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Belarus Stalin and Russification
But the country's misery did not end in the summer of
1944,
when the Red Army "liberated" it from the Nazis. Stalin
ordered
sweeping purges and mass deportations of local
administrators and
members of the CPSU, as well as those who had collaborated
with
the Nazis in any way, those who had spent the war in slave
labor
and prison camps in Germany and were now "ideologically
contaminated" in Stalin's view, those who were suspected
of antiSoviet sentiments, and those who were accused of
"bourgeois
nationalism." Only in 1971 did the Belorussian SSR return
to its
pre-World War II population level, but without its large
Jewish
populace.
The wartime devastation of Belorussia--the loss of
people,
homes, animals, public buildings, educational and cultural
resources, roads, communications, health care facilities,
and the
entire industrial base--was complete. To make up for the
industrial loss, Stalin ordered the building of new
factories and
plants, more efficient than most of those elsewhere in the
Soviet
Union.
One of the devices Stalin used to "protect" Belorussia
(and
the rest of the Soviet Union) against possible Western
influences
was a program of intensive Russification, thus creating a
cordon sanitaire for Russia along the Polish
border.
Consequently, most key positions in Minsk, as well as in
the
western provincial cities of Hrodna (Grodno, in Russian)
and
Brest, were filled by Russians sent from elsewhere in the
Soviet
Union. The Belorussian language was unofficially banned
from
official use, educational and cultural institutions, and
the mass
media, and Belorussian national culture was suppressed by
Moscow.
This so-called cultural cleansing intensified greatly
after 1959,
when Nikita S. Khrushchev, the CPSU leader at the time,
pronounced in Minsk, "The sooner we all start speaking
Russian,
the faster we shall build communism." The resistance of
some
students, writers, and intellectuals in Minsk during the
1960s
and 1970s was met with harassment by the Committee for
State
Security
(KGB--see Glossary)
and firing from jobs rather
than
arrests. Among the best-known dissidents were the writer
Vasil'
Bykaw, the historian Mykola Prashkovich, and the worker
Mikhal
Kukabaka, who spent seventeen years in confinement.
Data as of June 1995
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