There is a spectre haunting Belarus. It’s not a brutal autocrat who is oppressing his own people, flouting international law, and menacing the country’s neighbors. Nor is it Belarus’s international isolation or the country’s rapidly collapsing economy. At least not if you read the Russian media.
According to a growing number of pro-Kremlin commentators, the spectre haunting Belarus is the threat of “Belarusization,” meaning the promotion of the Belarusian language, history, and culture.
In a lengthy recent essay for APN, a Kremlin-connected publication with a nationalist bent, political commentator Sergei Shiyenko argued that like Ukraine before it, Belarus is attempting to “synthesize a new ethnicity and a national-state project on an anti-Russian basis.”
According to Shiyenko, “Belarusization is the cornerstone of the concept of creating a new nation from an isolated part of the Russian people under a state that was accidentally created at the beginning of the twentieth century. Without Belarusization, nation-building will come to a dead end, the “Republic of Belarus” will lose its meaning.”