Lisaveta Kasmach precedes her book with an epigraph in Belarusian given in English transliteration. The phrase belongs to Barys Kit, a Belarusian-identifying American-German physicist and rocket scientist. It reads (as translated in the footnote): “The nation exists only if it has its own heroes.” This is a charged beginning for an academic book that aims to present a case study of Belarusian nation-building in the crucial period of 1914–18 that encompasses WWI, seen as “a war of European decolonization,” and the Russian revolution. Treating the concept of a nation, after Ernst Renan, as a large-scale solidarity, methodologically the author intends to base the book on constructivist approaches. The study builds off Belarusian and Lithuanian archival sources, some of which are introduced for the first time, and broad knowledge of secondary literature.
Kasmach presents a detailed overview of new borderlines and territorial divisions in the region as the Germans were advancing to the east, and (western) Belarusian lands became incorporated into Ober Ost, while eastern ones remained the territory of heavy fighting, advancements, and retreats. She begins with an overview of the unraveling of WWI on Belarusian territories (Ch. 1) and then moves to discussing Belarusian, Lithuanian, and Polish identities and attitudes in the lands of Ober Ost (Ch. 2) and national policies there (Ch. 3); she treats in detail Belarusian political organizing in the non-occupied territories in 1917 (Ch. 4); spends Ch. 5 discussing the First All-Belarusian Congress (December of 1917) and, eventually, juxtaposes the making of Belarusian Democratic (or People’s) Republic vs. Soviet Belarus (Ch. 6). It was in that context of moving frontlines and changing political orientations and alliances that Belarusian national state-building activism was developing. It culminated with the proclamation, in March of 1918, under German occupation, of the Belarusian People’s Republic (BPR, or the Belarusian Democratic Republic [BDR], as Kasmach prefers to name it). This entity has been a controversial topic in Belarusian historiography and national memory. Not recognized at the time internationally and having “insufficient state authority” (208), the episode remained a virtual republic, in the words of the Swedish historian of Belarusian nationalism Per Anders Rudling. A political “intent” of a group of national activists rather than a practical state project, it was succeeded by the Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic announced in January 1919 by the Bolsheviks. Kasmach sees these two competing state projects as the national and the Soviet, although it was under the second one that Belarusian national statehood was realized in the twentieth century and eventually led to independence. However, a popular argument has it that without the BPR Bolsheviks would not have proceeded with establishing a Soviet republic on the Belarusian lands. Kasmach, for her part, seeking to establish a meaningful connection between then and now, argues on page 1 of her study that the protests against the rigged 2020 presidential elections brought Belarusians together as a nation around national symbols of that early era, which is not completely the case. While protesters did use the “independent” symbolism of red and white, the protests were not about national issues, according to the analysis presented in “Critical Discussion Forum: The Sociology of Protest in Belarus—Social Dynamics, Ideological Shifts, and Demand for Change” that was published in Slavic Review 80, no. 1 (Spring 2021); as it became clear, the nation turned out divided rather than united.
It is an engaged concern with the duality at the basis of Belarusian nationhood—affected by Polish messianism or the Russian imperial project, moving out of one great power orbit and into another, “national” vs. Soviet—that permeates the study. Kasmach concludes this book-long discussion by stating that BDR defended Belarusian interests: these are believed to be the creation of a nation-state. However, under the tumultuous conditions of 1918, most of those residing in the Belarusian ethnic lands did not know these were their interests, never identified with Belarusian peasant culture or were not ethnic Belarusians. Are we talking of people’s “false consciousness” here? Kasmach recognizes that ordinary people were more concerned with matters of everyday survival than of consciously identifying as Belarusians (253), while the Bolsheviks who provided financial assistance for publishing activities, access to refugee relief funds, and other tangible benefits responded to practical rather than imagined concerns of the population. The book, attentive to details and historical circumstances and seeking to be fair to both projects, still puts the story of Belarusian nationhood within a certain teleology: it was supposed to unravel, and it did.
