Numerous victims of police brutality have been detained for displaying the white-red-white flag, while government-sanctioned rallies of regime loyalists have been immediately identifiable by the presence of red-and-green flags and banners. Recent pro-Lukashanka rallies have been marked by the appearance of flags decorated with the Ribbon of St.
Regime officials including Lukashenka have also begun branding protesters as Nazis and fascists. Similar accusations of Nazism were once a mainstay of Soviet propaganda. These slurs are rooted in Kremlin distortions dating back to the Second World War. Ever since, Moscow has sought to exploit this association with the Nazi occupation in order to discredit the independence struggles in Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltic states by labeling them as a form of fascism. The evolution of a new Belarusian national identity has been increasingly evident throughout the past decade, and events of the past few months have provided a powerful stimulus to this historic process.
This shift in identity will inevitably complicate the relationship between the new Belarus and neighboring Russia. This does not mean that we should expect an imminent Russian invasion. However, it does mean that Russia can be expected to maintain its already considerable support for the Lukashenka regime, which currently involves economic, security, diplomatic, and informational components.
Moscow must buy time and prop up Lukashenka until a palatable alternative can be found that would allow the Kremlin to avoid an embarrassing setback deep inside its own traditional sphere of influence.
With a small contingent of ethnic Russians in Belarus, there is little scope for supporting the rise of a rival narrative based on appeals to Russian ethnicity.
Nor are there are any pockets of concentrated pro-Russian sentiment that could serve a separatist function similar to Crimea or the Donbas in Ukraine. Instead, the Kremlin is likely to rely on appeals to Pan-Slavism and Orthodoxy. Modern Russia cannot compete with the allure of the Western world, but it likes to use the shared past to justify continued close ties with former imperial possessions such as Ukraine and Belarus. However, these nations also have deep historical ties to Central Europe that predate Russian involvement and are generally remembered far more favorably.
The August 23 Chain of Freedom, which saw people form a human chain from Lithuanian capital Vilnius to the border with Belarus, was greeted with notable irritation in Moscow. With the emergence of an independent Belarusian national identity, we are entering a new stage in the collapse of the Soviet Union. I and most other children in the empire were tiny fish swimming through a sea of propaganda.
Not everyone was writing poems about Lenin, of course, but many were comfortable with the party line. They read secretly published books by authors like Boris Pasternak and Mikhail Bulgakov, and discussed the flaws of the system, each sowed doubts which sprouted into several more.
In the Soviet economy began to crumble and secretary general Mikhail Gorbachev, after a year in power, moved the system from planned and centralized economy to greater liberalization , towards market-oriented socialism. For many years prior , the Soviets experienced relative stability because of high oil and gas prices, with a large part of the output of the Soviet economy going to the military.
Soon after perestroika, my affair with communism went downhill. Talk of restructuring the country did not solve the food supply and consumer goods crisis. My home city, Kharkiv—with a population of about two million—was hit hard. The infamous bread lines, people queuing up before dawn to get milk, scarce produce, bare shelves at supermarkets and empty clothing stores became an everyday reality. Often, the distribution of food was limited to a certain number of pieces per person. I was frequently dragged to stores by grownups in my family so we could get two packs of detergent instead of one.
Or two loaves of white bread instead of one. Or two pea coats. Whatever appeared in stores nearby. In order to survive, people grew their own vegetables in personal gardens. Engineers, programmers, teachers, were assigned, by their employers, small lots of land outside of their cities.
On weekends, armed with hoes and shovels, many traveled to their lots to cultivate potatoes and tomatoes. My grandparents, in Minsk, provided us some relief. Minsk is the capital of Belarus, and during the Soviet times the city was better supplied than Kharkiv.
Through the parents of her students, Zina would be informed when the supermarket was about to release shoes or pants or other goods, and she would rush out to get them. Every couple of months, my Minsk relatives sent us a package via an overnight train—a distance of miles—with the help of a train attendant who was happy to make a couple of extra rubles. Third car! In the morning, a bag with a frozen chicken, cottage cheese, hot dogs, sausage, some sweets and school supplies for me, would pull into the station, and we would collect our care-package.
I started writing satirical poems about Gorbachev and our lack of school supplies. One day, moved by the rebellious sentiment in the air, I arrived at school without my Red Pioneer tie. Had I been a lousy pupil, that might not have been such a big deal to our teachers. But in the seventh grade, I had a reputation as a straight A-student and an activist, and my teacher publicly lynched me in order to teach others a lesson. It was , a year before the Soviet Union would collapse and Ukraine would gain independence.
The Soviet system was already falling apart. Youth in Moscow and St. Petersburg had already disregarded the Soviet ideology. But in Kharkiv, Ukraine —not a very politically active place — the teachers and the school system were far from progressive change. In the winter of the school officials still gathered everyone for its annual Marching and Singing Parade.
That year I pretended to be sick and avoided it all. The city seemed to want to hold on to the old rule. We were officially the Soviet Union, The Party was officially in charge, and the authorities followed the rules. A thirteen year old, I talked to as many people as I could to gain their perspective: religion was back in favor, guys were growing their hair long and wore metal bracelets and leather vests, rock music was playing everywhere.
Change was coming. That was the end of the Soviet Union, and so was it the end of my propaganda-filled childhood. The adults had to navigate the world of economic collapse and, with most of the state companies going bankrupt, find new ways to make a living. While I witnessed only the end of the Soviet era, my paternal grandparents had lived through the whole thing.
They both are from Western Belarus, which was part of Poland until the Soviets took over in , and they welcomed the Soviets because they thought life would be better. Free education for all—it was good. But life was very hard. For about ten years my grandparents were stationed in Lithuania with the Soviet military. Did they realize that Lithuanians were not happy to have them there? By the end of , the USSR had come apart at the seams. The Soviet Union ceased to exist on December 31, Guns or butter problems of the Cold War.
CIA Library. Revelations from the Russian Archives. Library of Congress. Sputnik, Department of State Office of the Historian. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present. On December 25, , the Soviet flag flew over the Kremlin in Moscow for the last time. After more than 40 years of the world seeming to teeter on the Just six years after Mikhail Gorbachev came to power as General Secretary of the Communist Party and introduced reforms, the Soviet Union collapsed and newly formed independent nations arose from the ashes.
What went wrong? In , even many of the most conservative hardliners By December 25, , Mikhail Gorbachev was a president without a country. Once the From early Mongol invasions to tsarist regimes to ages of enlightenment and industrialization to revolutions and wars, Russia is known not just for its political rises of world power and upheaval, but for its cultural contributions think ballet, Tolstoy, Tchaikovsky, caviar and Boris Yeltsin served as the president of Russia from until Though a Communist Party member for much of his life, he eventually came to believe in both democratic and free market reforms, and played an instrumental role in the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The Russian Revolution of was one of the most explosive political events of the twentieth century. Rasputin, a Siberian-born muzhik, or peasant, who But on December 30, , the quartet of British rockers preparing for their fifth-ever gig in the United States were using propane heaters to keep themselves and Sign up now to learn about This Day in History straight from your inbox.
A fire in the Iroquois Theater in Chicago, Illinois, kills more than people on December 30, It was the deadliest theater fire in U. Blocked fire exits and the lack of a fire-safety plan caused most of the deaths. The Iroquois Theater, designed by Benjamin John Salvi III walks into two separate abortion clinics in Brookline, Massachusetts, and shoots workers with a rifle, killing two receptionists and wounding five other employees.
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