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Andrej Jekadumau

Post-Soviet Belarus: Stagnation or Belated Postmodern

Belarus, which has a reputation of a Socialist preserve, experiences a situation similar to the Brezhnev stagnation era in the Soviet Union characterized by stable stagnation, slow decay and decomposition of society.

Like the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic (BSSR) in the late 1980s, Belarus at the beginning of the 21^st century remains a cultural and political periphery of the Moscow metropolis. Belarus lacks real economic, cultural and political support for its state sovereignty.

Aggressive nationalism, which plagued the Balkans, is not flourishing here, but Belarus has more relics of the Soviet era than any other country geographically located in Europe.

However, taking into account the fact that the Belarusians have never had their own, fully-fledged state (references to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania are irrelevant when it comes to the Belarusian nation), the period that followed 1990 can not be described as time lost.

Belarus’ achievements on the road to liberal civilization have been modest so far. The years that passed since the sudden declaration of independence were spent on bridging the cultural gap between Belarus and its post-Soviet neighbors. Although this process being far from complete, Belarus slowly adopts the system of values of liberal society by contraries or try-and-cut methods.

The article analyzes the cultural environment in the post-Soviet Belarus, the reasons for retarded socio-cultural modernization and trends that may help overcome this.

Russia spearheads changes

It all started in the late 1980s, when centripetal tendencies were gaining strength, and Belarus saw a rise of nationalism and pro-democracy sentiments.

Belarus at the time was the most Sovietized and Russianized republic and remains under strong informational influence of Russia, therefore it is essential to analyze cultural relations between the Belarusian province and the Russian metropolis, Moscow.

Russia played a great and equivocal role in Belarus’ social and cultural development in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It used to act as colonizer before, but during the Gorbachev perestroika period the Russian democratic elite encouraged national-democratic movements in the Soviet Union republics.

Russia’s domination over Belarus was great in the official cultural policies during the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Russia set trends in counter-culture and the dissident movement in the late 1980s.

At the time the Soviet counter-culture, with Russian rock or better Soviet rock, (because all republics were involved) in the political vanguard, gained official recognition and prominence in the cultural life of the USSR republics. 

Russian rock – a digest of Western cultural products by dissident Soviet bands formed in the 1970s and 1980s of people under 30 who rebelled against the establishment.  

Belarus was drawn in this cultural process by Russia in the first place. Russia, with its powerful information resources, union-wide electronic and print media was the main supplier of counter-culture products to Belarus.

There were no substantial barriers to Russia’s cultural expansion to Belarus due to the Russianized education system and the domination of the Russian-language print and electronic media. Only the Belarusian authorities potentially could pose a serious obstacle to the penetration of the Russian-Soviet counter-culture.

When the counter-culture was gaining recognition, Russia played the role of cultural donor supplying new texts, role models and cultural products that became more and more popular as the crisis of the Soviet empire deepened.

The catalogue of Russian rock samizdats and the table of rock groups popular in Belarus and Russia in the late 1980s and the early 1990s (Supplement 1) show the dimensions of the Belarusian and Russian rock stage.[1]

In the late 1980 and early 1990s, efforts to reestablish Belarusian identity, which gave prominence to unknown or forgotten Belarusian lyrics, were complemented with the increasing inflow of texts, which had been banned by Communist censorship in the past, from Russia. 

The leading Russian periodicals, as diverse as Voprosy Filosofii (Matters of Philosophy) and Literaturnaya Gazeta (Literary Newspaper) mulled over the flaws and the crisis of the Soviet system when Belarus gained independence. Russia’s union-wide periodicals, radio and television stations disseminated the ideas of Soviet dissidents, prominent Soviet and Russian cultural figures who were in opposition to the Communist bureaucracy.

There was a positive aspect in Russia’s influence on Belarus: works by Western philosophers and thinkers, unavailable to an overwhelming majority of the Soviet citizens before perestroika, were legally distributed in Belarus by Russian periodicals and publishing houses. (Belarusian philosophical magazines like Fragmenty or Arche appeared much later.)

Russian magazines published works by former banned authors (for instance, publications by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn published in the journal Novy Mir), television stations offered airtime to Soviet rock bands and broadcast live Mikhail Gorbachev’s speeches and heated debates in the USSR Supreme Soviet.

