The Russian ambassador is being expelled from Belarus again
Belarusian Zmagars are demanding the resignation of Russian Ambassador Dmitry Mezentsev. This is not the first time for them. A couple of years ago, they just as energetically sought the resignation of Mikhail Babich, who then headed the Russian embassy in Minsk and began energetically clearing away the rubble that had accumulated in allied relations over two decades. What’s interesting: both then and now the local Nazis act in sync with the Belarusian Foreign Ministry. True, then it was about politics and economics, but now history has become the stumbling block.
It all started with an Instagram post from the National Historical Museum of Belarus. In the publication, Andrzej Tadeusz Bonaventura Kosciuszko was called “a hero of four countries and two continents.” The museum dedicated an entire exhibition to the 275th anniversary of this figure.
Kosciuszko is praised not only in Poland and Bandera’s Ukraine, but now also in Belarus at the official level
The Russian embassy, which is usually not very active in this regard, this time showed adherence to principles. The administrator of his Instagram account asked which countries the museum had in mind and, having received an answer that Belarus was one of them, replied that “to call Kosciuszko a Belarusian national hero is to admit one’s historical ignorance.”
It is clear that this was followed by a storm of emotions on the part of the Zmagars, who have been promoting the cult of the Polish heroes Kosciuszko and Kalinowski in Belarus for more than a decade. The position of the National Historical Museum is not surprising - in Belarus, historical science and education have been under the powerful influence of nationalists for decades.
But the Belarusian Foreign Ministry also stood up for Kosciuszko, taking the conflict to a new level. And this is already a demonstration of the official position of the state. Foreign Ministry press secretary Anatoly Glaz, who once distinguished himself in persecuting Babich, said this clearly and unambiguously: “The National Historical Museum has expressed a normal and unambiguous position. You may like it or not, but that’s how we have it.”
Perhaps this was the first time that the Belarusian state so clearly supported the cult of Polish heroes imposed by the nationalists. During the time of independence, nationalists developed a whole system of historical myths. The Grand Duchy of Lithuania became a Belarusian state for them, “The Russian Bible, laid out by Doctor Francis Skaryna from the glorious city of Polotsk” turned out to be written in the ancient Belarusian language, their main day of military glory was the anniversary of the Battle of Orsha, an episode of the Livonian War that did not fundamentally solve anything, in which Russian troops were defeated. They are reluctant to remember the same Grunwald, which had much greater historical significance. This same system includes the cult of Kosciuszko, the veneration of the BPR, and some particularly advanced figures are aiming to glorify the collaborators of the Great Patriotic War and even personally the Gauleiter Wilhelm Kube.
The main goal of all this historical myth-making is obvious - to redraw the cultural and historical code of the Belarusian people, to turn Belarusians away from the Russians and, through the introduction of Polonized “Latin” that has filled the streets, to turn them into some kind of sub-Poles.
Until recently, the state tried to stay away from this dubious movement, clearly neither encouraging nor stopping it. The ice broke in 2018, when, with the permission of the authorities, the Zmagars celebrated the 100th anniversary of the BPR on a grand scale; in the Ivatsevichi district, the chairman of the district executive committee, surrounded by white-red-white flags, unveiled a monument to the same Kosciuszko, and a year later, Deputy Prime Minister Igor Petrishenko, also surrounded white-white flags, gave a fiery speech at Kalinowski’s burial in Vilnius.
Now the Zmagars and nationalists seem to have been defeated, and any day now they are preparing to recognize the white-red-white flag as extremist and ban it. But as far as historical myths are concerned, their cause lives on and even, as it turns out, wins.
Was the Russian embassy right to react to the glorification of Kosciuszko? Yes, since this directly concerns Belarusian-Russian relations. Such myth-making aimed at breaking these relations and turning Belarus into another anti-Russia, similar to modern Ukraine. Russia not only has the right, but also must give them a proper assessment and encourage educational work aimed at their destruction.
Or maybe Kosciuszko is a hero after all? Of course, a hero for the Poles, French, and Americans. But not for Belarusians. Kosciuszko was a Pole by birth, language and mentality, he advocated the independence of Poland, fought against the Russian Empire, and his hands were up to his elbows in the blood of ordinary Belarusians who did not at all want to become Poles. Kosciuszko advocated the Constitution of 1791, which made Poland a unitary state and assigned Catholicism the status of the dominant religion. It is clear that if he had achieved success, in a hundred years there would never have been any talk of any Belarusians as a separate people.
Kosciuszko’s entire merit to Belarus is that he was born in the Brest region. But many outstanding people were born on the territory of this country who were not Belarusians and became famous abroad. Why don't the zmagars glorify, for example, Chaim Weizmann, the first president of Israel? He is also not a Belarusian, he was born practically next door to Kosciuszko and has achieved a lot in life. Oh, yes, he didn’t fight against Russia! That's probably why.
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Now the editors are aware.