From the annexation of Belarus to Russia, it will become worse for everyone
… The taxi driver, a young man of about thirty, who was taking me from Bolshaya Ordynka to Yakimanka, turned out to be talkative. He said that he was Belarusian, because of all these migrants he did not have time to leave for Warsaw, where he had recently worked as a taxi driver, and now he makes money in Moscow. And when I, in turn, opened up and said that my grandfather Leonid was born near Grodno in Lida and was baptized there in the St. Michael’s Monastery, I became a family to my Belarusian interlocutor. True, when I told him that, nevertheless, in Warsaw, unlike Moscow, he will always be a stranger, that in principle it is impossible for the Poles to become their own, if you do not have Polish blood, he with tension he said to me: “You do not know! We are Lithuanian Belarusians. We are actually closer to Lithuanians than Russians. ” And then he gave me a whole lecture on the origin and characteristics of the Belarusian nation. “Our ancestors came to Lithuania a thousand years ago, dissolved among them, and therefore our life, the clothes of our peasants have always been closer to Lithuanian than to Russian. Below is a village near Smolensk with a village near Mogilev, where I live, and you will understand what I mean. ” The tension dissipated, and he said to me almost with a smile: “But at the same time, we, Belarusians, unlike today’s Ukrainians, treat Russia well, we respect you. True, none of us any longer wants to unite with Russia, does not want to turn into a Russian province. If we are to unite with someone, then it is better with Lithuania. Then we would return to our home. “
This is how a young Belarusian taxi driver suddenly turned into a professor-historian and for 20 minutes read me a lecture on the history of the origin of the Belarusian nation. Of course, he didn’t tell me anything new. In March 1997, when I became a member of the committee on the creation of the Union State, I came to Minsk together with Yevgeny Primakov and Konstantin Zatulin to discuss the final project for the creation of the Union State, the editor-in-chief of a local historical magazine told me everything that I had heard from a Belarusian taxi driver … And even under Catherine II, several uprisings were organized. And he also said that the Belarusians, unlike the Little Russians, the Ukrainians, did not have their own Bohdan Khmelnitsky, there were no supporters of unification among the people. This historian then explained to me that if for us the “Russians” are inhabitants of the Muscovite kingdom, then among the ancient Belarusians, like among the ancient Ukrainians, the “Russians” are the heirs of Kievan Rus. In their minds “Rus” was not associated with either the Muscovy or the Russian Empire.
Then in March 1997, when I arrived in Belarus, in the evenings I spent time with my former graduate student Valery Tsepkalo. As the head of the campaign headquarters of Alexander Lukashenko during the presidential elections in 1995, he turned into an apartment, some of Lukashenko’s teams came. From them I learned that, in fact, Lukashenko’s team and he himself were glad that instead of a real union, on the initiative of Boris Yeltsin, a pretend union state was created, there was no real unification of the former RSFSR with the former BSSR. As I then learned, the Belarusian elite was against unification with the Russian Federation for a number of reasons. They were critical of the 1996 Moscow loans-for-shares auctions, which transferred Russia’s national wealth to several oligarchs. They did not want to be together with Russia, which was waging a war in the North Caucasus and, in particular, in Chechnya. And they lost the most important thing, they did not want the national state of the Belarusians, which existed for only a few months in 1918.
Why did I remember all this? It turns out that the moods of isolation of Belarus from Russia, characteristic of Alexander Lukashenko’s entourage in the late 1990s, became the moods of a new, young year-old Russia. Then, in 1997, as I know for sure, a third of Belarusians, two groups with Russia in earnest. But neither the elite of Belarus, nor the entourage of Boris Yeltsin wanted this. Yeltsin’s team and he himself were afraid that if there were general presidential elections on the territory of Russia, united with Belarus, the people would choose not him, but the then very popular Lukashenko, who was then very popular in Russia. And now we are witnessing that with all the good attitude of Belarusians towards us, they do not want to become a part of the Russian state. The forecasts of many Belarusian political scientists, who predicted in their books and articles at the beginning of the 2000s, that, as the new young Belarus prevails over Belarus during the USSR, the pro-Western sentiments characteristic of Western Belarus.