In the late 1980s, these publications and broadcasts shaped the mentality of the Belarusians to a much greater extent than activities of groups advocating national rebirth. In other republics the Communist elite could act together with national-democratic groups, whereas in Belarus, unlike the central Soviet government, the nomenklatura strongly resisted new national-democratic ideas.

Russia was in the forefront, setting trends and orientating the readership and television viewers to liberal society values. This made it easier for the emerging national-democratic opposition to mobilize people against the Communist bureaucracy.

Soviet Belarusians

Cultural development problems of independent Belarus deserve a special mention. In the context of the country’s integration into European culture, the problems were determined not so much by Russian’ cultural influence but rather by Soviet cultural heritage. A key factor were insurmountable Soviet myths and Soviet identity of a majority of the Belarusians and ethnic Russians in Belarus who regarded themselves as representatives of the “new historic community” of the Soviet people.

Data of the Ministry of Statistics and Analysis for 1999 dispel the myth that the Russians dominated in Belarus.

The Belarusians-to-Russians ratio was approximately 8 to 1.

See Table 1.[2]

Table 1. Ethnic composition of the population of the Republic of Belarus in 1959, 1970, 1979, 1989 и 1999.

The ratio of Belarusian to Russian urban residents is approximately five to one.

See Table 2.[3]

Table 2. Belarusian and Russian urban population

The ethnic Belarusians definitely dominated the urban cultural elite. The proportion of the Belarusians on the urban population almost doubled since 1970, while the number of the urban Russians at the end of the 1990s was almost the same as the number of ethnic Russians in 1979.

At the same time, the urban population grew fast not because of a high birth rate, but because of the migration of the rural population to the cities.

Before the industrialization drive, which began somewhere in the 1950s-1960s, Belarus was dominated by agriculture and had a large proportion of the rural population. Did not only the vigorous industrialization under the guidance of the Communist Party prompted the development of the education system that trained technical workers, but it also encouraged the extinction of Belarusian traditions, the centralization and Russification of education, and helped establish Soviet identity, which overshadowed national identity.

By 1989 a majority of the Belarusian population was concentrated in cities, rebuilt after World War II, the cities that lost their historic appearance and relics of ancient culture. These were new residents of the new cities with old names. The urban population was concentrated around industrial enterprises that produced goods for export to other Soviet Union republics. Therefore, Belarus after World War II was dominated by marginal culture, neither rural nor urban. This was the culture of high-rise buildings and “sleeping districts,” where workers returned after work just to have a sleep before the next working day. This culture was shaped by first or second generation of rural residents who lost ties with their rural cultural traditions, but have not yet accepted the new urban culture. The more so that the cultural environment of Belarusian cities underwent transformation during the 20^th century.

A drastic change in the demographic composition and growth of urban population in Belarus by itself could not undermine Belarusian national culture but for the Soviet Russification policy and the intensive post-war industrialization.

Soviet Belarus became the USSR “assembly shop” built on the ashes of old urban traditions in the wake of World War II. However, the industrialization slowed rather than accelerated the development of urban culture. 

Says Ales Chobat, a Belarusian publicist, “As a result of the large-scale industrialization (between 1956 and 1980), it was not the city that slowly digested and assimilated the village, but the village overrun the city imposing the collective-clannish way of life and thinking.”[4]

After the start of industrialization, launched by the Moscow metropolis, Belarusian-Soviet paternalistic practices, propelled by the lack of market relations and democracy, flourished in place of the erased rural culture.

Being geographically part of Europe in cultural terms Belarus found itself isolated from the European system of liberal values.

The European traditions of social partnership and democracy, which constitute the basis of civic society, were not developing in Belarus when it was part of the Russian Empire and later part of the Soviet Union.

On gaining independence Belarus started to adopt new cultural trends and traditions. So far, in demand have been practices based on pre-industrial cultural patterns that alien to liberal society.

Ales Chobat gave a concise description of the problem of values in post-Soviet Belarus. “What strikes is the lack of any society, any common traits or national interests, except for daily efforts to fill . . . one’s stomach. Our communities are formed by relation or by association of people from the same area. . . Belarus is a large clan with life psychology reminiscent of a medieval village . . . Members of a family clans cling one to another in permanent fight against the enemies in order to prevent another clan from taking ‘what belongs to them.’”[5]

The post-Soviet Belarusian society was constrained by paternalistic practices on the one hand, and by the Soviet secondary and higher school heritage and democratic illiteracy on the other. This impaired the Belarusians’ creative potential and limited the demand for it within the country.

