The Rise and Fall of Belarusian Nationalism

The rise and fall of Belarusian nationalism, by Per Anders Rudling, Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014, x + 436 pp., US$29.95 (pbk), ISBN 978-0-822-96308-0In his book The Rise and Fall of Belarusian Nationalism, Per Anders Rudling provides a detailed story unfolding the venture of Belarusian nationalism between 1905 and 1931. The "rise" of nationalism he associates with the organized political activism of Belarusian nationalists, which became possible in the conditions of liberalization of national policy in the Russian empire after 1905. The "fall" was marked by the end of the policy of national communism in the USSR, when the formation of national and Soviet parallel identities fostered by the Bolshevik government in the 1920s was replaced by the repressions of national elites and the advancement of a Soviet project centred on Russian language and culture.The way of presenting the history of nationalism chosen by Per Rudling is rather unusual for studies of a national project: rather than focusing on the dominant track of nationalists' arguments and their political achievements, he tends to deconstruct the context in which nationalist activists had to operate. As a result, the author navigates in a complex historical realm where Belarusian nationalist intellectuals, often split among themselves along political lines, were contested by other national movements, and they altogether proved to be highly dependent on various external actors and changing conditions.Chapter 1, "Imagining Belarus", reconstructs the historical context in which the Belarusian idea was first taken as a political category by Belarusian nationalists. Rudling shows how the composite national environment of the western borderland of the Russian Empire created the competitive ideological atmosphere for the articulation of a Belarusian national project. Chapter 2, "The Beginning of Belarusian Nationalism", depicts barriers of a various nature that Belarusians had to overcome on their way to a modem nation: the historical legacy of blurred boundaries between ethno-linguistic groups populating the region; the consequences of western Russian discourse developed in the empire that denied the existence of Belarusian ethnicity; Kraowa ideology, which highlighted the ethnic heterogeneity of Belarusian lands and promoted the multinational political project; the orientalization of Belarus in the discourse of Polish nationalists, and so on.Chapter 3, "Six Declarations of Statehood in Three Years", shows how Belarusian national activists repeatedly attempted to achieve state independence during the chaotic period of 1917-1920. The story told by Rudling to a certain extent disguises the opinion about the lack of political will to statehood among Belarusians. But it also reveals a critical level of dependency of Belarusian nationalism on various external actors - German occupational forces, the Polish state, and the Bolshevik party and Soviet government - who played pivotal and often destructive roles in Belarusian nation-building. Chapter 4, "Nationalities Policy in Soviet Belarus", and Chapter 5, "Belarusian Nationalism in the Second Polish Republic", describe the contrasting conditions for the national development of Belarusians across the border established by the Riga Treaty - the one that left Belarus divided between the Soviet Union and the Polish Republic. Instead of focusing on the dissimilar experiences of indigenization (korenizatsiia) in Soviet Belarus and Polonization in Poland, Rudling, again, brings into picture a far more complex ethnic and linguistic landscape in which Belarusian nationalists had to deal not only with the state ideologies of the USSR or the Second Polish Republic, but also with competing national ideologies of other ethnic groups - Poles, Jews, Ukrainians - as well as with ideological and political splits among themselves. …