When and how they came up with the Belarusians

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Russians and Belarusians admit that we are not very different from each other. But still we are different. How Belarus was formed and what is its uniqueness.

HISTORY OF WHITE RUSSIA

The ethnonym "Belarusians" was finally adopted by the Russian Empire in the 18th - 19th centuries. Together with the Great Russians and Little Russians, the Belarusians in the eyes of the autocratic ideologists constituted a triune all-Russian nationality. In Russia itself, the term began to be used under Catherine II: after the third partition of Poland in 1796, the empress ordered the establishment of the Belarusian province on the newly acquired lands.

Historians have no consensus on the origin of the toronims Belarus, Belaya Rus. Some believed that White Russia was called the land independent from the Mongol-Tatars (white is the color of freedom), others raised the name to the white color of the clothes and hair of local residents. Still others opposed the white Christian Russia to the black pagan one. The most popular was the version about Black, Chervonnaya and White Russia, where the color was compared with a certain side of the world: black with the north, white with the west and red with the south.

The territory of White Russia stretched far beyond the borders of present-day Belarus. Since the XIII century, foreigners-Latins have called the White Russia (Ruthenia Alba) North-Eastern Russia. Western European medieval geographers almost never visited it and had a vague idea of its borders. The term was also used in relation to the Western Russian principalities, for example, Polotsk. In the 16th - 17th centuries, the term Belaya Rus was assigned to the Russian-speaking lands in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and the northeastern lands, on the contrary, began to be opposed to White Rus.

The annexation of Ukraine-Little Russia to Russia in 1654 (do not forget that along with the Little Russian lands, part of the Belarusians were also annexed to Moscow) provided state ideologists with an excellent opportunity to put forward the concept of brotherhood of three peoples - Great Russian, Little Russian and Belarusian.

ETHNOGRAPHY AND DRANIKI

However, despite the official ideology, the Belarusians had no place in science for a long time. The study of their rituals and folk customs was just beginning, and the Belarusian literary language was making its first steps. Stronger neighboring peoples, experiencing a period of national revival, primarily Poles and Russians, claimed White Russia as the ancestral home. The main argument was that scientists did not perceive the Belarusian language as an independent language, calling it a dialect of either Russian or Polish.

It was only in the XX century that it was possible to distinguish that the ethnogenesis of Belarusians took place on the territory of the Upper Dnieper, Middle Podvina and Upper Poneman, that is, on the territory of modern Belarus. Gradually, ethnographers identified the distinctive sides of the Belarusian ethnos and, in particular, the Belarusian cuisine. Potatoes took root in the Belarusian lands back in the 18th century (unlike the rest of Russia, which knew the potato reforms and riots of the 1840s) and by the end of the 19th century, Belarusian cuisine was replete with an assortment of potato dishes. Draniki, for example.

BELARUSIANS IN SCIENCE

Interest in the history of Belarusians, the emergence of the first scientifically substantiated concepts of the origin of an ethnic group is a matter of the beginning of the 20th century. One of the first to tackle it was Vladimir Ivanovich Picheta, a student of the famous Russian historian Vasily Osipovich Klyuchevsky. Based on the settlement of the Slavs according to the Tale of Bygone Years, he suggested that the ancestors of the Belarusians were the Krivichi, as well as the neighboring tribes of Radimichi and Dregovichi. As a result of their consolidation, the Belarusian people arose. The time of occurrence was determined by the separation of the Belarusian language from the Old Russian, in the XIV century.

The weak side of the hypothesis was that the chronicle tribes from the middle of the XII century disappear from the pages of the chronicles and it is difficult to explain the two-century silence of the sources. But the beginning of the Belarusian nation was laid, and not least because of the beginning of the systematic study of the Belarusian language. In 1918, Bronislav Tarashkevich, a teacher at Petrograd University, prepared his first grammar, for the first time normalizing spelling. This is how the so-called tarashkevitsa arose - a linguistic norm, later adopted in the Belarusian emigration.

Tarashkevica was contrasted with the grammar of the Belarusian language in 1933, created as a result of the language reforms of the 1930s. It contained a lot of Russian, but it was entrenched and used in Belarus until 2005, when it was partially unified with the tarashkevitsa.

As a remarkable fact, it is worth noting that in the 1920s on the official flag of the BSSR the phrase "Workers of all countries unite!" was written in as many as four languages: Russian, Polish, Yiddish and Tarashkevitz. Tarashkevitsa should not be confused with tarasyanka. The latter is a mixture of Russian and Belarusian languages, found everywhere in Belarus and now, more often in cities.

BELARUSIANS FROM ANCIENT RUSSIAN PEOPLE

After the Great Patriotic War, the national question in the USSR was greatly aggravated and on this basis, in order to prevent interethnic conflicts in the ideology of the Union, a new supranational concept - "the Soviet people" was widely used. Not long before that, in the 40s, the researchers of Ancient Russia substantiated the theory of the “Old Russian nationality” - the single cradle of the Belarusian, Ukrainian and Russian peoples.

There were few similarities between these two concepts, but their active use by the USSR during this period is striking. Such features of the Old Russian nationality as "common territory, economy, law, military organization and, especially, a common struggle against external enemies with the awareness of their unity" can be safely attributed to Soviet society in the late 1940s and 1960s. Of course, ideology did not subordinate history, but the structures by which historians and politicians-ideologists thought were very similar.

The origin of the Belarusians from the Old Russian nationality removed the weaknesses of the "tribal" concept of ethnogenesis and emphasized the gradual isolation of the three peoples in the XII-XIV centuries. However, some scholars extend the period of formation of the nationality until the end of the 16th century.

This theory is accepted now: in 2011, at the celebration of the 1150th anniversary of the Old Russian state, its position was confirmed by the historians of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. During this time, archeological data were added to it, which showed the active connections of the ancestors of the Belarusians with the Balts and Finno-Ugric peoples (from here were born versions of the Baltic and Finno-Ugric origin of the Belarusians), as well as a DNA study carried out in Belarus in 2005-2010, which proved the proximity of three East Slavic peoples and great genetic differences between the Slavs and Balts in the male line.

HOW BELARUSIANS BECAME BELARUSIANS

In the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which included almost the entire territory of modern Belarus in the XIII-XVI centuries, the Old Belarusian language (that is, Western Russian) was the first state language - all office work was carried out in it, literary works and laws were written down. Developing in a separate state, it experienced a strong influence of Polish and Church Slavonic, but it remained a bookish language.

In contrast, colloquial Belarusian, experiencing the same influences, developed mainly in rural areas and has survived to the present day. The territory of the formation of the Belarusians did not suffer so much from the Mongol-Tatars. The population constantly had to fight for their faith - Orthodoxy and against foreign culture.

At the same time, much of Western European culture took root in Belarus faster and easier than in Russia. For example, book printing started by Francysk Skorina almost 50 years earlier than in Muscovy.

Finally, another important factor in the formation of the Belarusian nationality was the climate, softer and more fertile than in Central Russia. That is why potatoes took root in Belarus 75 - 90 years earlier. The Belarusian national idea was formed later than among other peoples and sought to resolve issues without conflicts. And this is her strength.