On gaining independence, Belarus’ ruling elite pursued a targeted policy to discourage Belarusian culture and play down Belarusian national identity. The elite consisted mainly of Russified ethnic Belarusians sticking to Soviet values. 

The Belarusians considerably outnumbered the Russians in all socially active age groups. The Ministry of Statistics and Analysis[6] data show a slightly greater number of young people among the Belarusian population. However, those over 30 outnumber other age groups. The older generation of the Belarusians are the ones who cherish Soviet culture and passively resist both Belarusification and modernization.

The Russian cultural influence in post-Soviet Belarus is neither determined by the number of ethnic Russians, nor by their aggressive Russification policies nor by the targeted Soviet-style cultural and information policy pursued by Moscow after 1991.

The Russian cultural influence is attributable to cultural consequences of Soviet-era Russification of the Belarusians, the weakness and the lack of organization in the Belarusian opposition, and a weak Belarusian culture as compared to Russian.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Belarus’ national movement developed in the same socio-cultural situation and had the same roots as the socio-cultural practices of the people. The nationalist opposition to the Belarusian-Soviet nomenklatura needed to change its mentality and adopt cultural models of liberal civilization.

Ales Chobat notes that distaste for the Communist nomenklatura or President Lukashenka or worries about the future of national culture do not mean that this culture can organically integrate into European civilization. “European civilization . . . rests on priority of an individual over a clan and respect for the rights of minorities. This right implies privacy, democratic freedoms, the limitation of the government and the state by the constitutional law, and even . . . respect for national languages. This is alien to our clannish mentality. . .”[7]

Chobat goes on to say, “This is why the problem of culture extinction is not limited to the extinction of our literary language. The trouble is that our spiritual level remains the same as it was before the 1914 war. We continue to regard writing as our obligation to a clan, the Fatherland, the opposition or the government, or at least to ‘an independent’ and ‘free’ literary community. We do not just enjoy writing words, do not honor our signature and our words, and no one can say for sure that we appreciate what has been written by others.”[8]

The declaration of precedence of a collective, a group or the masses over an individual under the slogan of Sovietization or Belarusification distances Belarus from Europe.

Belated Modern

The emergence of Belarusian-speaking sub-cultural ghetto instead of a strong national movement is linked to a great extent to the specific situation in Belarusian culture of the late 1980s and the early 1990s. In particular, the Belarusian socio-cultural projects always lagged behind the socio-cultural processes that called for their emergence.

Ales Chobat noted that during the collapse of the Soviet Union “no one, including the camp of radicals led by Pazniak, had any idea of the future.”[9]

Events that led to the declaration of Belarus’ independence in 1990, always came ahead of their conceptualization by the Belarusian elite, both by the old party nomenklatura and new national-democratic opposition. The latter began gaining strength in the second half of the 1980s and did not seek to create an independent Belarusian state. It first sought to revive the Belarusian language, history and culture as much as possible within the Soviet Union. The idea of national sovereignty was raised later as separatism was on the rise all over the Soviet Union.

Belarus got all attributes of an independent state overnight on the adoption of the Declaration of State Sovereignty by the Supreme Soviet in 1990 hot on the heels of Russia and Ukraine. The country’s national movement just emerged at the time and was gaining strength. The old, Soviet-conservative socio-cultural model had less and less resources for regeneration at the level of official culture in its outdated imperialistic Communist form. However, the new model of the fully-fledged national state did not take shape. The national-democratic opposition offered a set of slogans instead of conceptualizing the role and prospects of new Belarus in the new situation.

The national ideology was prepared in a rush. The old elite continued to rely on old socio-cultural patterns, which did not compromised themselves completely at the time as the country was still under the influence of the Soviet past, whereas the nationalists put forward an ambiguous modernistic plan for reestablishing national identity.

The largest and strongest party in opposition to the nomenklatura, the Belarusian Popular Front (BNF) “Adradzhenne”, was balancing between democracy and nationalism and opted for nationalism in the long run. When new identity was taking shape in Belarus, countries outside the Soviet Union gave priority to authoritarian and modernistic ideology. The opposition wanted a majority of the population to brush aside the Soviet past, habits and practices, change their attitude toward Russia, ex-Soviet brother number one, and switch over to the Belarusian language. Nobody cared much about the motivations that could prompt such transformations in the people. The situation was rather paradoxical in Belarus at the time and the conditions were not very favorable for the national movement to follow the lead of the Baltic states or Ukraine.

