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Memorial Narratives of WWII Partisans and Genocide in Belarus 7 East European Politics and Societies Volume 24 Number 1 Winter 2010 6-25 © 2010 SAGE Publications 10.1177/0888325409355818 Memorial Narratives of http://eeps.sagepub.com hosted at WWII Partisans and http://online.sagepub.com Genocide in Belarus Alexandra Goujon University of Bourgogne, France The memory of WWII always played an important role in Belarus, which was charac- terized as a “Partisan Republic” during the Soviet time. Soviet historiography and memorial narrative emphasized the heroics of the resistance to fascism and allowed only a description of the crimes of the Nazis. New ways of looking at war events appeared during the perestroika and after the independence of the country. But after Alexander Lukashenko came to power as president in 1994, a neo-Soviet version of the past was adopted and spread. The Great Patriotic War (GPW) has become an increas- ingly publicized event in the official memorial narrative as the culminating moment in Belarusian history. Since the mid-2000s, this narrative tends to be nationalized in order to testify that the Belarusian people’s suffering and resistance behavior were among the highest ones during WWII. Political and academic dissenting voices to the Belarusian authoritarian regime try to downplay this official narrative by pointing out that the Belarusians were also victims of the Stalinist repression, and their attitude towards the Nazi occupation was more than ambivalent. Behind the memorial discourses, two competitive versions of Belarusian national identity can be distinguished. According to the official version, Belarusian identity is based on the East-Slavic identity that incor- porates the Soviet history in its contemporary development. According to the opposi- tion, it is based on a national memory that discards the Soviet past as a positive one. Keywords: Belarus, World War II, memory, partisan, genocide n 28 August 2008, the deputy minister of education in Belarus, Kazimir Farino, Oannounced to the press that the new academic year in all schools would begin with a lesson devoted to the sixty-fifth anniversary of the liberation of Belarus from German fascists invaders.1 The exercise would help prepare students for the 2009 commemoration of Independence Day (July 3) in relation to this event. What is Author’s Note: An earlier version of this article was presented at the conference “United Europe-Divided Memory,” held at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, 19-21 September 2008; at the 14th Annual World ASN Convention, held at Columbia University in New York, 23-25 April 2009; and at the confer- ence “World War II and the (Re) Creation of Historical Memory in Contemporary Ukraine” in Kyiv, 23-26 September 2009. I thank the participants and discussants for their useful comments. I also wish to thank Maria Salomon Arel for her careful editing. Faculté de droit et de science politique, Université de Bourgogne, 4 boulevard Gabriel, 21000 Dijon, France. Email: [email protected] 6 Downloaded from http://eep.sagepub.com at Fondation Nationale on March 6, 2010 Goujon / Memorial Narratives of WWII Partisans and Genocide in Belarus 7 clearly reflected in this government initiative is the role of World War II in official national memory, historiography, and identity politics in Belarus. The memory of WWII plays an important role in Belarus. Since 1945, commemo- rations of the Great Patriotic War (GPW) sought to boost patriotism among the Soviet population. The Victory Monument located in Victory Square in Minsk (erected in 1954) is dedicated to Soviet soldiers and partisans who died in WWII. However, the specific role of the Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic (BSSR) during the war was not highlighted before Piotr Masherov, a Soviet partisan awarded Hero of the Soviet Union status, became the first secretary of the Belarusian Communist Party in 1965. The major memorial monuments connected to partisan warfare and Nazi mass crimes in Belarus emerged only after Masherov came to power.2 The decision to build a memorial complex in Khatyn to honor the hundreds of Belarusian villages destroyed by the Nazis was taken in 1966. The memorial com- plex that finally opened in 1969 also commemorated the great sacrifices, in lives and otherwise, made by Belarus in support of the victory drive against the Nazis. Mount of Glory (Kurgan Slavy), a memorial complex honoring Soviet soldiers who fought during WWII, was also established in 1969, on the outskirts of Minsk. A few years later, in 1974, Minsk was awarded the status of Hero City for outstanding hero- ism during the GPW (about twenty-nine years after Leningrad, Stalingrad, Sevastopol, and Odessa and thirteen years after Kiev). Under Brezhnev, the representation of wartime heroism was ethnicized, promoting a Soviet-Belarusian patriotism that helped legitimize the BSSR nomenklatura as a partisan generation.3 Partisan warfare and Nazi genocide policy were the twin pillars of the official Soviet historical narrative of WWII. With few exceptions, the Soviet era emphasized the heroics of the resistance to fascism