Who are the Belarusians. To the question of identity
Attention! A big request to read the material to the end. The material is not an official point of view of the Belarusian authorities. The ideas presented in the material have the right to exist and can and should be the subject of reasoned discussion. Some of the links in the body of the article are to oppositional (of. Belarusian authorities) websites.
Author of the article: Mikhail Malash. Political analyst. Born in 1977, in Tomsk, graduated from the TSU faculty of international relations. He received the citizenship of Belarus by decree of the President of the Republic of Belarus. Business Owner. He lives in Minsk. Contains a private botanical garden.
"The Belarusians have no signs of a distinct ethnocultural identity. And the intervention of politics, mixed with skillful manipulations of the media and the lack of knowledge of the population in the post-Soviet space stories Belarus, make it necessary to deeply immerse in the history of the formation of the Belarusian identity. Otherwise, it is impossible to stop the wave of myth-making about Belarusians.
Multi-development as a factor of Slavicization of the Balts
The Slavs were ahead of their neighboring Baltic peoples in socio-economic development: by the 9th – 10th centuries, the Russians already had early feudal statehood, cities, crafts and writing. The Balts had nothing of this, they were at the primitive level of tribal communities. The Balts, adjacent to the Slavs, were assimilated by them. This process began around the 6th century.
Less developed people are always assimilated to more developed ones. This is well illustrated by the example of the Celts in Western Europe and the Finno-Ugrians in Eastern. People first perceive a higher material culture, and gradually, language and religion. Assimilation was stimulated by active interaction of peoples, due to their mutual interest due to different levels of development.
Primitive Balts were a profitable market for Old Russian artisans, as they valued their products more than their compatriots. This product is valued above where it is not produced, and all trade is built on this. The main consumer of handicraft products is the most solvent part of society. As a rule, this is a different kind of elite. They also need a real indication of their position. Imported high-value goods always fulfill the function of social status attributes.
Thus, the Balta nobility, being the most active consumer of handicrafts, was interested in the physical relocation of Russians to their lands in the Neman river basin. This is the reason for the emergence of ancient Russian cities on the territory of the Balt settlement. The cities of Grodno (Garodnya), Volkovysk (Volkovskysk), Slonim (Voslonim), Novogrudok (Novogorodok) are known from the XI – XIII centuries.
There was no shortage of arable land and pastures at that time and, accordingly, there could not be any serious land conflicts between nations. Trafficking between people involved in hunting, gathering and fishing, and sellers of handicraft products was carried out in the form of barter in the equivalent, much more profitable for the latter. A similar situation takes place even now in deaf depressed areas of Siberia and the Far East, where Russian traders traded cranberries, pine nuts and furs for industrial products from local residents. Trade was moneyless, since the Balts had neither statehood nor money.
One of the places of such an exchange was on the border of the Baltic and Russian lands, not far from the city of Zaslavl on the banks of the creek, called Menka. Later, a permanent settlement was formed there, known from the year 1067 as Mensk. Under the influence of the Polish language, the name was transformed into Minsk.
Subsequently, when an external threat appeared (the Crusaders and the Tatar-Mongols), joint defense was added to the trade interest. Different development implies not only the division of labor in economic activity, but also the division of social roles. Thus, the less well-off people take on security functions much more readily. And for this reason, the Balts were also of interest to more advanced Russians, especially since they themselves took the initiative. All this led to the Russification and the justification of the Balts. From the chronicles we are not aware of the presence of any problems in the language communication between the Balts and the Slavs. This suggests that by the 12th century, when the first written sources appeared, the Russification of the Balts was already quite substantial.
Not a nation, but an empire
By the middle of the XIII century, when the region was subjected to the invasion of Tatar-Mongols from the East and German crusaders from the West, the Russian principalities and Baltic tribes united in the early feudal state "Grand Duchy of Lithuania, Russian and Zhemoitskoe" (VKL). By the XIV – XV centuries, it occupied the territory of present-day Lithuania, Belarus, half of Latvia, and most of present-day Ukraine. This was no longer a nation-state, but an empire-state, since, unlike Kievan Rus or the kingdom of Hungary, it was not mono-ethnic, but poly-ethnic and, accordingly, multicultural. By the XIV century, the region began to be subject to Polish influence. In 1385, the GDL concluded an alliance with Poland.
