Ernest Renan argued over a century ago that belonging to a nation entails forgetting just as much as it required remembering past events. Certainly this is the case in East Central Europe, where not infrequently different nationalities create out of a single historical event utterly opposing historical memories. In the western borderlands of the Russian Empire, one historical event that has been variously interpreted by different nationalities is the Insurrection of 1863. To simplify somewhat, prerevolutionary Russian historians generally interpreted this key event as a mutiny against the established legal order—the term miatezh (mutiny) was always used in such accounts—while the Poles interpreted the uprising as perhaps naive and foolish, but in any case a noble attempt to regain rights usurped by the Russian occupiers. With such a sharply opposed memory of the uprising as a whole, it comes as no surprise that the figure who did the most to crush the insurrection in the Northwest (Lithuanian and Belarusian) provinces, Count M. N. Muraviev, should also be a controversial figure, praised by conservative Russians and demonized by Poles, Lithuanians, and liberals of all nationalities.

A frequent assertion about the recent events and pervasive mood in Belarus—the apparent efforts to reunite with Russia, the virtual denial of a Belarusian identity by a Russophone president, official nostalgia for the time of the former Soviet Union— is that national consciousness is somehow retarded or delayed, and national development is lagging considerably behind that of its neighboring states, Lithuania and Ukraine. This article seeks to address the question of national self-awareness in Belarus from three angles: those of demography, culture, and language. Was development of the republic in the Soviet period different from that of the other republics, and is that development responsible for what has been described as the “national nihilism” of today? Is that mood likely to change with a new generation of Belarusians? How far is President Alyaksander Lukashenka, the first president of Belarus, who was elected in July 1994, responsible for the present situation and how far is he a symptom of the notable lack of self-assertion of Belarusians?

In late February 1947, Stalin's trusted troubleshooter Lazar' Kaganovich arrived in Kiev as the Ukrainian Communist Party's new first secretary. Having served consecutively as the Soviet People's Commissar of Railroad Transport, Heavy Industry, and Construction Materials, the notoriously heavy-handed Kaganovich had earned the epithet of zheleznyi narkom (“iron minister”). His tenure at the head of the Ukrainian party organization in March–December 1947 was marked by intensified coercive intervention in the economy and ideological purges in culture and scholarship. In Ukraine, Kaganovich's brief rule is remembered primarily for his relentless attacks on the alleged remnants of “Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism.” In the works of post-Soviet Ukrainian historians, the 1947 crusade against “nationalism” appears as a comprehensive campaign masterminded by Stalin, planned by his envoy Kaganovich, faithfully implemented by the servile republican functionaries, and submissively endured by the terrorized Ukrainian intellectuals. Clearly, modern Ukrainian historians have adopted the traditional Western concept of Stalinism as a successful totalitarian dictatorship, in which society was no more than a passive object of an all-powerful state.

This article is based on the preliminary results of a project on “Islam, Ethnicity and Nationalism in Post-Soviet Tatarstan and Dagestan,” which began in March 1997 and ended in September 1999. These two out of Russia's 21 autonomous republics were chosen for comparative research because, although they are both Muslim, there are obvious geographical, ethnic, cultural, and political differences between them. Each republic also represents a distinctive model of the evolution of Muslim society and its relations with Russian culture in general and with the Russian political center in particular.

At the beginning of the 1990s, when the former Soviet republics declared sovereignty, the questions of their national histories, long neglected in the Soviet period, once again became important. In taking up the national and cultural traditions of the pre-Soviet era, as well as a literary language that had been reduced to folklore, the post-Soviet national intelligentsias began to develop their own versions of the Belarusian past. As the old Soviet empire declined, new “historical” nations developed against a background of diverse ethnicity and political struggles for power. Western scholars have discussed in detail the changes in historical writing since the emergence of glasnost'. The post-Soviet intelligentsia not only faced a crisis in historical writing and history generally within the late Soviet Union, but were confronted with what Aaron Gurevich has called a “vacuum of historical vision.”

The new states emerging from the break-up of the Soviet Union not only had to manage the task of political and economic reforms but were also forced to develop a suitable national state ideology in order to ensure their achieved independence. The existence of a national consensus is essential for the stability of every state and society, and during periods of transition the question how national identity is defined becomes especially important. Thus, on the one hand, the dominance of a concrete national state concept may facilitate the transformation process because people are ready to bear the social costs of economic reforms in the name of state sovereignty, as was the case in Lithuania. On the other hand, a continuing Soviet cultural hegemony can also block necessary modernization in the post-Soviet period.

Political leaders often use language as an instrument to establish their legitimacy. From the end of the 1980s, the Belarusian language became the symbol of Belarusian independence; however, it has never been the language of power. The language law of Belarus, which was adopted in 1990 and made Belarusian the official language of the state, appears to have been more a symbolic action for a new appropriation of power than the expression of a real political will. During perestroika political elites, mostly Russophones, preferred to rely on the language situation inherited from the Soviet system, in which the majority spoke Russian, rather than question a policy that could guarantee their popularity. When Alyaksander Lukashenka came to power in 1994, the gradual process of Belarusian language development was slowly reversed in order to integrate language policy into the continuity of Soviet practice. The promotion of the Russian language and the increase of discrimination against Belarusian have taken place along with the establishment of an authoritarian regime, which is based on press censorship, arrests of political opponents, and the monopolization of social, political, economic, and cultural activities. Faced with a direct threat to its existence, the Belarusian language became, as was the case during the Soviet period, a language of opposition and of counter-power. Belarusian leaders have tried to keep the Belarusian language and the discourses related to it out of power. The opposition, however, uses Belarusian as a political weapon against the regime, seeking to transform Belarusian into a future language of power. Considering the language as a crucial political issue, language policy is a way to manage and control not only the use of language, but also the discourse and the persons who are using it. In that context, language implies a speech, and the French distinction between langue and language is interesting in this respect. Language politics implies social and political representations of language and speech, which can be studied, analyzing the influence of political actors on these representations and the way in which they deal with the language problem.