“Before the break up of the Soviet Union the situation in Belarus was the following: almost the whole ethnic territory was within the borders of the BSSR, there was a good general education system and access to higher education, the engineers and technical elite were relatively well off, and the industrial, research and development potential considerably increased. In addition, the BSSR has been a founding member and a subject of the international law since 1945. On the other hand, the national education was almost eliminated, there was no national elite, with the exception a small group of artists and writers, and the weak opposition did not even dream that the Soviet Union will collapse and Belarus will gain independence.”[10] The situation at the time was really paradoxical: the more Belarus was getting prepared for independence economically and politically, the less it was ready in terms of national and general culture.[11]

The nationalist opposition’s plan for reestablishing the national identity could be described as modernistic. In the context of the nationalist rhetoric of early 1990s, the socio-cultural reality seemed flexible and easily changing under the influence of the nationalist elite. The 1994 presidential election proved this to be an illusion. A majority did not support nationalists. The opposition was too weak and not ready to impose its ideals on the old elite and the passive and lost electorate.

It was not only the belated nature of the Belarusian nationalist movement of the late 1980s and the early 1990s that made it difficult for the masses to embrace their slogans, but also the situation in which the belated nationalist modernism was shaping. Belarus in the late 20^th century had postmodernist trends in culture already.

Restoring and prompting nationalist ideas that cropped up in the early 20^th century, but failed to materialize due to colossal social and cultural catastrophes, the nationalist opposition found itself in an absolutely different cultural situation in the late 1980s and the early 1990s. Modernist and postmodernist practices entered in complicated relations in the Belarusian culture. Belarus lagged behind other countries in cultural development, with Europe and Russia supplying it with finished cultural products, which were in brisk demand in the country during the 20^th century.

In the countries of origin, works of literature, art, philosophical trends and other cultural products were created and digested slowly, succeeding one another, while Belarus gained access to these products in a brief period of time, mainly through television broadcasts from Russia.

The free choice of texts and cultural products, facilitated by the lack of a serious language barrier, enabled the relatively educated and demanding consumers to distance themselves from both Soviet conservatism and nationalism and to choose democracy rather than nationalism, and the world cultural heritage rather than what was offered by the nationalists.

The cultural demand of the Russian speakers, who could potentially form part of the Belarusian intellectual elite, was absolutely different from what the nationalists had to offer. The Belarusian nationalism had greater influence on Soviet conservatism than on liberal postmodernism.

Most Belarusians, when they found themselves in the independent Belarusian state, were still trapped by the Soviet myth and rejected the nationalistic myth.

Donor and recipient

In the late 1980s the Sovetization and Russification affected most of the Belarusians with the number of Belarusian speakers falling considerably. Most people spoke Russian or pidgin Russian -- a mix of Russian and Belarusian.

By the time Belarus gained independence its culture underwent big changes under the influence of the colonization culture of the Russian Empire, and the Soviet Union, world wars, industrialization and migration of people within the Soviet Union.

Most analysts of Russian-Belarusian cultural ties before and after 1990 were influenced by ideology.

Yury Lotman distanced himself from ideology focusing on cultural interaction between Belarus and Russia in the context of cultural dialogue.

Lotman’s analysis of the historic and cultural development dwells on two principles of fundamental importance for “typological research.” Firstly, he says, “the interpretation of one culture or another, immanent and within the national limits, is only possible through the examination of short historical periods.”

Secondly, “the comparison of internal development mechanisms and external influences is possible by means of contemplative abstraction only. In a real historical process, both phenomena are linked and represent various manifestations of a single dynamic process.”[12]

Yury Lotman defined the cultural development process as “cultural dialogue” based on the exchange of texts. The cultural dialogue involves the dominating, donating party or culture, which supplies the other party with texts and text production programs, and the recipient or addressee, which uses and digests the texts.

Although in certain periods in history, one culture may enforce, even using a threat of extermination, its basic texts on other cultures, conflict relations among various cultural systems are much more complex than mere replacement of one cultural products and texts with others.

Even during armed conflicts socio-cultural systems maintain a permanent dialogue. Lotman uses “cultural dialogue” because he has not found a more accurate term. “In contrast to the normal perception of a dialogue, in this case ‘the response’ may be addressed to a different culture, not the one that originated it.”[13] Cultural systems constantly change, but the intensity of the changes may vary in different situations.