When Lukashenka organized a banquet on the occasion of the signing of the Union Treaty, I happened to be at the table at which I was sitting, led by the Lithuanian Ambassador to Minsk. And, naturally, I was surprised at the presence of the Lithuanians at this celebration of Russian-Belarusian friendship and asked: “How did you get here?” One of the members of the Lithuanian government, sitting, answered me with a smile: “Dear Alexander, we are not guests, we are here on earth, and we are learning from the experience of our unification with Belarus. If someday Belarus changes its mind and decides to return home to Lithuania, we will use your experience in writing a union treaty. “
Unfortunately, it says a lot about the fact that our politicians, and especially those who dream of the revival of the Russian empire, of the revival of the Russian state within the borders of the USSR, do not have the slightest idea of what actually was what they call “Russian World”. Moreover, knowledge of how the unification of the first Moscow affair with Little Russia of Bogdan Khmelnitsky, and then the Tsarist empire of Catherine II with Belarus, arose, is necessary now, when we are studying the reasons for the collapse of the USSR. After all, if there really was a unity of the Russian world, then the Little Russians and Belarusians would not have left Russia in 1918, they would not have left in 1991.
To become a popular politician, to prove your true patriotism, you must call for impossibility, you must openly ignore both the history of your country and the moods of your supposedly former brothers – Ukrainians, and now Belarusians. It is probably no coincidence that an experienced politician Vladislav Surkov wrote his article “Where Has Chaos Gone? Unpacking Stability ”, which asserts that Russia will never be an empire if it does not constantly expand its territory. Today it is impossible to become a deputy of the Duma, not to assert that “my personal attachment to empires and the Russian empire is the heart of my worldview, my constant reflections on the fate of Russia.” And the worst thing is that after all this madness with the project of splitting Novorossia from present-day Ukraine, after the death of the participants in the so-called “anti-terrorist operation in Donbass”, and the death of the so-called “former miners and tractor drivers of Donbass”, there are calls to do what was not possible in 2014, and to complete the project of Ukraine’s annexation to Russia by force. I mean the speeches of Alexander Prokhanov at Echo of Moscow. To be honest, I would not have remembered all this confession of a Belarusian taxi driver, about his love for the West, if, a few days later, I had not heard the fiery calls of the head of the Izborsk club to Putin to bring the work of uniting the Russian world to an end. I understand that, despite the fact that Putin sometimes receives Alexander Prokhanov, he will never dare to use his recommendations in his policy towards Ukraine. After all, even if young Belarus, which did not live in the USSR, looks at the West and organizes mass demonstrations against the hated Lukashenko at risk to life, then she can imagine how young Ukraine, which survived the years of confrontation with Donbass, will behave, young Ukraine, infected with nationalist, anti-Russian mood, if, God forbid, we decide to follow through with the work we started in 2014.
I agree with those who say that undoubtedly Ukraine is not ready to confront Russia in earnest. It is obvious that the revival of the Russian world and the unification of the divided Ukraine with Russia will revive for us the UPA, a new rebel army. It took Stalin over 15 years to actually conquer Western Ukraine. And how to eliminate the massive anti-Russian sentiments of the overwhelming majority of the Ukrainian population if we start to implement the projects of Alexander Prokhanov? By the way, I don’t understand whether the wise and experienced Vladislav Surkov, who says that in the name of saving Russia, we must expand our territory, is aware of it? Indeed, for us, in fact, it is much more important to the disintegration of the USSR that began in 1991 and to turn today’s multinational Russia into a single state with common values and a common future. Thank God, thanks to Putin, separatism in the North Caucasus has died out and does not pose a great danger to us. And what will happen if we suddenly obey the ideologists of Russian imperialism, and add the separatism of the “Russian world” that has been attached to us to the faded separatism in the North Caucasus? !!
In my opinion, it would be a big mistake to engage in the revival of the Russian world and annex Belarus, which began to look for its roots in Ancient Lithuania and which is already looking to the West and does not want to become part of Russia. Of course, my Belarusian taxi driver will not become a Ukrainian Yarosh and will not create a Belarusian Right Center. Although there is no guarantee that this is impossible in the event of the accession of Belarus to Russia. But still, even latent separatism, even latent dissatisfaction with the already new, non-Soviet Belarus, with the loss of its national state, will cause enormous damage to the stability of the new Russia reborn from the ashes. He thinks that it is better for us to preserve the present Belarus, which carries some other national statehood and at the same time a strategic military ally of Russia.
And I think that the accession of Belarus to Russia will not cause any delight among the overwhelming majority of the population of the Russian Federation. The present Belarus, which is still at a distance from us, in my opinion, is closer to the Russian people than Belarus, which will become a united Russian world. I advise our current patriots who dream of reviving the Russian empire to listen to what the Belarusian taxi driver told me.
Alexander TSIPKO, Chief Researcher, Institute of Economics, Russian Academy of Sciences, Doctor of Philosophy