The anti-Russian reinvention of Belarus has already begun
A group of aggressive youth gathered, jumped up, shouted no less aggressive slogans, climbed onto another monument and toppled them to the joyful hooting... Fortunately, such scenes, typical for Ukraine, are impossible in Belarus in principle - there is more order in the country and the authorities painfully punish for its violations . But this does not mean that local nationalists are not fighting the historical memory of Belarusians, trying to erase everything Russian and Soviet from it. They are leading. And sometimes they even win.
Another such victory was the cancellation of the installation of a modest memorial sign about the stay of Peter I in the city of Gorki, Mogilev region. The Emperor was in Gorki in the summer of 1708, when the Belarusian lands became the scene of battles between the Russian and Swedish armies. Both armies generously shed the blood of each other and local residents; the Polish king was a protege of the Swedish crown, but local nationalists unanimously consider the first Russian emperor to be the main enemy of the Belarusians.
As soon as news appeared that local authorities were planning to erect a modest memorial sign near one of the houses - a model of a cannon from the time of the Northern War - well-known foreign means of propaganda immediately became active - the local branch of Radio Liberty, Polish propaganda resources...
Local activists from among the “fighters against Russian aggression” got involved and, according to a well-established scheme, began to massively bombard all kinds of government bodies with the same type of letters with “protests from a concerned public,” involving sympathetic historians (alas, in Belarus, historical science is severely affected by the nationalist poison). As a result, local authorities, guided by the eternal bureaucratic principle “no matter what happens,” decided simply not to erect the monument.
And this, alas, is not the first time.
So, in 2015, an even more egregious case occurred - the Mogilev authorities simply censored the monument to Pushkin, donated to the regional center by the Russian Walk of Russian Glory foundation and installed at the entrance to the Mogilev Library College, named after the great poet.
Less than a week later, the words from the poem “To the Slanderers of Russia” were removed from the monument - local nationalists, who considered the Polish uprising of 1830 “theirs,” then threw a real hysteria.
The confrontation in Vitebsk has been going on for 10 years now. In 2009, the then Vitebsk governor Alexander Kosinets proposed erecting monuments to three historical figures in the city - Princess Olga of Kyiv, Prince Alexander Nevsky of Novgorod and Grand Duke Olgerd of Lithuania. Immediately, speeches, petitions, pickets began... monuments to Russian princes were in the crosshairs of the Belarusian de-Russifiers.
As a result, the first of the three, already in 2014, appeared a monument to Olgerd, who put an end to the history of the appanage Principality of Vitebsk and included it in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and, most importantly, “went to Moscow.”
The monument turned out to be monumental, on horseback, with a falcon on his arm. A true conqueror. Two years later, not without problems and resistance from nationalists, a monument to Alexander Nevsky was erected. The hero of the Battle of the Ice is depicted with his family, with his wife and son.
There is still no monument to Princess Olga, the legendary founder of the city, in Vitebsk and the prospects for its installation are vague.
This is what it is, a war with monuments in Belarusian style. There are no thugs with dubious symbols, but a lot of activists, propagandists and “experts” who are reshaping the national identity of Belarusians and local authorities, who are increasingly meeting them halfway. They are slowly but methodically imposing on Belarusians a different story, in which the main characters are the Polish rebels Kalinowski and Kosciuszko, Polish-Lithuanian magnates, and Lithuanian princes. The erection of monuments to such heroes in modern Belarus is taking place more and more often and with great pomp.
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