BORDERLAND FOREVER: MODERN BELARUS 1. See No Evil: Belarus In
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CHAPTER THREE BORDERLAND FOREVER: MODERN BELARUS 1. See no evil: Belarus in the twilight of the Soviet era Th e reforms started by Mikhail Gorbachev were originally intended to make the Soviet Union stronger without changing its political system. While the word “perestroika”, restructuring, soon entered dictionaries of many languages, the Gorbachev era started with another catch-word: “uskoreniye”, acceleration. According to this policy, the Soviet Union had considerable potential, unused in the Brezhnev era, to become the dominant world superpower, both economically and militarily. Not that there was something wrong with the systemic principles: the one Party rule, the impenetrable barriers to democratic political participa- tion, the suppression of national sentiment, the centralized economy buttressed by criminal penalties for private entrepreneurship, all these and many other features of totalitarian regime were there to stay. What was needed was not an overhaul of the system, but new men in high places who would be able to make the system work faster (for more on economic policies of the early Gorbachev era see, e.g., Aslund, 1991, p. 71; Bryson, 1995, pp. 60–61; Sutela, 1991, p. 147). Economically, it meant the channeling of resources to the newly established, more effi cient, more technologically advanced enterprises. Csaba (1995, p. 39) highlighted the main purpose of the new thrust towards economic effi ciency: Th e new Soviet leadership wanted to retain the country’s status of a military superpower. Militarily, the West had to be intimidated into accepting Soviet supremacy. A crucial role in this was assigned to the recently revealed ability of the Soviet armed forces to destroy much of Western Europe with brand new intermedi- ate range missiles. Th e latter, suffi ciently compact and mobile to avoid the deterrence eff ect of American ICBM force and capable of indepen- dent launch with very little preparation time, thus making preventive destruction of launch complexes by air strikes virtually impossible, had a range up to 3,000 miles and payload of three 0.15 megaton warheads, enough to eliminate any target in Western Europe. As the deployment 146 chapter three of new missiles was completed by 1986, the new weapons became an important factor in global strategic balance, helping to tip it in favor of the Soviet Union. Belarus occupied an important place in the plans of the new Soviet leadership. Its industry, built aft er the war, was a pinnacle of Soviet high technology and thus a potential recipient of additional investments distributed by central planning authorities in Moscow. Oil exports, an increasingly important source of foreign currency revenues for the Soviet economy, to a great extent depended on Belarusian oil refi neries and the extensive network of pipelines. Geopolitically, the territory of Belarus was a major component of the Soviet Union’s aggressive posture vis-à- vis NATO in Europe. Soviet land forces in Belarus included hundreds of thousands of soldiers and tens of thousands of armored vehicles, all of them ready to reinforce the fi rst echelon of the Warsaw Pact armies in Eastern Germany. Moreover, the addition of new intermediate range ballistic missiles and more lethal strategic bombers to the Soviet nuclear arsenal made Belarus an ideal launching site for a nuclear strike against targets in Western Europe. Politically, Belarusian national aspirations were not strong or widespread enough to be a source of concern for the Soviet leadership. Th e Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic was almost perfectly integrated in the economy, polity, and society of the Soviet Union. For the vast majority of Belarusians their republic’s continuing prominence in the economic and military designs of the new Soviet leadership did not produce an identifi able concern. Belarusian elites did not exhibit discernable nationalist sentiment comparable to their coun- terparts in neighboring Baltic states and, to a somewhat lesser extent, Ukraine. Th is attitude seemed to be rewarded by the early Gorbachev administration. In February 1986, Nikolai Slyun’kov, First Secretary of the Communist Party of Belarus, has been appointed a candidate member of the Politburo. Th is was the only non-Russian appointment at the Politburo level in the fi rst year of the Gorbachev rule. Barely a year later, Slyun’kov was elevated to full membership in Politburo and promoted to a secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Th ese promotions, which triggered a chain reaction of upward move- ments in the highest echelons of Belarusian Party and administrative apparatus, could plausibly be interpreted as an indication of approval of the policies of Belarusian leaders by the new General Secretary. Slyun’kov belonged to a group of denationalized technocrats who by the late Brezhnev era began to replace the “partisan” generation in the .