258 “Some of the state’s recent initiatives have sought to reappropriate ethno-cultural and pre-Soviet history and tradition, shaping a new politics of identity.” Belarus’s Winding Path to a Post-Soviet Identity NELLY BEKUS T his year marks a quarter-century in power for the president of Belarus, Alexander Lu- kashenko. He came to power at a crucial moment, when Belarus was facing difficult choices about the direction of its future development after the collapse of the Soviet system. His rule quickly turned out to be autocratic, and the country ac- quired the image of the last dictatorship in Eu- rope, caught in the grip of a retrograde Soviet-style ideology. However, a closer look reveals a complex process of building a new national identity both in tension and in sympathy with the Soviet legacy. On its way to becoming a nation-state, Belarus faced challenges similar to those experienced by other post-Soviet countries, but in many respects it became an exception to the dominant scripts for both exiting socialism and constituting a new nationhood. Postsocialist transformation typical- ly entailed political liberalization and the transi- tion to a market economy. It also involved creat- ing new social fabrics to form nation-states out of the former Soviet people. These conversions offered favorable political settings for the rise of ethno-linguistic nationalism. They also tended to enhance the power of the state, now understood as a genuine “national” actor, to reshape public life along nationalist lines. In their search for the means to build a new col- lective identity, post-Soviet nations often launched programs that can be described as aiming at the postcolonial “othering” of the Soviet and socialist past. In political science, the phenomenon of other- ing is traditionally analyzed as a way in which na- tions define themselves in contrast to others. Post- communist elites sought to define their nations’ independent status in contrast to the Soviet past. Post-Soviet othering is now a common way for a nation to consolidate its collective identity by distancing itself from the Soviet legacy. Becom- ing a nation, in this context, means becoming anti-Soviet. The forced liquidation of what are perceived as vestiges of the Soviet system is con- sidered an essential part of nation-state building. Various programs of decommunization and crimi- nalization of the Soviet past have been central to the new politics in the Baltic states, Georgia, and, most recently, Ukraine. In its initial phase of independence, Belarus fol- lowed a similar path. But since then, it has headed in a very different direction. VICTIMHOOD AND NATIONALISM The country’s first anticommunist opposition movement, started in 1988, was the Belarusian People’s Front (BPF). Although it remained a mi- nority in the Supreme Soviet of Belarus after the first competitive elections were held in 1990, the BPF, led by Zianon Pazniak, gained the support of the Democratic Bloc, a group of opposition politi- cians who emerged from various nongovernmen- tal organizations. The BPF became the leading po- litical force in defining a nationalizing strategy. To undertake the strategic othering of the So- viet past, the BPF launched several projects in- tended to reimagine the nation. The party empha- sized a new language policy and a new version of Belarusian historical memory. The former aimed to recast the national linguistic design in accor- dance with the “one-nation, one language” mod- el, which entailed erasing Russian from public use. The latter involved rewriting national history from a non-Soviet perspective in order to prove that Belarus belonged culturally and politically to Europe, rather than to Russian or Soviet civiliza- tion. NELLY BEKUS is an associate lecturer in history at the Uni- versity of Exeter.