Polish culture had a powerful impact on the entire region, but the Russian population turned out to be resistant to it. The Russian population in the vicinity of Brest (Berestye), despite the close proximity to Polish territory, as it was Russian-Orthodox, and continued to remain so. The Balts, by that time not fully Russified and superficially justified, even living at a distance of 400 – 500 km from the Polish lands, began to gradually fade. So it turned out that today's Catholics in the Republic of Belarus do not live along the Polish border, but along the Lithuanian and even Latvian. In the old Russian Brest there are no Catholics.
It seems that Russian assimilation has changed Polish due to the fact that by that time the Balts as a whole were pulled up to the level of the Russians in their socio-economic development and the latter had lost their assimilation resource. The Poles, by contrast, began to have superiority in development.
Like the Russification of the Balts in the late Middle Ages, their polishing in the New time had very uneven depth among different groups of the population. In the cities and among the nobility, it had a maximum degree - to the extent that people directly called themselves Poles and spoke Polish, although its local dialect. A typical example is the poet Adam Mickiewicz. The rural population spoke “simple move” - the peasant dialect of this dialect - and called themselves “tutheis”, which means “local” in Polish. By the way, in the Orthodox regions, people said: "We are a tutoshny people." Both the “tutoshnye” and the “stinkers” lived relatively conflict-free. There were no serious confessional conflicts between ordinary people in Belarus.
Bietnic people
The initiative to unite Catholics with Orthodox came from the West, which was interested in separatist weakening of the Russian Empire. The accession of the Catholic minority, which constituted 1898% of the population in 24, created the hybrid people to the Orthodox majority, distinguishing it from the Russian and making it only a “brotherly” people in relation to the Russian. Having Catholics in their composition, Belarusians are no longer Russian and are becoming a convenient preset for creating a buffer-limited state between Russia and the West.
This initiative was actively supported by the Catholic elites, who were guided by the gentry, who keenly felt their marginality due to their lack of integration into the RI elite, unlike other ethnic groups. The protest dissatisfaction of the nobility in the ranks against the Russian authorities was expressed in support of Napoleon and the uprisings of 1830 and 1863. Now she was given the opportunity to become a national elite.
In the pre-war years, many writers appeared who literally processed the language (“uparadkavali simple language”), rare texts of which existed in Latin before. The result was translated into Cyrillic and called the Belarusian language. But a particularly powerful burst of their activity came in the Soviet years, when these “pismennіkі”, literally from scratch, created national literature. The vast majority of them were Catholics.
Until the end of the 19th century, there was no stable concept of “Belarusian language”, since there were no reliable texts proving the fact of its existence. If we carry out a content analysis of the Belarusian language, we will see that those words that are not similar to Russian, 90% coincide lexically with Polish. Words similar to Russian in it also sound roughly in Polish. The main difference in these languages is syntactic and phonetic. Even from this we can conclude that the Belarusian language is more the result of some Russification of the eastern dialect of the Polish language, rather than the Polonization of the West Russian dialect. In the Russian Empire, “simple” was officially considered the dialect of the Polish language.
One way or another, but the politicized gamble of rejecting the Belarusians from the Russian people by slipping them into an artificially fabricated language failed. Today in Belarus there are no areas where the population would live compactly, using the Belarusian language in everyday communication. That is, not only Orthodox Belarusians did not switch to the language of Catholics, but the Catholics themselves forgot the language of their ancestors.
In addition, the percentage of Catholics themselves is reduced. In 1990, they were 15% of the population, now 14%. In Catholic areas in rural areas, there are remnants of that dialect, which used to be called “simplemova,” remnants of the Belarusian dialect of the Russian language in Orthodox areas are called “transyanka”.