A culture, examined separately from other cultural systems, either Russian or Belarusian, is complex. It may be studied further by means of contemplative fragmentation to smaller, presumably independent, cultural units. All these units exchange texts with various intensity.

The Belarusian and Russian cultures can be regarded as subsystems of a larger cultural system, as part of a certain ethnic culture region, or as part of the world culture. The dominant role of one culture system or another is not permanent at the level of the cultural super-system, or semiosphere, as Lotman puts it. A cultural dialogue is characterized by alternating activity of the donor and the recipient.[14] “The partnership in a dialogue is absolutely asymmetric.”[15] 

One party dominates at the beginning of a dialogue, playing the central role and imposing the role of cultural periphery on the recipient. The bearers of periphery culture get used to their secondary role and regard themselves as representatives of a cultural periphery.

As the new periphery culture adopts imported texts and products and it develops, it starts to claim ancient roots and a dominating position in the cultural world. The periphery becomes the center donating texts to foreign cultures.

At that moment the recipient becomes the donor. The exportation of texts to the former donor helps boost identity of the culture that used to be a recipient or a periphery and is accompanied by a rise in hostile sentiments against the former dominant party in the dialogue. The former periphery may lay political and military claims to the former center in certain historical circumstances.[16]

It should be noted that the recipient does not adopt the texts of foreign cultures mechanically. The recipient culture produces new cultural patterns by combining its own texts with the imported ones.

Says Yury Lotman, “Typological parallels prove that intensive adoption of foreign texts is followed by a strongly emission of own texts in the surrounding cultural space. For instance, the Russian 18^th century culture gave rise to the next stage – Russian Romanticism of the 19^th century, which exerted strong cultural influence on the West.”[17] In the 18^th century Russia borrowed secular literary trends from the West, whereas in the 19^th century, Russian literature became a great cultural phenomenon that influenced Western traditions.

To analyze the current state of the Belarusian-Russian dialogue it is necessary to determine the sequence: 1. adoption and accumulation of foreign culture products; 2. synthesis of own and imported texts; and 3. emission of texts to the donor and a boost in recipient culture identity.

Therefore, the accumulation of texts and a change of lead in producing cultural patterns from the dominant party in the dialogue is a phase that precedes and prepares a boost in identity of the periphery representatives. The periphery distances itself from the former center after passing through all stages of the cultural dialogue mentioned by Lotman. The accumulation of own texts and patterns is essential for raising the sense of national identity.

When we look at the Russian and Belarusian culture of the early 1990s through the prism of Lotman’s typological theory, we see a conflicting picture. The outburst of national democratic, cultural and educational activity in Belarus in the second half of the 1980s and early 1990s may be regarded as a prelude to the third phase of the cultural dialogue with the Russian center. However, there was no cultural conclusion of the third phase that should have accompanied the political conclusion – the acquisition of independence. Belarus was producing its own cultural products, but at the same time it saw an inflow of texts from Russia. It was the Russian cultural influence that helped boost Belarusian identity and subdued Soviet identity at the time.

Belarusian national and cultural elite reacted slowly to rapid changes in the political and cultural situation, unlike the elite in Ukraine or the Baltic states.

In the early 1990s, the most numerous and influential organization, the BPF “Adradzhenne,” saw a rise in public support for its efforts to strip the Soviet party bureaucracy of its privileges, but lacked support on issues of Belarusification and independence from Russia.

Third-hand Culture

After becoming an independent state, Belarus, nonetheless, was not able to satisfy its cultural needs by its own intellectual resources. It continued to digest flows of new texts coming from Russia. Belarus could not enter the third phase of cultural dialogue with Russia only through the effort of Belarusian-speaking elites. And Russian-speaking intellectual elites that shared the ideals of independence remained unneeded as “lacking national consciousness” and staying beyond the nationalist modernistic discourse.

The failure of the modernistic nationalist project, the lack of consolidation among the Belarusian-speaking and Russian-speaking opponents of the Soviet-Belarusian cultural model and, as a result, a temporary return to renewed patterns of Soviet-Belarusian culture encouraged by the elites that ruled after 1994, contributed to the conservation of Belarus in the state of a cultural recipient of Russia.

Russian electronic and print media outlets still supply the Belarusians with news and transmit works of the world’s cinema, Russian publishing houses deliver to Belarus works of modern world literature in Russian translations. But the texts transmitted to Belarus from the territory of Russia are translations into the Russian language of texts created in other ethnocultural regions.