rather than the actual crimes and abomina- tions committed by the Nazis.4 Historical information became more critical at the end of the 1950s and early 1960s. Under Brezhnev, “the Great Patriotic War [became] a sacrosanct cluster of heroic exploits that had once and for all proven the superiority of communism over capitalism.”5 In the late 1980s and 1990s, the war was reexam- ined again. During perestroika, a public debate on the Soviet regime as well as on Soviet contemporary history developed in Belarus and the other federal republics. Important in this connection is the 1988 discovery of mass graves in Kurapaty, on the outskirts of Minsk, where NKVD officers killed several thousand Belarusians and other civilians between 1937 and 1941. Kurapaty soon came to symbolize the crimes of the Stalinist regime and, more recently, of Soviet rule. In these years, the focus was on the atrocities of the Soviet regime rather than its glorious past. Following independence, nation-building in Belarus led to the nationalization of Belarusian history, differentiating it from Soviet historiography and demonstrating its association with European history and values.6 This process was halted with the election of Alexander Lukashenko in 1994, when a neo-Soviet version of the past was adopted and disseminated.7 A new interpretation of the Kurapaty mass graves, which attributed the executions to the German Wehrmacht, was propagated to restore Downloaded from http://eep.sagepub.com at Fondation Nationale on March 6, 2010 8 East European Politics and Societies the image of Soviet history under Stalin. New textbooks were published that pre- sented the GPW as the culminating moment in Belarusian history. This interpretation ran counter to the mainstream nationalist discourse that had become more common in the pre-Lukashenko years. The latter discourse had a different focus, for example glorifying the battle of Orsha in 1514, when the combined forces of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Kingdom of Poland defeated the army of the Grand Duchy of Moscow.8 Since the mid-1990s, the GPW has become increasingly prominent in both Belaru- sian national history and memory. A crucial example of this development is the 1996 decision to change the date of Independence Day from 27 July (the day Belarus declared sovereignty in 1990) to 3 July (the day Minsk was liberated from the Nazis in 1944). In the early 2000s, the official ideology launched by Lukashenko and endorsed by all state-owned institutions reinforced the role of the GPW in politics and society through the promotion of patriotic education across the country. Thus, two new core courses were introduced at the university level: “The Basics of the Ideology of the Republic of Belarus” and “The Great Patriotic War of the Soviet People.” In addition, the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of Belarus in 2004 and the sixtieth anniversary of victory in the GPW in 2005 offered the Belarusian authorities other opportunities to revive the memory of the war and partisan glory.9 Several important monuments, including Khatyn and the Mount of Glory, were restored in this context. And for the first time, a monument to the Belarusian partisan movement, called “Par- tisan Belarus,” (Belarus partizanskaia), was erected in Minsk in 2005. Since the mid-2000s, there has been a tendency to nationalize the official narrative of the GPW. This development can be viewed as part of a more global nationaliza- tion of official Belarusian identity policy. Lukashenko is pursuing a nation-building strategy of reconciling Belarusian sovereignty with Soviet structures to strengthen authoritarian rule in the country.10 In their treatment of WWII, the authorities promote the Belarusian dimension of the war experience, from both heroic and victim perspec- tives. The integration of a Belarusian-specific aspect into Soviet war memory glorifies Belarus’s distinctiveness. For example, on the sixtieth anniversary of victory in the GPW, the Belarusian presidential Web site published an essay (“Victory Day in the History of the Belarusian People”) claiming that “the Belarusian people kept its dis- tinct ethnos only thanks to the partisan movement.”11 Declarations such as these help promote an official Belarusian nationalism that glorifies the Belarusian nation while at the same time integrating it into Soviet historiography and the supranational Slavic community in which it purportedly plays the supreme role.12 War memory is also used to legitimize Lukashenko’s policy towards his oppo- nents, who are often depicted as fascists or belonging to a fifth column. Several Western states that, according the authorities, interfere in Belarus to bring down the government are treated in similar fashion.13 Opponents of the country’s authoritarian regime downplay the heroic discourse surrounding the war and partisan activities by Downloaded from http://eep.sagepub.com at Fondation Nationale on March 6, 2010 Goujon / Memorial Narratives of WWII Partisans and Genocide in Belarus 9 pointing out that Belarusians were the victims not only of Nazi policy, but also of Stalinist repression.
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