Thus, the Belarusian language does not exist as a social phenomenon and does not serve as a means of communication. He is a purely ideological concept. The “smart” (conscious) intelligentsia is trying to shame Belarusians for forgetting their native language, replacing it with Russian.
The initiative of such a hybridization of Orthodox and Catholics into a single nation is called the “project of Belarusian nationalism”. This initiative received practical implementation, since it was subsequently supported by the Bolsheviks, since the idea of the international and self-determination of nations was at the core of their political platform. For the Bolsheviks, the more people there were in the Soviet country, the better.
In order to solve the problem of the purity of understanding the identity of the Belarusians, it is necessary to eliminate the conditions in which the problem exists, that is, to consider the people of Belarus not as a mono-ethnic nation, but as a bi-ethnic political people like Belgium or Canada. Accordingly, the independence of the state should be based not on an ethno-cultural basis, but on a socio-economic one, as is the case in Switzerland, Singapore, and Canada.
Why is it advantageous for us to “break the pattern” of the Lithuanian-Belarusian nationalism and stop treating Orthodox and Catholics as a single ethnos?
First, the this is an elementary restoration of historical justice, a return to the natural state of things. Neither the Orthodox Belarusians, nor the Catholics in the current borders have ever been a separate nation - either individually or together, but always only as part of empires: ON, RI, USSR. And everywhere the Belarusians were either the titular people, or part of the political core. BSSR in the perception of its inhabitants was more of an administrative unit. Its population identified itself with the Soviet people rather than with any kind of ethnocultural education. For this reason, the ethno-identification, which was imposed on Belarusians together with the “tuteish” Litvin Catholics, did not work out.
Second, the The accession of the Catholic “stumbled” to the Orthodox Belarusians and the slipping of the non-Polish “simple-minded”, which was named after the literary treatment of the Belarusian language, destroys the idea of the trinity of the Russian people. This deprives Belarusians of share rights to the greatness of Russian culture, reducing their international status, since belonging to a global culture is a powerful resource in world politics. On the other hand, it also confirms the usurpation of the “Russians” brand by the Great Russians and the rights to all-Russian culture.
Two approaches to Belarusians: Litvinism and Western Russianism
Before World War I, the population in Belarus was clearly divided into Orthodox Belorussians and Polish Catholics. Moreover, the Belarusians were officially considered as a branch of the triune all-Russian people and were part of the titular people of the empire. This is also reflected in the 1898 census.
The situation changed before the start of the First World War. Catholics and Orthodox began to be considered as one people. A new approach to the consideration of the Belarusian history, conventionally called Litvinism, has appeared. In a more or less radical form, it still exists inertia. Its rather mild form was the official version of history in Soviet times. She remains it today. It is based on demagogy based on the substitution of notions, in particular, the Litvins as an ethnonym and as a politonym.
Radical Litvinists claim that there was no Old Russian people, there was no Old Russian oral language, Kievan Rus did not include Belarusian territory, and when the ancient Belarusians called themselves Russians, they meant Orthodox affiliation. It is argued that the Belarusians were always the European people, and the inhabitants of the Moscow state were Asians - the Turks and Finno-Ugrians, imitating the Slavs (see hereor here). Litvinists consider Catholics and Orthodox united.
The version of the history of Belarusians and their identities set forth here is called Western Russianism. This historical school considers Belarusians as a western variety of Russians, as a subethnos of the all-Russian superethnos. The founders of this doctrine were scientists M. Koyalovich and E. Karsky. Today, the weak point of the majority of Western Russian scientists is the inability and unwillingness to separate the ethno-cultural from the political-administrative.
A number of modern Western Russians openly call for liquidation of the Belarusian state independence and therefore are in radical opposition to power. Politicians, exploiting the theme of the trinity of the Russian people to fight against the Belarusian authorities and the model of socio-economic development, marginalize the flow itself. The Litvinists accuse the West Russianists of acting in the interests of the Kremlin. The logic of the prosecution is as follows: if the Belarusians are part of the Russian people, there is no point in the existence of a separate Belarusian state. Independence of Belarus is a historical misunderstanding, which should be corrected, and the Belarusian state property, respectively, should be privatized for nothing by the Russian oligarchs.
