• Military Menu                       

• Introduction
• Systems
• Facilities
• Agencies
• Industry
• Operations
• Countries
• Hot Documents
• News
• Reports
• Policy
• Budget
• Congress
• Links

• WMD
• Intelligence
• Homeland Security
• Space

1945 - From Stalin to Gorbachev

The country's misery did not end in the summer of 1944, when the Red Army "liberated" it from the Nazis. Stalin ordered sweeping purges and mass deportations of local administrators and members of the CPSU, as well as those who had collaborated with the Nazis in any way, those who had spent the war in slave labor and prison camps in Germany and were now "ideologically contaminated" in Stalin's view, those who were suspected of antiSoviet sentiments, and those who were accused of "bourgeois nationalism." Only in 1971 did the Belorussian SSR return to its pre-World War II population level, but without its large Jewish populace.

The wartime devastation of Belorussia--the loss of people, homes, animals, public buildings, educational and cultural resources, roads, communications, health care facilities, and the entire industrial base--was complete. To make up for the industrial loss, Stalin ordered the building of new factories and plants, more efficient than most of those elsewhere in the Soviet Union.

One of the devices Stalin used to "protect" Belorussia (and the rest of the Soviet Union) against possible Western influences was a program of intensive Russification, thus creating a cordon sanitaire for Russia along the Polish border. Consequently, most key positions in Minsk, as well as in the western provincial cities of Hrodna (Grodno, in Russian) and Brest, were filled by Russians sent from elsewhere in the Soviet Union. The Belorussian language was unofficially banned from official use, educational and cultural institutions, and the mass media, and Belorussian national culture was suppressed by Moscow.

This so-called cultural cleansing intensified greatly after 1959, when Nikita S. Khrushchev, the CPSU leader at the time, pronounced in Minsk, "The sooner we all start speaking Russian, the faster we shall build communism." The resistance of some students, writers, and intellectuals in Minsk during the 1960s and 1970s was met with harassment by the Committee for State Security (KGB) and firing from jobs rather than arrests. Among the best-known dissidents were the writer Vasil' Bykaw, the historian Mykola Prashkovich, and the worker Mikhal Kukabaka, who spent seventeen years in confinement.

In economic terms, the post-war years were very difficult for the BSSR. Considerable funding was allocated from the central, the USSR, budget. The following plants and factories were built: Minsk Automobile Works, Minsk Tractor Plant, Road-Making Machines Plant in Zhodina, Oil Refinery in Novapolatsk, Chemical Fertilizer Plant in Hrodna, Tire Plant in Babruisk, Synthetic Fiber Factory in Salihorsk, and others.

Belarusian cultural development took place within the ideological pre-determinism and the Communists party control after the war and till the 1980s. Nevertheless, there appeared quite a number of talented post-war writers, such as: A.Adamovich, V.Bykov, R.Borodulin, G.Buravkin, A.Vertinski, V.Zuenok, I.Naumenka, B.Sanchenko, I.Chigrinov, I.Shamiakin, and a number of distinguished artists, such as painter M.Savitski, sculptors, such as Z.Azgur, S.Selikhanov, etc. There was a whole net of cultural establishments in the country; all sorts of cultural activities were also popular.

A new policy of openness, called "Glasnost" (Openness), contributed to Belarusian cultural liberation from the ideological dictatorship and brought about spiritual revival of the Belarusian nation. The language situation changed. In 1990 the law "On the Languages in the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic" was adopted. The works of many writers, banned before, were published (J.Vitbich, M.Sednev and others). The number of theatre companies increased.

The early days of Mikhail S. Gorbachev's perestroika in Belorussia were highlighted by two major events: the Chornobyl' disaster of April 26, 1986 (the Belorussian SSR absorbed 70 percent of the radioactive contaminants spewed out by the reactor), and a December 1986 petition sent by twenty-eight intellectuals to Gorbachev expressing the Belorussian people's fundamental grievances in the field of culture ("a cultural Chornobyl'").

