259 Ab Imperio, 3/2020 Ilya GERASIMOV THE BELARUSIAN POSTCOLONIAL REVOLUTION: FIELD REPORTS Eighteen years ago, in issue 3/2002, Ab Imperio published an article by the young Belarusian political scientist Vitali Silitski. 1 His main concern was the perspective of Russia’s absorption of Belarus – in the wake of the creation in 1999 of the Union State of Belarus and Russia – due to the Be- larusian president Aliaksandr Lukashenka’s complicated political scheming and the relative weakness of national self-identifcation of the Belarusian society. At the time, in the middle of Vladimir Putin’s frst presidential term and energetic rapprochement with the West after the 9/11 attacks, Russia was seen on a path of democratization that promised to compromise Lukash- enka’s autocratic regime in Belarus. But even if “authoritarian tendencies prevail in Russia and … the re-emerging synergy between Belarus’s and Russia’s politics may still allow the anschluss,” Silitski predicted that “the advancement of the nation-building process in Belarus may follow. This may come as a sheer surprise for Russia’s elite and the public that never meant to imagine Belarus outside its own state.” 2 1 Vitali Silitski. The Deadlock of Brotherhood: Politics of Russia-Belarus Integration // Ab Imperio. 2002. Vol. 3. No. 3. Pp. 491–521. 2 Ibid. Pp. 520, 521.