Western Russian nationalist-chauvinistic persuasion does not hide this position, and academic scholars, being office theorists, only brush off these accusations without taking them seriously. They, by their idealistic naivety, do not understand that history serves to justify today's political interests, and is not a self-sufficient thing in itself. It turns out that pro-Kremlin Western Russianists are more enemies of the Belarusian authorities than pro-Western Litvinists. Litvinists assume a puppet dependence on the West, and pro-Kremlin Western-Russian proponents of the same call for the elimination of sovereignty and Belarus.
The special wisdom of the peoples of Belarus
The Belarusian society is not just multicultural, as in Switzerland, Belgium, Latvia or Kazakhstan. His multiculturalism is historically opportunistic. The dominance of East and West changed, followed by the self-perception of the indigenous people. The grandfather considers himself a Pole, his father is a Belarusian-Catholic, and his son is already an Orthodox Belarusian. Due to the obviousness of this, the most resilient Catholics, like the Orthodox Belarusians, understand perfectly well at the level of mass consciousness this opportunistic character of ethnic cultures. This understanding lies at the basis of what is called the tolerance of our people, and clearly shows the local inhabitants that culture is only the outer shell of a person’s inner essence. And this shell, as it turns out, is quite interchangeable. Apparently, this is the fundamental reason for the particular wisdom of the Belarusian people, which is the foundation of its comparative well-being.
Man's worldview exfoliates from the ethnic culture. This is impossible, for example, for the Chinese and the Jews; they do not see (and have never seen) their collective existence outside their culture. They have the ability to abstract from culture is available only to the smartest people, philosophers and thinkers. And on the Belarusian land any inhabitant can see the essence and purpose of a person in the form cleared of conventions. And this mission is creative creativity and an infinitely free choice between good and evil. A scoundrel and decent man, as you know, can be a Catholic, and Orthodox. "
Author of the article: Mikhail Malash. Political analyst. Born in 1977, in Tomsk, graduated from the TSU faculty of international relations. He received the citizenship of Belarus by decree of the President of the Republic of Belarus. Business Owner. He lives in Minsk. Contains a private botanical garden.
"The Belarusians have no signs of a distinct ethnocultural identity. And the intervention of politics, mixed with skillful manipulations of the media and the lack of knowledge of the population in the post-Soviet space stories Belarus, make it necessary to deeply immerse in the history of the formation of the Belarusian identity. Otherwise, it is impossible to stop the wave of myth-making about Belarusians.
Multi-development as a factor of Slavicization of the Balts
The Slavs were ahead of their neighboring Baltic peoples in socio-economic development: by the 9th – 10th centuries, the Russians already had early feudal statehood, cities, crafts and writing. The Balts had nothing of this, they were at the primitive level of tribal communities. The Balts, adjacent to the Slavs, were assimilated by them. This process began around the 6th century.
Less developed people are always assimilated to more developed ones. This is well illustrated by the example of the Celts in Western Europe and the Finno-Ugrians in Eastern. People first perceive a higher material culture, and gradually, language and religion. Assimilation was stimulated by active interaction of peoples, due to their mutual interest due to different levels of development.
Primitive Balts were a profitable market for Old Russian artisans, as they valued their products more than their compatriots. This product is valued above where it is not produced, and all trade is built on this. The main consumer of handicraft products is the most solvent part of society. As a rule, this is a different kind of elite. They also need a real indication of their position. Imported high-value goods always fulfill the function of social status attributes.
Thus, the Balta nobility, being the most active consumer of handicrafts, was interested in the physical relocation of Russians to their lands in the Neman river basin. This is the reason for the emergence of ancient Russian cities on the territory of the Balt settlement. The cities of Grodno (Garodnya), Volkovysk (Volkovskysk), Slonim (Voslonim), Novogrudok (Novogorodok) are known from the XI – XIII centuries.