On 26 April 1986, Byelorussia was struck by the Chernobyl disaster, as a result of which vast territories of Homel, Mogilev and some territories of Hrodna, Brest and Minsk regions were contaminated with radioactive elements. Thousands of kilometers of land were made unfit for farming and living on and turned into "dead zones".

The population of the Belorussian SSR was jolted into national awareness in the late 1980s with the occurrence of one disaster and the discovery of another. The explosion at the Chornobyl' (Chernobyl') nuclear power plant in Ukraine not only entailed the physically damaging radiation carried by the winds but also came to represent the toll taken on the country's sense of its ethnic and cultural identity by years of Russification. These two sets of consequences affected both the daily lives of the Belarusians and national politics: how was the country to remedy the two kinds of damage?

Belarus's other disaster was the discovery in 1988 of mass graves containing victims of Joseph V. Stalin's atrocities. Although the revelation of these graves angered a broad spectrum of Belarusians, it actually energized only a relatively small group of activists to try to overcome the country's political apathy. Nationalists saw Stalin's actions as clear proof of Moscow's attempts to eliminate the Belorussian nation and wanted to make sure that such barbarity could not occur again. For them, a strong, independent Belarus was the first step in this direction.

Whereas the full impact of the physical effects of Chornobyl' was kept secret for more than three years, the "cultural Chornobyl'" became a subject of hot discussion and an inspiration for considerable political activity. The petition pleaded with Gorbachev to prevent the "spiritual extinction" of the Belorussian nation and laid out measures for the introduction of Belorussian as a working language in party, state, and local government bodies and at all levels of education, publishing, mass media, and other fields.

The document embodied the aspirations of a considerable part of the national intelligentsia, who, having received no positive answer from the CPSU leadership either in Moscow or in Minsk, took to the streets. A number of independent youth groups sprang up, many of which embraced the national cause. In July 1988, the Organizational Committee of the Confederation of Belorussian Youth Associations called for "support of the radical restructuring of Belorussia."

In June 1988, mass graves, allegedly with up to 250,000 of Stalin's victims, were found near Minsk at Kurapaty. This sensational discovery fueled denunciations of the old regime and brought demands for reforms. An October demonstration, attended by about 10,000 people and dispersed by riot police, commemorated these victims as well as expressing support for the Belarusian Popular Front (BPF), which had been formed earlier in the month in hopes of encouraging reform. The group of activists who called for reform was relatively small; most people, although angry about the graves, remained both attached to Soviet ways and politically apathetic, believing that all these public activities would make no difference in the long run. The March 4, 1990, elections to the republic's Supreme Soviet illustrated the extent of political apathy and ideological inertia. Of the 360 seats in the legislature, fifteen were unfilled (at least eleven remained so more than a year later); of those elected, 86 percent belonged to the Communist Party of Belorussia (CPB). This conservative majority was not alone in slowing the pace of reforms. A majority of the republic's population, 83 percent, also voted conservatively in the March 17 all-union referendum on the preservation of the Soviet Union, even though the Supreme Soviet of the Belorussian SSR adopted the Declaration of State Sovereignty of the Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic on June 27, 1990 (following the Russian example of some two weeks earlier).

On the 27th of July 1990, the "Declaration of State Sovereignty" was adopted. According to the Constitution, the Republic of Belarus is a presidential republic. The President is the head of the state. The National Assembly is the country's supreme legislative authority, and the Constitutional Court is the country's supreme judicial authority.

A series of strikes in April 1991 put an end to the Belorussian SSR's reputation as the quietest of the European Soviet republics. The demands were mainly economic (higher wages and cancellation of a new sales tax), but some were also political (resignation of the Belorussian government and depoliticization of republic institutions). Certain economic demands were met, but the political ones were not. However, increasing dissent within the party led to thirty-three CPB deputies joining the opposition as the Communists for Democracy faction one month later.