether he understands its meaning or not. Nobody is concerned about the loss of the Belarusian language. He did not even hesitate for a second when he was terminating the only Belarusian secondary school in Belarus where children were taught in Belarusian. Everything has been done to prevent creation of the university in which all courses of training would be conducted in Belarusian. There is no national aspect in any social state. There is no humane citizen and individual in it as the economic person dominates, i.e. a stomach-man who has a stomach instead of his heart; the latter is only in charge of pumping blood and nothing else.
History is aware of the existence of the social states. Headed by animal-like and, in most of the cases, illiterate tyrants, they used to decay and die, having left nothing for the following generations that would be worth paying their attention to. When they founded Italy as a united state in the 19th century, one of its fathers said: ”We have already created Italy; now we have to create Italians”. The Lukashenka supporters do not bother themselves about such analogous ideas. Belarus, being a sick unity of Europe, should evoke interest in the psychiatric science. They could write a good doctor paper, the unique one, which could discover a monumentally new disease, something like the Asiatic “poultry flu”.
The nearest future of Belarus will resemble the territorial formation with unclear state symbols. They keep intrusively using the term “peoples of Belarus”, rather that the “Belarusian people”. They draw attention to similar phenomena like “peoples of Siberia”. Are they saying that Belarus will become a multinational region of Russia, in which all of 123 nationalities have been covered with the cap of Russification? And what about the leading nation? The answer is that it will get self-destroyed on analogy with those 123 of them. It resembles a black old Greek tragedy.
Nowadays we also eyewitness aquarization of cultures. In our case we speak about the aquarium in which we can see Belarusian fishes; in the next one – the Polish, the Tatar and the Ukrainian ones etc. We are missing only one aquarium, i.e. the one with the Russian fish because it would be not interesting for the Russian-speaking visitors and even difficult to understand why a sheep man should have a museum of a sheep. But don’t forget that prior to the war there existed the BSSR with four state languages, i.e. Belarusian, Russian, Polish and Hebrew. On analogy with Switzerland where they have also spoken four languages for centuries.
Why are we trying to avoid the objective information? Because we have developed a soviet skill, i.e. to treat something desirable as the real one. This is the ideology of a liar. A liar is sitting on the top of a liar and another one is running in back of them. This is the unique enclave of Europe. It is worth bringing here tourists. The Germans would be the best ones because they pay more.
The most suspicious way to destroy the Belarusian spirit is to re-orientate it into the field of folklore, i.e. to turn it into the museum. It would be not fair to accuse Moscow of it. In reality, the roots of hatred towards the national culture are right on the surface: i.e. for the Russian-speaking population, supporting the Asiatic Moscow spirit, the Belarusian national culture is simply alien, foreign because it is Europe-oriented. Let us recollect its elementary history: at least the names of Frantsishak Skaryna, a western European doctor of sciences, or Simiaon Polatski, who taught the Muscovites the essentials of culture, the taste of verse, literature, helped the Romanovs learn Latin and Polish; by the way, Peter the Great, a reformer of Russia, could speak fluent Polish while his sister wrote even poems in Polish.
So, why do they try to get rid of the language and not ethnography of Belarus? Because grammar of each national language is a specific philosophy of a human world. Liquidation of the Belarusian language would mean liquidation of the Belarusian mentality and perception of the world around them. The Russian-speaking Belarusian will serve as a link in the foundation of the Russian nation and the Russian attitudes towards the neighbors, Europe and the whole world. He resembles the Frenchified mother of Pushkin, who punished her son for his wish to speak Russian; and Sasha caught that infection from his babysitter, whom he adored very much and whom (not his mother) he devoted his poems to. Belarus had its national language but repudiated it, having left only the archipelagos of Belarusian spirit, exotics of the incidental Belarusian word in the avenues of Minsk. The Belarusian language today is the language of incident, it serves as a sensation for the salesgirl and taxi-drivers who treat you as if you have addressed them in French or in English.
Any salesclerk will keep staring at you as if she saw the eighth wonder of the world and will even feel sorry that you can not speak “the normal human language”. This is the aura, the public aura, which exists around the constitutional first national language of the Republic of Belarus.
Pimen Panchanka was not kidding when called Belarusians the abdicators.
What could be the prospects in life of abdicators with psychology of cripples? An abdicator is a person who tramples his own dignity, hoping someone will like it. It resembles the nature of a slave or a mistress of a rich lover. Abdicators have no faith in their own dignity and will. They are not citizens; they are the population of this country. They need to grow up before they become the “citizens of the Republic of Belarus”. One can not be born a ready-made citizen or a hero; he/she can only become the one. The state, which is not interested in bringing up its people for them to later on become citizens, does not deserve to be called a state. It is no more than administration or police department. It keeps digging the hole, into which it will be swept away by the spontaneous forces and events.
What can the country of such people achieve? Their hearts are empty and they live mechanically. Only frogs and tadpoles can live in ditch-water. It is the country of eunuchs. Even this dark prognosis means nothing to them. Russia is sick and tired of that integration with Belarus. The Slavic unity of the retarded minds, who do not even realize such a simple thing that every third citizen of Russia is not a Slav, scares it. Slavic unity can become the fatal hit for Russia. How can we go to the intellectual Kremlin, meet with the patriarchy of Russia having millions of Catholics and Protestants in our own country? One must be real crazy to even think about it!
