TALLINN, Estonia (AP) — When school started this year for Mikalay in Belarus, the 15-year-old discovered that his teachers and administrators no longer called him by that name. They now called him Nikolai, its Russian equivalent.
Moreover, classes at his school, one of the best in the country, are now taught in Russian, rather than Belarusian, the language he has spoken for most of his life.
Belarusians like Mikalay are experiencing a new wave of Russification as Moscow extends its economic, political and cultural dominance to overtake its neighbor’s identity.
This is not the first time. Russia under the tsars and during the Soviet Union imposed its language, symbols and cultural institutions on Belarus. But with the demise of the USSR in 1991, the country began to assert its identity and Belarusian briefly became the official language, with the white-red-white national flag replacing a version of the red hammer and sickle.
But everything changed in 1994, after Alexander Lukashenko, a former Soviet collective farm official, came to power. The authoritarian leader made Russian an official language, alongside Belarusian, and removed nationalist symbols.
Today, Lukashenko, who has ruled the country for more than three decades, has allowed Russia to dominate every aspect of life in Belarus, a country of 9.5 million people. Belarusian, which uses the Cyrillic alphabet like Russian, is barely audible on the streets of Minsk and other major cities.
Official business is conducted in Russian, which dominates most media. Lukashenko speaks only Russian, and government officials often do not use their native language.
The country depends on Russian loans and cheap energy and has created a political and military alliance with Moscow, allowing President Vladimir Putin to deploy troops and missiles on its soil, which served as a base for the war in Ukraine.
“I understand that our Belarus is occupied. And who is the president there? Not Lukashenko. The president is Putin,” said Svetlana Alexievich, a 2015 Nobel Prize winner in literature who lives in exile in Germany. “The nation has been humiliated and it will be very difficult for Belarusians to recover from this.”
Belarusian cultural figures have been persecuted and hundreds of nationalist organizations have been closed. According to experts, Moscow is seeking to implement in Belarus what the Kremlin intended to do in neighboring Ukraine when war broke out in that country in 2022.
“It is obvious that our children are being deliberately deprived of their native language, their history and their Belarusian identity, but parents have been strongly advised not to ask questions about Russification,” said Mikalay’s father, Anatoly, who spoke to The Associated Press on condition that his last name not be used for fear of reprisals.
“We were informed about the synchronization of the school curriculum with Russia this year and were shown a propaganda film about how Ukrainian special services would recruit our teenagers and force them to commit sabotage in Belarus,” he said.
Mikalay’s school was one of the few that offered materials and courses in Belarusian. But in recent years, dozens of teachers have been fired and the Belarusian section of its website has disappeared.
Human rights defender Ales Bialiatski, convicted in 2023 on charges related to his work, which earned him the Nobel Peace Prize, demanded that his trial be held in Belarusian. The court rejected his request and sentenced him to ten years in prison.
Lukashenko mocks his native language, saying that “nothing great can be expressed in Belarusian.”[…]There are only two major languages in the world: Russian and English.
Speaking to Russian state media, Lukashenko recounted how Putin once thanked him for making Russian the dominant language in Belarus.
“I said: ‘Wait, what are you thanking me for? … The Russian language is my language, we were part of an empire and we are participating in (helping) this language develop,'” Lukashenko said.
Belarus was part of the Russian Empire for centuries and became one of the 15 Soviet republics after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Everyday use of the Belarusian language declined and persisted only in the west and north of the country and in rural areas.
In 1994, about 40% of students were taught in Belarusian; today this figure has fallen to less than 9%.
Although Belarusian, like Russian, is an East Slavic language, its vocabulary is considerably different. In 1517, the Belarusian publisher Francysk Skaryna was one of the first in Eastern Europe to translate the Bible into his native language.
Speaking Belarusian is seen as a show of opposition to Lukashenko and a statement of national identity. The practice played a key role in the mass protests that followed the disputed 2020 election, which gave the authoritarian leader a sixth term. In the brutal crackdown that followed, half a million people fled the country.
“The Belarusian language is increasingly perceived as a sign of political disloyalty and is being abandoned in favor of Russian in public administration, education, culture and mass media, either on orders from the hierarchy or out of fear of discrimination,” said Anais Marin, UN Special Rapporteur on human rights in Belarus.
At the same time, “more and more people want to speak Belarusian, which has become one of the symbols of freedom, but they are afraid to do so in public,” said Alina Nahornaja, author of “Language 404,” a book about Belarusians who have faced discrimination for speaking their native language.
Like Ukraine, Belarusians had a desire for rapprochement with Europe that accompanied their nationalist sentiment, Belarusian analyst Valery Karbalevich said.
“But the Kremlin quickly realized the danger and began the process of creeping Russification in Belarus,” he added.
This prompted pro-Russian organizations, joint educational programs and cultural projects to spring up “like mushrooms after rain – against the backdrop of harsh repressions against everything Belarusian,” Karbalevich said.
Censorship and bans affect not only contemporary Belarusian literature, but also its classics. In 2023, the prosecutor’s office declared extremist the 19th-century poems of Vincent Dunin-Martsinkyevich, who opposed the Russian Empire.
When the Kremlin began supporting Lukashenko against anti-government protests in 2020, it secured his loyalty and was given carte blanche in Belarus.
“Today, Lukashenko is paying Putin with our sovereignty,” said exiled opposition leader Svetlana Tikhanovskaya. “Belarusian national identity, culture and language are our most powerful weapons against the Russian world and Russification.”
Four cities in Belarus now host a “House of Russia” to promote its culture and influence, by offering seminars, film clubs, exhibitions and competitions.
“The goal is to spread Russian messages so that as many Belarusians as possible consider Russia their native language,” analyst Alexander Friedman said. “The Kremlin is sparing no expense and is acting on a large scale, which could be particularly effective and dangerous in a situation where Belarus is informationally isolated and there is almost no one left in the country to resist the Russian world.”
Almost the entire troupe of the Yanka Kupala Theatre, the oldest in the country, fled Belarus because of political repression. Its former director, Pavel Latushka, now an opposition figure abroad, said the new management had not been able to recruit enough new actors and had to invite Russians, “but it turned out that no one knew the Belarusian language.”
“Putin published an article denying the existence of an independent Ukraine in 2021, and even then we perfectly understood that he was pursuing similar goals in Belarus,” Latushka said.
“The main course was supposed to be Ukraine,” he added, with a Russified Belarus “for dessert.”
