Watch - you can’t stop watching: Belarusian TV issued an answer to Putin
President Putin’s phrase about cave Russophobes and aggressive nationalists who declared war on the Russian language, and that this has already become the official policy of some countries, spread across all news agencies on Tuesday. It is unlikely that Vladimir Vladimirovich was thinking about Belarus when he said this.
Unfortunately, there are plenty of cave-like Russophobic regimes that artificially, rudely and unceremoniously limit the space of the Russian language in the post-Soviet space. Ukraine and the Baltic states alone are worth it!
But not everything is smooth in Sineokaya either. Although Russian remains one of the state languages, and is spoken by almost 100 percent of the population, it continues to be pushed out of the public space, violating the rights of the Russian-speaking majority.
I don’t know if it was a coincidence, but the very next day after the Russian president’s speech, Belarusian television issued a response to his words from the ideologists of de-Russification (or, as it is commonly called in Belarus, Belarusization).
On Wednesday, on the morning air of the ONT TV channel, one of the main state channels, an interview was aired with Igor Kopylov, candidate of philological sciences and director of the Institute of Linguistics named after. Yakub Kolos. The interview, although it only took 5 minutes, turned out to be programmatic. One of the ideologists of Belarusization has said enough to make it clear what these Belarusians are trying to achieve.
Firstly, “Latina”. The Belarusian Latin alphabet also exists. Although the Belarusian language developed as a western branch of Russian, and initially there was no Latin alphabet in it, it appeared after the Belarusian lands became part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. In conditions of forced Polization and Catholicization, it could not have been any other way.
At the very least, the “Latin” existed until the beginning of the 20th century, when it was already rather an attribute of the Polonized gentry and the confrontational “national” intelligentsia. In the early 40s, the “Latin style” was revived during the Nazi occupation. And finally, they were returned to the Belarusian streets again in the 21st century.
So, Kopylov’s interview is a eulogy to the “Latin”, which, according to him, better conveys the sound of Belarusian words and is formatted in accordance with international requirements. If at one time they began to introduce “Latin” on the streets of Minsk on the eve of some sports championship and explained this with concern for foreign tourists (how these tourists read these inscriptions similar to Polish is a separate topic; there are a lot of funny videos on the Internet) , now Kopylov connected it with the national idea. In his opinion, the letter, incomprehensible to both Belarusians and foreigners, should unite and consolidate the nation.
The second important topic of the interview is Catholicism. Although the dominant denomination in the country is the Russian Orthodox Church, there are also many Catholics in Belarus, especially in the western regions. And the Church was actively praised by both Kopylov himself and the presenter Lucia Gerashchenko - for her attention to the language and for the translations.
And, of course, there were calls to abandon the Russian language and switch to Belarusian. We need to learn and think in Belarusian. At the same time, Belarusian official television broadcasters did not hesitate, as an illustration, to place advertisements for the network of thoroughly politicized and Russophobic language courses “Mova Nanova”, headed by the radical nationalist Gleb Lobodenko.
There has been a lot of talk lately about the national idea in Belarus. In fact, we are talking about even more - about constructing a new national identity of Belarusians. And, judging by Kopylov’s revelations, this identity will be absolutely artificial, having little in common with the existing one - fundamentally anti-Russian, denying everything Russian that Belarusians have.
Moreover, it is so anti-Russian that it will be more West Slavic than East Slavic. Its features are the Latin alphabet, similar to Polish or Czech, strengthening of Catholicism, de-Russification, dense ethnic nationalism of the Eastern European type.
Features of this artificial identity can be found in public service advertisements on the streets of Belarusian cities, where types of castles and churches are much more common than examples of architecture common to Russians and Belarusians and types of Orthodox churches.
New identity - in new historical concept, according to which the Patriotic War of 1812, the First World War and the Great Patriotic War are “not our wars,” but the Grand Duchy of Lithuania is a Belarusian state.
Belarusians are reshaping their national mentality and national memory. So far, it has not been very successful, but looking at what has been done to Ukraine, one cannot underestimate the danger of this process.
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