Stupid politics has no prospects but it can survive for a long time. Stalin, for example, kept slaughtering his people for years and survived until old age. Hitler with similar genocide, directed towards Germans, could not survive even for one year. The thing that is possible in Asia can hardly be tolerated in Europe. Mussolini, a fascist, was thrown down by fascists. Stalin was poisoned while the one who poisoned him was also shot down, just in case. It was done in the pure Asiatic style.
Let us discuss in brief the issue of hostility of the Russian-speaking part of the population towards the Belarusian-speaking one. It is not so open today as it was couple of years before. Let us just think for a while what it means to speak “the normal human language”. It means that the Belarusian language is the tongue of the primeval barbarians. The term of the “human language” can be found only in Belarus, nowhere else. It is used to convey the abyss of disgust towards a person who does not speak Russian. Again, in V.I.Lenin’s words, a non-Russian, who became Russian, is more dangerous than the Russian chauvinist. An individual like this has a zoological hatred towards non-Russians. Actually, he hates himself and his family-tree…
In what way will the war against the Belarusian culture end? Of course, with a brilliant victory. It will result in devastation of the Belarusian nation and removal of Belarusian presence in the world. Belarusian economy, as the part of the Russian one, but not having its own vital interests, can hardly be called even a colony. It is funny to predict the future of the territory which will be familiar only to geographers. Do you think that the Russian-speaking population of former Belarus will go to Russia and have better life there? No way! Nobody needs them there. They will stay where they are and will start crying over their lost motherland. They will resemble the English-speaking Irishmen who hated the Englishmen and raised the anti-English revolt; they spoke English a bit worse than the Englishmen but their tongues could not utter a single word in their native Irish. Having gained independence, they did not have better life. An Englishman, before going to Ireland, learned Irish and puzzled the Irishmen a lot. A Pole from Warsaw, speaking Belarusian in Mensk, can expect the same kind of reaction. They will treat him either like a sick person or a former spy. This or that way, he will still look stupid.
Speaking Russian in Belarus means the real catastrophe for this country. It is not by chance that those who continue to speak Belarusian in Belarus, are known to be the most intellectual and energetic individuals. Being a Belarusian-speaking person today requires inner courage and it always means a certain risk. And who wants to undergo any risk? It is always much easier to swim with stream.
Why is Russification so crucial for the future of Belarus? Why did it become a catastrophe with a long-delay action? Marginalization of national culture, based on the national language and the indigenous ethnography, is not the only problem for that. Let us go back to the essence of a national language and treat it as the original unique philosophical system, world outlook of people, specific sense of life, the notion, which we often call the soul of nation or the national spirit. Assimilation tends to get rid of nations and, later on, the states. Lingual assimilation aims to primarily liquidate the different soul. This, in its turn, will lead to adoption of way of life and spirit. It means castration of the nation and turning it into a ghetto.
Russification of Belarus pushes it down into the swamp of provinciality, into the drift of the ethnic epicenter. It turns Belarus into the spiritual and economic province of Russia, its one of the regions. Mentality of any provincial dweller is known to be depreciated; he is always on his knees before someone. Existence within the natural habitat of the Russian language will mean that Belarusians will be looking back at Moscow or St. Petersburg as a law-maker in the field of culture, but not Mensk. Mensk will become the famous “out-of-the-way place”, i.e. it will never define cultural policy of the Russian-speaking community. But this seems to be of no significance. In other words, one can say that the Belarusians used the democratic approach to have abandoned their native language; that was their own choice and their own will. But they remain to be Belarusians. So, why should we cry about it?
Can Belarusians be Belarusians with the Russian soul? Lukashenka always says: “We are the same Russian people”. Well, if “the same”, then what are we talking about? It appears that Belarus will be the second Russian state. Vladimir Putin wonders: “What the hell do I need this second Russian state for?” It looks like a diversionary structure for him.
So, when we take into account public psychology of Belarusians, the feeling of their all-nation sense of the existence as well as the idea that all of us are dreaming about sharing the Russian fate, it appears that the only prospect for Belarus will be to get self-liquidated and referendum would be the best way to do it. Voice of people is the voice of God.
