Ivan Lepeshau, Professor
The newspaper “Nasha Slova” on March 24 of this year published a letter by S.M. Artsiukh under the heading “The Belarusian Language Must Be a State Language in the Smolensk, Bryansk, and Pskov Regions.” I read this letter and could not refrain from expressing my categorical disagreement with, to put it mildly, the frivolous initiative of the author to “demand from the government of the Russian Federation that in certain constituent entities of the federation, Belarusian be introduced as another state language, especially in the Smolensk, Bryansk, and Pskov regions.” In other parts of the author’s article, Bialystok, Vilnius, and Daugavpils are also mentioned.
First of all, one should not, as they say, provoke the geese. Because these demands of a linguistic nature could give the leadership of our state an excuse to once again accuse Belarusian “nationalists” and “oppositionists” of their alleged pretensions, not only linguistic but also territorial, toward neighboring countries — Russia, Lithuania, Latvia, Poland.
Second, it is unclear which Belarusians of the Smolensk, Bryansk, and Pskov regions the author is concerned about. True, he refers to the well-known map of the Belarusian tribe, drawn in its time by Academician Ya.F. Karskiy. On it (this is now known to very many), within the ethnic boundaries of the Belarusian nation, the greater part of the Smolensk province — all the way to Vyazma — is rightly marked, based on the study of local dialects of that time. Ya.F. Karskiy undoubtedly also took into account statistical data that were occasionally published based on the census of the tsarist Russian population. Thus, in the book “Smolensk Province. Data of 1859” (published in 1868) the following table is included: (see table).
From the table we see that in seven of the twelve districts of the Smolensk province, Belarusians significantly outnumber the Great Russians or constitute the absolute majority of the province’s population. Let us not forget, however, that 150 years have passed since then.
As encyclopedias attest, Pskov was only briefly under the authority of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and from 1510 it was already part of Muscovy; Bryansk was occupied by the troops of Ivan III in 1500, and the Bryansk region became part of the same Muscovy; Smolensk, from 1686, according to the “Eternal Peace” between Russia and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, was finally secured for the Russian state. The process of Russification of Belarusians (who were mainly peasants, rural population) was slow in those centuries, because there were no schools, newspapers, radio, or television at that time. The same can be said about the 19th and early 20th centuries, when Ya.F. Karskiy was compiling the above-mentioned map. Russian authorities and even the progressive intelligentsia of the time, albeit with great-power, chauvinistic views, made significant efforts to accelerate this process. Thus, the popular representative of the Decembrist movement P. Pestel, on the pages of “Russkaya Pravda,” resolutely advocated that Belarusians and Little Russians (Ukrainians) be “considered true Russians and not separated from the latter by any other names,” and called for ensuring that “throughout the entire expanse of the Russian state” there should be “only one language — Russian.” Pushkin merely dreamed of the time when “the Slavic streams would merge into the Russian sea,” and about Belarusians he wrote that they were “a people kindred to us since ancient times.”
But only during the period of the USSR, when under the internationalist slogan a “single Soviet people” was being created, did nearly all these dreams come true. The quantitative ratios between urban and rural populations changed sharply. Peasants, those eternal guardians of linguistic traditions, fell to less than 20 percent. The powerful influence of school and mass media increased incomparably.
This can be clearly seen in the example of our present Republic of Belarus, where its leadership proudly declares: “We are the same Russians, only with a quality mark.” As if holier than the Pope himself…
About the state of the Belarusian language and its future fate — not a word. Yet the international organization UNESCO last year classified the Belarusian language among those under threat of complete extinction. Only the blind cannot see this. I will not cite here the well-known facts about the absence of Belarusian schools in our cities, the lack of secondary and higher educational institutions with Belarusian as the language of instruction, the foreign-language operation of our radio and television, newspapers in which only the title is printed in Belarusian (for example, “Respublika,” “Hrodzienskaya Prauda”), etc. In our city, on the central square, for several months now, a slogan has been displayed in large beautiful letters: “I love you, Belarus!” — in Russian.