There was no shortage of arable land and pastures at that time and, accordingly, there could not be any serious land conflicts between nations. Trafficking between people involved in hunting, gathering and fishing, and sellers of handicraft products was carried out in the form of barter in the equivalent, much more profitable for the latter. A similar situation takes place even now in deaf depressed areas of Siberia and the Far East, where Russian traders traded cranberries, pine nuts and furs for industrial products from local residents. Trade was moneyless, since the Balts had neither statehood nor money.
One of the places of such an exchange was on the border of the Baltic and Russian lands, not far from the city of Zaslavl on the banks of the creek, called Menka. Later, a permanent settlement was formed there, known from the year 1067 as Mensk. Under the influence of the Polish language, the name was transformed into Minsk.
Subsequently, when an external threat appeared (the Crusaders and the Tatar-Mongols), joint defense was added to the trade interest. Different development implies not only the division of labor in economic activity, but also the division of social roles. Thus, the less well-off people take on security functions much more readily. And for this reason, the Balts were also of interest to more advanced Russians, especially since they themselves took the initiative. All this led to the Russification and the justification of the Balts. From the chronicles we are not aware of the presence of any problems in the language communication between the Balts and the Slavs. This suggests that by the 12th century, when the first written sources appeared, the Russification of the Balts was already quite substantial.
Not a nation, but an empire
By the middle of the XIII century, when the region was subjected to the invasion of Tatar-Mongols from the East and German crusaders from the West, the Russian principalities and Baltic tribes united in the early feudal state "Grand Duchy of Lithuania, Russian and Zhemoitskoe" (VKL). By the XIV – XV centuries, it occupied the territory of present-day Lithuania, Belarus, half of Latvia, and most of present-day Ukraine. This was no longer a nation-state, but an empire-state, since, unlike Kievan Rus or the kingdom of Hungary, it was not mono-ethnic, but poly-ethnic and, accordingly, multicultural. By the XIV century, the region began to be subject to Polish influence. In 1385, the GDL concluded an alliance with Poland.
Polish culture had a powerful impact on the entire region, but the Russian population turned out to be resistant to it. The Russian population in the vicinity of Brest (Berestye), despite the close proximity to Polish territory, as it was Russian-Orthodox, and continued to remain so. The Balts, by that time not fully Russified and superficially justified, even living at a distance of 400 – 500 km from the Polish lands, began to gradually fade. So it turned out that today's Catholics in the Republic of Belarus do not live along the Polish border, but along the Lithuanian and even Latvian. In the old Russian Brest there are no Catholics.
It seems that Russian assimilation has changed Polish due to the fact that by that time the Balts as a whole were pulled up to the level of the Russians in their socio-economic development and the latter had lost their assimilation resource. The Poles, by contrast, began to have superiority in development.
Like the Russification of the Balts in the late Middle Ages, their polishing in the New time had very uneven depth among different groups of the population. In the cities and among the nobility, it had a maximum degree - to the extent that people directly called themselves Poles and spoke Polish, although its local dialect. A typical example is the poet Adam Mickiewicz. The rural population spoke “simple move” - the peasant dialect of this dialect - and called themselves “tutheis”, which means “local” in Polish. By the way, in the Orthodox regions, people said: "We are a tutoshny people." Both the “tutoshnye” and the “stinkers” lived relatively conflict-free. There were no serious confessional conflicts between ordinary people in Belarus.
Bietnic people
The initiative to unite Catholics with Orthodox came from the West, which was interested in separatist weakening of the Russian Empire. The accession of the Catholic minority, which constituted 1898% of the population in 24, created the hybrid people to the Orthodox majority, distinguishing it from the Russian and making it only a “brotherly” people in relation to the Russian. Having Catholics in their composition, Belarusians are no longer Russian and are becoming a convenient preset for creating a buffer-limited state between Russia and the West.