One can hear the notes of economic patriotism in Belarus, e.g. “we will not give up our companies and factories in favor of the Russian business”. To my mind, even this scream itself sounds like recognition of our weakness. It would be not bad to replace the economic patriotism with the national one, be where can you get it in the country, burnt down in the fire of Russification? Anything with Belarusian spirit in it has become the symbol of oppositional forces. For how long will the economic patriotism survive? It will happen until the moment of time when the aggressor will have secured higher living standard for its slaves. Russia is theoretically capable of doing that. The only thing it will never secure for Belarus is the Belarusian national culture. Frankly speaking, the Russian authorities, possessing higher cultural standards, will never oppress the Belarusian spirit; it can be done only by the local native louts. The Russian cops will not be using their rubber sticks to beat Belarusians for their speaking Belarusian in the street. As for the present regime and the militia men, the Belarusian language became the symbol of anti-government phenomenon, and, therefore, they simply hate it. The officials can apply Belarusian labels to their offices or type up couple of documents in Belarusian only for order’s sake. The people know that it is no more than an empty vessel. It is done to throw dust in they eyes of Europe; at the same time, even a little kid in Belarus knows that its present administration will never join Europe. Nowadays official Belarus hates Europe and the latter makes them sick in Mensk. The only question remains: for how long will it last? I mean, a ten-million socialist Republic of Belarus within the capitalist environment, like Cuba in the eastern sector of the Slavic world. Think it over! The union of a frog and a cow.
No, not us, Belarusians, will put on our thinking-caps. Happy people do not bother themselves about thinking hard. And, what kind of future can the happy people have? What for do they need it? Having reached the communist paradise, the humankind would stiffen at all. As if in paradise. The end of the history, period. History of humankind, however, keeps rolling, and not necessarily forwards. In Belarus it froze down. And why should it roll here when life around Belarus seems to be much worse. For example, pensioners are paid their pensions and workers get their salaries in this country. As for Russia – it is the real nightmare down there; the same is about Ukraine where the people are dying of hunger; or Lithuania, in which the people kill each other; or Latvia, in which prostitution is in full swing; or in Poland where streets are covered with dead bodies of those who died of hunger. And in America they beat Negroes! Wow!
As for life in the Republic of Belarus, you can hardly even dream about the better one! But as soon as we have figured it out that it is not true, what country can we catch up with? North Korea?
To predict the future of Belarus is as simple as shelling pees. Belarus in its majority resembles Moses and his Jews who will begin the new life only after the last generation of Belarusians has blotted out of its memory the remembrances of the socialist paradise (i.e. slavery on its own accord).
Do we need ungovernable imagination to be able to see what will become of Belarus in some ten years down the road? No at all. This will be the country with complexes of a provincial suburb and technologies that can be found only in museums. I would like to add some salt to injury and say that without serious investments into foreign high techs Belarusians will be chasing and biting their tails. The reputable serious investors will never come to Belarus. Nowadays it is using the leftovers of the former soviet potential which has already become shabby. Poland went through the same learning curve: once the Polish newspapers boasted about the West being ready to purchase the Polish machinery. It turned out that only one lathe had been purchased by the Swiss museum of polytechnics… However, the official propaganda said nothing about that fact.
Aliaksandr Ryhoravich (for Christ’s sake!), how can the country enlarge its potential and power when it is surrounded by the fence of isolation? Pretty soon it will go down the tube and not a single state will be willing to have anything in common with it. Actually, what can they get from Belarus? Even potatoes seem to be more expensive there as compared to the German ones. Even potatoes have not been taken proper care of, like in the fields of the German Bauers. The Belarusian potato is traditionally harvested by old women and drunk tractor-drivers. There are not so many alcoholics among the rich people while among the poor ones vodka becomes the national drink. In Belarus, however, “a glass of vodka and a slice of fat” is considered to be the sign of prosperous life, the final stage of the paradise. We have pork while the Russian envy us for that… Let it be. This is the only thing which the Belarusian patriotism is based on.
As my mother used to say: “Have you finished eating? Now, go to the barn!”.
A homo soveticus can give birth to a homo soveticus the same way as a beggar gives birth to a beggar. Genetics comes above all. Our ancestors had not been the soviets, although nearly each of them was very poor. They were striving to get rich as most of the American settlers were (by the way, the USA were built thanks to the European ragged, Australia – to the London slots and convicts). Our children are not so much soviet and I do hope that our great grandchildren will resemble Europeans to some extent.
It is a mere illusion to wait for the revival of Belarus; although the Belarusian culture will keep smoldering for it to burst into flames when the right time comes. There are no totalitarian ideas in mentality of Belarusians and they can not simply dwell in minds of the people like this. The spirit of power is the mark of a national identity. Republic of Belarus will not die. It has existed for too much time already. It has given birth to too many representatives of its national elite. As for the economic decay, yes, it will come soon. Europe does not actually care a s… about the Belarusian brand of socialism (it is more concerned about the huge Russian market to win). This underdeveloped infantile region can continue playing with its own toys, who cares about it? In case Belarus behaves bad, we will stop supplying it with natural gas and oil and, in no time, it will be kneeling and banning on the doors of the Kremlin again, bagging for a chance to “polish the boots of the master”. What for do the Russians need to annex this area? Why should they share the table with the parasite, who is as poor as the church mouse? Let them feed themselves up like a peripheral tribe.
For the coming decade I can predict for Belarus only the fate of Bantustan. I will only pray the Lord for no social collisions to happen in this country when masses of happy people will start joining the majority.
P. S. The decade of Lukashenka is a miserably lost decade. Therefore, the coming decade will be the decade of regaining consciousness. And only within the third decade Belarus will set in motion. It can hardly happen earlier as we are speaking about the wrong people, the wrong power and the wrong means.
Translated by Ivan Burlyka
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