Andrei Khrapavitski: Belarusian American Blog

I’ve just finished reading Timothy Snyder’s impressive volume “The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569-1999.” Although this book is not as detailed about Belarus as about the intricacies of Polish-Ukrainian and Polish-Lithuanian relations within the nation-building process, I’d still highly recommend this book to anyone interested in Belarus as part of the greater regional context. The author offered quite a realistic and unbiased narrative about the occurrence of nation-states in place of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which Belarus and Ukraine were integral parts of. Whereas Lithuania, Poland, and Ukraine succeeded in this “reconstruction” process, Belarus failed due to a bunch of reasons enumerated in this book. Here’s just a small extract on this issue:

Tradition involves what people actually do now, whereas history narrates what people supposedly once did. Where tradition stops and history begins appears to depend a great deal upon the social origins of national activists. Here again the Lithuanians enjoyed an unexpected advantage over the Belarusians. Activists of humble social origins, whose families never played any role in early modern politics, found it easier to treat the entire past as history. Lithuanian activists, often Russian-educated peasant sons, happily skipped over several centuries and spoke of rebirth. Belarusian activists, Polish-speaking Roman Catholic gentry, were bogged down in the received truth of the actual tradition they learned from their parents and grandparents.

I can’t agree more.

OK, here’s another laughable story for you. As I wrote earlier, BPF Party has recently elected a new leader, Yanukevich, who was in opposition to the old party elite.

The party did not split as it had happened in the past when an old party leader could not accept to cooperate with a new one. The old leader would just bang the door, taking his supporters with him. That was before. Now our democratic parties are becoming more democratic and tolerant, aren’t they?

Well, let’s just say that somebody’s hands are itching to put stokes into the wheels of the newly elected party leader and council. According to the Belarusian blogosphere, a webmaster, loyal to the previous leader, is refusing to pass passwords and website requisites to the new team. Thus they can’t update the party website. A source in the party revealed that they are now thinking of registering a new domain to bypass the obstacle.

Can you imagine anything like that happening in your country? For example, what if Bush web team refused to pass control to Obama’s team over whitehouse.gov? Belarus is surely a pretty odd place.

For quite a while, I’ve been intrigued by Estonia, the fatherland of Skype and Hotmail, the most wired country in Europe, the only Nordic post-soviet state, as it is often portrayed in the media. True, some of it is just hype, clever image-making, but Estonians have, indeed, shown some staggering progress in IT sphere, even conducted the first Internet elections (in spite of being not quite prepared for it, as diagnosed by many experts).

Now it seems, if nothing goes wrong, this country will be the first Baltic state to adopt euro. Way to go, Estonia, way to go!