This initiative was actively supported by the Catholic elites, who were guided by the gentry, who keenly felt their marginality due to their lack of integration into the RI elite, unlike other ethnic groups. The protest dissatisfaction of the nobility in the ranks against the Russian authorities was expressed in support of Napoleon and the uprisings of 1830 and 1863. Now she was given the opportunity to become a national elite.
In the pre-war years, many writers appeared who literally processed the language (“uparadkavali simple language”), rare texts of which existed in Latin before. The result was translated into Cyrillic and called the Belarusian language. But a particularly powerful burst of their activity came in the Soviet years, when these “pismennіkі”, literally from scratch, created national literature. The vast majority of them were Catholics.
Until the end of the 19th century, there was no stable concept of “Belarusian language”, since there were no reliable texts proving the fact of its existence. If we carry out a content analysis of the Belarusian language, we will see that those words that are not similar to Russian, 90% coincide lexically with Polish. Words similar to Russian in it also sound roughly in Polish. The main difference in these languages is syntactic and phonetic. Even from this we can conclude that the Belarusian language is more the result of some Russification of the eastern dialect of the Polish language, rather than the Polonization of the West Russian dialect. In the Russian Empire, “simple” was officially considered the dialect of the Polish language.
One way or another, but the politicized gamble of rejecting the Belarusians from the Russian people by slipping them into an artificially fabricated language failed. Today in Belarus there are no areas where the population would live compactly, using the Belarusian language in everyday communication. That is, not only Orthodox Belarusians did not switch to the language of Catholics, but the Catholics themselves forgot the language of their ancestors.
In addition, the percentage of Catholics themselves is reduced. In 1990, they were 15% of the population, now 14%. In Catholic areas in rural areas, there are remnants of that dialect, which used to be called “simplemova,” remnants of the Belarusian dialect of the Russian language in Orthodox areas are called “transyanka”.
Thus, the Belarusian language does not exist as a social phenomenon and does not serve as a means of communication. He is a purely ideological concept. The “smart” (conscious) intelligentsia is trying to shame Belarusians for forgetting their native language, replacing it with Russian.
The initiative of such a hybridization of Orthodox and Catholics into a single nation is called the “project of Belarusian nationalism”. This initiative received practical implementation, since it was subsequently supported by the Bolsheviks, since the idea of the international and self-determination of nations was at the core of their political platform. For the Bolsheviks, the more people there were in the Soviet country, the better.
In order to solve the problem of the purity of understanding the identity of the Belarusians, it is necessary to eliminate the conditions in which the problem exists, that is, to consider the people of Belarus not as a mono-ethnic nation, but as a bi-ethnic political people like Belgium or Canada. Accordingly, the independence of the state should be based not on an ethno-cultural basis, but on a socio-economic one, as is the case in Switzerland, Singapore, and Canada.
Why is it advantageous for us to “break the pattern” of the Lithuanian-Belarusian nationalism and stop treating Orthodox and Catholics as a single ethnos?
First, the this is an elementary restoration of historical justice, a return to the natural state of things. Neither the Orthodox Belarusians, nor the Catholics in the current borders have ever been a separate nation - either individually or together, but always only as part of empires: ON, RI, USSR. And everywhere the Belarusians were either the titular people, or part of the political core. BSSR in the perception of its inhabitants was more of an administrative unit. Its population identified itself with the Soviet people rather than with any kind of ethnocultural education. For this reason, the ethno-identification, which was imposed on Belarusians together with the “tuteish” Litvin Catholics, did not work out.
Second, the The accession of the Catholic “stumbled” to the Orthodox Belarusians and the slipping of the non-Polish “simple-minded”, which was named after the literary treatment of the Belarusian language, destroys the idea of the trinity of the Russian people. This deprives Belarusians of share rights to the greatness of Russian culture, reducing their international status, since belonging to a global culture is a powerful resource in world politics. On the other hand, it also confirms the usurpation of the “Russians” brand by the Great Russians and the rights to all-Russian culture.