The role of Russia as a producer of authentic texts transmitted into the cultural space of Belarus is not so great as its role as a retransmitter of texts that originate from other regions and come to Russia. Thanks to Russia’s television networks, its movie and video markets, mostly pirated, Belarusians have access to new Hollywood products, consume Brazilian soap operas, watch sports tournaments and follow international events in their own country. Also through Russia, Belarus receives literary and philosophical works made outside Belarus and Russia and translated into Russian.

Taking these texts Russia, as a cultural system, is a recipient itself. If Belarus were not in self-isolation because of the ruling political regime, the role of Russia as a cultural retransmitter and intermediary in the delivery of texts produced in Japan, Germany or the United States to Belarus would be much less important.

Russia, in the first instance thanks to its electronic media, supplies the Belarusian cultural space with already digested samples of American, European and other modern culture. But the share of the purely Russian component in this flow of texts from Russia often is not so great. In the context of the processes of formation of the global information space and the international interpenetration of cultures, it is highly problematic in general to draw a dividing line between the national and alien cultural spaces. That is why we should always keep in mind the largely conditional nature of the terms “national Russian culture” or “national Belarusian culture” and take into account the limited sphere of using such terms, which was once suggested by Yury Lotman.

At present Russia predominates in the information space of Belarus. Belarusification, which started with the proclamation of the independence of the Republic of Belarus, considerably decelerated in the middle of the 1990s. The role of the Belarusian language was largely prevented and continues to be prevented from increasing by the insufficient potential of Belarusian-language texts to satisfy the needs of Belarusian cultural revival.

Belarusian intellectual elites are separated by a language barrier. But the communication problem of the Belarusian elites is not only the problem of the everyday use of Belarusian or Russian by representatives of different subcultures in Belarus.

In the cultural space of Belarus, there are various complexes of texts that can give rise to the consolidation of one subculture or another, Belarusian-language subculture or Russian-language one. Representatives of intellectual elites in Belarus who prefer to speak Belarusian or Russian have different complexes of texts at their disposal.

Apart from 19^th-century Belarusian literary works and literary monuments of the times of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, of no less importance for the modern culture of Belarus are texts originated with present-day, mass and elite, cultures. Among them are not only written texts created in Belarus in the current period on the basis of the existing corps of Belarusian literary works but also motion pictures, musical and literary works created outside Belarus or within Belarus on the basis of imported, external cultural texts.

Belarus is incorporated into the cultural and information space of modern Russia, but there is little of the purely Russian content in this influence. The Russian language is a dominant factor in this regard. But the Belarusians increasingly frequently deal with products and samples of Western, above all American and European and more rarely Eastern mass culture coming to Belarus in Russian translations. As for purely Russian products, they are dominated by newscasts, Russian musical pop culture and Russian serial films. But being orientated to the imitation of samples of liberal civilization, although sometimes in a caricatured form, this kind of cultural products from Russia again prompts the Belarusian consumer to reject the Belarusian-Soviet standard.

A representative of Belarusian-language subculture who wants to watch a new Hollywood blockbuster or read a popular foreign novel has to make a choice between consuming this cultural product in its Russian translation and rejecting the non-Belarusian-language text. The much-talked-of language barrier is not the only cause and, probably, not the main cause of the problem of communication between the Belarusian-language and Russian-language subcultures of Belarus. It is mainly caused by the difference between the cultural contexts in which the bearers of these subcultures exist. Russian-speaking representatives of the Belarusian intellectual elite can not only make their own translations from foreign languages into Russian but also easily use texts created outside Belarus and Russia but already translated in Russia and delivered to Belarus.

Belarusian-language subcultures are in want of the direct translation of foreign cultural texts from the original language into Belarusian. Otherwise the use of Russian translations from Western pieces engenders a characteristic phenomenon of second-hand culture. For instance, the Belarusian rock and pop music stage is formed under the influence of the Russian one, which digests borrowed Western patterns, and a foreign motion picture is dubbed into Belarusian from Russian, not from the original language of the film.

Under the current circumstances, a considerable step on the path toward national revival, the strengthening of the national cultural space and cultural integration into Europe could be not a rapid transition of entire society to the Belarusian-language standard but above all the creation of equal conditions for both language groups in satisfying their cultural needs, i.e. the establishment of closer cultural contact between Belarus and the other world except Russia. At present Belarus’ communication with the world’s culture, above all mass culture, is mostly determined by Russia, its publishing houses, legal and underground cinema and video markets, and media outlets.