I would like to ask Siarhei Artsiukh: does anything Belarusian survive in his production association “Azot”? In our university, for example, I see nothing Belarusian except for a huge beautiful sign: “Hrodna State University named after Yanka Kupala.” Pay attention: “named after Yanka Kupala.” Is this not a mockery of the memory of our genius, prophet, apostle? We do have a department of Belarusian language and literature at the Faculty of Philology (only 22 full-time students and 12 correspondence students are enrolled, because there is nowhere to send the graduates due to the decreasing number of Belarusian schools; yet not so long ago — in 1991-1994 — things were completely different: 125 full-time and 50 correspondence students). I think that not only I, but others as well, feel like natives in a reservation here. And nobody in the leadership intends to save the Belarusian language, the one on its deathbed, in our country. And there is no light at the end of the tunnel.
At the end of last year, a journalist at a press conference asked President A.R. Lukashenko: “The Belarusian language is now in decline, partly due to a lack of support from the Belarusian state. I propose introducing a system of state grants and preferences for public organizations engaged in linguistic issues, for Belarusian-language media, and for Belarusian-language classes and schools.” The answer was: “The language questions have been resolved once and for all in this country. At least during the time I serve as president. We resolved this issue definitively in a referendum, and I do not intend to introduce any additions or innovations.”
All of the above was about how the state language (according to the Constitution, but not de facto) has been nearly destroyed here — in the independent, sovereign Republic of Belarus. And now — about the Smolensk region (it is not worth talking about the Pskov and Bryansk regions).
Belarusians in today’s Smolensk region are something virtual, fantastical, mythical. They are not there. You will not find them with a candle in broad daylight. Over more than three hundred years, they were long ago dissolved in the cauldron of Russification. And they have completely forgotten that their ancestors were once Belarusians (or, more precisely, Litvins). From personal experience I know: when you remind any of them that their great-great-grandfathers were Belarusians, these now “one hundred percent Great Russians” do not want to hear it, they angrily resent you, the “bulbash” (potato eater), and others condescendingly smirk: as if you are trying to claim them as countrymen…
True, some distinctly Belarusian words and expressions may have remained completely unforgotten and even still in use among speakers in the Smolensk region. Thus, the famous poet Alexander Tvardovsky (a native of the Roslavl district) in his poem “The House by the Road” used, instead of the Russian “kosovishche,” the familiar-from-childhood, from parents and grandparents, Belarusian “kossyo” (“And, leaning on the kossyo, barefoot, bareheaded, he stood and understood everything and did not finish the row”). Or in three editions of the poem “Tyorkin in the Other World” there was the Belarusian adverb “unachi” instead of the Russian “nochyu” (“He drank sometimes. Sometimes came home without his hat, at night made noise. But, aside from his grandmother, he had no reprimands”), and later, apparently someone told the poet that the Russian language has no such combination as “v nochi,” and in the last edition a replacement was made.
If by some miracle, in some district of the Smolensk region, even a few villages had survived whose inhabitants, without renouncing the “great, mighty, truthful and free Russian language,” wished for their children to be taught in Belarusian, an unsolvable problem would immediately arise: why learn Belarusian if it has no practical application in life going forward? Which Russian higher education institution could a graduate of such a Belarusian secondary school enter? There are none. And if the graduate wanted to go study in the neighboring “fraternal Belarus,” it turns out there is not a single university with Belarusian as the language of instruction there either. A vicious circle…
As an example of bilingualism in Russia, S. Artsiukh cites Tatarstan, but apparently does not know that Tatarstan has the same kind of independence that the BSSR had in the Soviet Union. When not long ago the State Duma of the RF was discussing and approving the Constitution of Tatarstan, the now well-known Zhirinovsky (even better known as the “son of a lawyer”) took the podium and resolutely declared: the constitutional article stating that only a person who speaks the Tatar language can be President of Tatarstan is completely unacceptable. And nearly the entire Duma agreed with him.
S. Artsiukh asks a whole series of questions: is Belarusian language and literature taught in the Smolensk region “at least in individual schools as a subject,” does the government of Belarus help Belarusians in Russia maintain their national life, does it support Belarusian-language writers of the Smolensk region, does the TBM (Belarusian Language Society) operate in the RF? etc. To all these and other questions, the answer can only be negative: no, none of that exists there. And it cannot exist. For the same reasons discussed above, which seem to have been sufficiently explained.
I.Ya. Lepeshau. Strange but true…: collection of scientific articles. — Hrodna: Lamark, 2010. — pp. 55-59.