Two approaches to Belarusians: Litvinism and Western Russianism
Before World War I, the population in Belarus was clearly divided into Orthodox Belorussians and Polish Catholics. Moreover, the Belarusians were officially considered as a branch of the triune all-Russian people and were part of the titular people of the empire. This is also reflected in the 1898 census.
The situation changed before the start of the First World War. Catholics and Orthodox began to be considered as one people. A new approach to the consideration of the Belarusian history, conventionally called Litvinism, has appeared. In a more or less radical form, it still exists inertia. Its rather mild form was the official version of history in Soviet times. She remains it today. It is based on demagogy based on the substitution of notions, in particular, the Litvins as an ethnonym and as a politonym.
Radical Litvinists claim that there was no Old Russian people, there was no Old Russian oral language, Kievan Rus did not include Belarusian territory, and when the ancient Belarusians called themselves Russians, they meant Orthodox affiliation. It is argued that the Belarusians were always the European people, and the inhabitants of the Moscow state were Asians - the Turks and Finno-Ugrians, imitating the Slavs (see hereor here). Litvinists consider Catholics and Orthodox united.
The version of the history of Belarusians and their identities set forth here is called Western Russianism. This historical school considers Belarusians as a western variety of Russians, as a subethnos of the all-Russian superethnos. The founders of this doctrine were scientists M. Koyalovich and E. Karsky. Today, the weak point of the majority of Western Russian scientists is the inability and unwillingness to separate the ethno-cultural from the political-administrative.
A number of modern Western Russians openly call for liquidation of the Belarusian state independence and therefore are in radical opposition to power. Politicians, exploiting the theme of the trinity of the Russian people to fight against the Belarusian authorities and the model of socio-economic development, marginalize the flow itself. The Litvinists accuse the West Russianists of acting in the interests of the Kremlin. The logic of the prosecution is as follows: if the Belarusians are part of the Russian people, there is no point in the existence of a separate Belarusian state. Independence of Belarus is a historical misunderstanding, which should be corrected, and the Belarusian state property, respectively, should be privatized for nothing by the Russian oligarchs.
Western Russian nationalist-chauvinistic persuasion does not hide this position, and academic scholars, being office theorists, only brush off these accusations without taking them seriously. They, by their idealistic naivety, do not understand that history serves to justify today's political interests, and is not a self-sufficient thing in itself. It turns out that pro-Kremlin Western Russianists are more enemies of the Belarusian authorities than pro-Western Litvinists. Litvinists assume a puppet dependence on the West, and pro-Kremlin Western-Russian proponents of the same call for the elimination of sovereignty and Belarus.
The special wisdom of the peoples of Belarus
The Belarusian society is not just multicultural, as in Switzerland, Belgium, Latvia or Kazakhstan. His multiculturalism is historically opportunistic. The dominance of East and West changed, followed by the self-perception of the indigenous people. The grandfather considers himself a Pole, his father is a Belarusian-Catholic, and his son is already an Orthodox Belarusian. Due to the obviousness of this, the most resilient Catholics, like the Orthodox Belarusians, understand perfectly well at the level of mass consciousness this opportunistic character of ethnic cultures. This understanding lies at the basis of what is called the tolerance of our people, and clearly shows the local inhabitants that culture is only the outer shell of a person’s inner essence. And this shell, as it turns out, is quite interchangeable. Apparently, this is the fundamental reason for the particular wisdom of the Belarusian people, which is the foundation of its comparative well-being.
Man's worldview exfoliates from the ethnic culture. This is impossible, for example, for the Chinese and the Jews; they do not see (and have never seen) their collective existence outside their culture. They have the ability to abstract from culture is available only to the smartest people, philosophers and thinkers. And on the Belarusian land any inhabitant can see the essence and purpose of a person in the form cleared of conventions. And this mission is creative creativity and an infinitely free choice between good and evil. A scoundrel and decent man, as you know, can be a Catholic, and Orthodox. "
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