To a considerable degree, the problem of communication between Russian-language and Belarusian-language subcultures that represent people professionally engaged in mental labor does not lie directly in the use of languages. Probably, the essence of the matter is that there is an insufficient amount of common texts existing in both subcultures in their languages. It was and remain a frequent occurrence that what is said is less important than the language in which it is said.

Russia’s strong cultural influence on Belarus continues to exist and becomes even stronger mostly because of the weakness of Belarus’ cultural space, which takes Russian cultural products as there is a lack of national cultural products or they are not in demand.

Apart from the Soviet ideological legacy, among factors that contribute to Russia’s influence on Belarus are the isolation and underdevelopment of the local intellectual elites, their language opposition, the low initial level of the development of national consciousness, little progress in market-oriented reforms and the unfavorable political situation for the development of Belarusian culture.

All these factors are very complicatedly interdependent and form a complex of contradictory trends inside the Belarusian cultural space. At the same time Russia, which already had the role of a determining cultural center, has started to produce and introduce new cultural patterns more actively, developing in accordance with the model of liberal society on the basis of a market economy. In the absence of a serious language barrier and in the conditions of self-isolation, not having sufficient political, economic, and legal support for its internal cultural innovations, Belarus is doomed to remain a cultural province of the new Russia.

Old Official Culture

Since 1994, the Belarusian authorities’ policy in the cultural sphere has been aimed at the reproduction of Soviet cultural patterns. Their economic policy, aimed at the preservation of state ownership as the basis of the current elite’s rule and the concordant tradition of controlling culture, inherited from the Soviet era, perfectly complement each other.

The Belarusian government by its own hands ensures Russia’s leadership in the production and introduction of new cultural patterns. Owing to the sluggish state system of control over culture, the prevention of market-oriented reforms in the economy and the absence of legal guarantees for private enterprise, Belarus is certainly behind Russia in the field of mass culture. The government’s cultural policy and the domestic economic situation are complementary and interdependent factors determining Belarus’ failure to keep pace with Russia.

The local show industry, which is generally associated with pop music, is stagnating in an embryonic condition. As for the role of Belarus in the field of pop culture in the Belarusian-Russian cultural space, it boils down to the reproduction or imitation of Soviet-era samples, which is supported by the government.

Various art festivals involving CIS member countries are regularly held on the territory of Belarus. Model led on festivals held when the USSR and the Warsaw Pact existed, they are an integral part of Belarus’ official cultural life. A demonstrative example is the Slavyansky Bazar (Slavic Bazaar) festival held in Vitebsk under the personal patronage of the Belarusian president. It is above all intended for people nostalgic for the Soviet times with their myth about the fraternal unity of nations incorporated into the Soviet Union. Not long ago authorities launched a similar pop music festival called “At the Crossroads of Europe,” but given its level and representation, they had better have named it “At the Crossroads of the CIS.” The absence of a civilized market and the government’s political and ideological control impede the development of new forms of pop culture in Belarus.

As was the case in the Soviet era, television and publishing remain under the control of the state represented by governmental agencies whose functions include ideological and so-called moral supervision. Market relations in the communications industry develop very slowly, as they constitute a direct danger to the government’s monopoly over the news business.

The Belarusian publishing business remains underdeveloped because of the unfavorable political situation and the government’s reluctance to carry out market-oriented reforms. As a result, given the advanced Russianization, Russian book publishers have found a good market for their products in Belarus. The State Press Committee of Belarus, ignoring the unprofitability of the state system of production and distribution of printed products, resisted the destruction of the state network of book sales and blocked the development of private publishing businesses, thus creating favorable conditions for Russian publishers.

There is obvious asymmetry in the Belarusian-Russian exchange of printed products.18 Russian publishing houses retained a dominant position in the Belarusian book market in the second half of the 1990s. The lion’s share of the wide range of books, mostly tripe stuff, came from Russia.19

As was the case at the beginning of Gorbachev’s perestroika and after Belarus declared independence, Russia still supplies Belarus with new books on philosophy and humanities. It is Russian titles that form the bulk of literature used in Belarus’ humanities schools.

See Table 3.20

Table 3. Publication of books, booklets, magazines and newspapers in Belarus