Journal of Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society

3:1 (2017)

Julie Fedor, Samuel Greene, Andriy Portnov, Andre Härtel, Andreas Umland, Andrey Makarychev, Felix Ackermann, Michael Galbas, Uilleam Blacker, Olesya Khromeychuk, Marcin Kaczmarski, Natasha Kuhrt, Mark Berman, Olga Sasunkevich

• Publisher: Ibidem Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9783838270661
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This special issue provides a forum for discussion of what Belarusian Studies are today and which new approaches and questions are needed to revitalize the field in the regional and international academic arena. The major aim of the issue is to go beyond the narratives of dictatorship and authoritarianism as well as that of a never-ending story of failed Belarusian nationalism—interpretive schemes that are frequently used for understanding Belarus in scholarly literature in Western Europe and Northern America. Bringing together ongoing research based on original empirical material from Belarusian history, politics, and society, this issue combines a discussion of the concept of autonomy/agency with its applicability to trace how individual and collective actors who define themselves as Belarusian—or otherwise—have manifested their agendas in various practices in spite of and in reaction to state pressure. This issue offers new approaches for interpreting Belarusian society as a dynamically changing set of agencies. In doing so, it attempts to overcome a tradition of locating present Belarusian political and social dilemmas in its socialist past.

Reviews

Paulina Pospieszna, Democracy Assistance from the Third Wave: Polish Engagement in Belarus and Ukraine. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014. 245 pp.

Democracy assistance is an important aspect of the democratization process in the region of Central and Eastern Europe and post-Soviet countries. The central research question of this book concerns how young democracies participate in delivering democracy assistance to other countries. The author goes about answering this by way of a comparative study of Poland’s democracy assistance to two neighboring countries—Belarus and Ukraine. Pospieszna extensively describes these two cases with an original focus on their broad political context and the projects realized there with Polish support. While the book tends at times to be insufficiently critical in its approach to Polish assistance policy, overall it provides an original overview on the democracy assistance to neighboring Eastern Partnership states by a country which had itself only recently undergone the transition period with all its challenges.

One important aim pursued in the book is testing the idea that Polish democracy assistance might be more efficient than its Western counterparts, on the grounds that socio-cultural, geographical, and other similarities between transmitters and adopters are likely to facilitate greater efficiency in democracy assistance. In this context Pospieszna examines the case of Poland as a third-wave democracy that has changed status from recipient to donor of aid provision. The book also addresses the under-investigated topic of democracy transfer via civil society networks operating across national borders. The study covers the period from 2003, when the Polish national programs of assistance started, through to the year 2011.

The author locates her work within a wide range of political science literature. She draws upon both international relations theories, focused on analysis of the external influences on domestic politics, and a comparative politics approach to cross-border democratization, in order to elaborate hypotheses regarding strategies of assistance. The book offers a critical assessment of the current state of democracy assistance literature in an accessible manner.

From a comparative politics perspective, the book provides an interesting case study of political regimes and civil societies in Belarus and Ukraine (Chapter 1). The author examines the characteristics of non-democratic regime consolidation and repressions against civil society in Belarus within a wider socio-cultural context, including consideration of national identity-building processes, the linguistic situation, and the post-Soviet ideological legacy in the country. Analysis of the Ukrainian case is based on the interpretation of the political situation in the country as problematic when it comes to democratic consolidation. The author identifies key barriers on the Ukrainian road to democracy, including difficulties regarding commitment to democratic rules and adherence to democratic practices, as well as the weakness of political culture and civil society.

The insights into the political situation in the recipient countries are followed by a review of the Polish aid programs (Chapter 2) and an original analysis of the situation in Polish civil society itself (Chapter 3). The main conclusion of the former chapter is that Polish programs do not fit into the existing twofold typology of democracy assistance characteristic of the relevant literature, whereby programs are classified as either political or developmental. Rather, the Polish programs represent a balanced mixture of both sets of features, with a special focus on the local peculiarities of the recipient countries. The author claims that this specific approach is channeled via the following actors: representatives of central and local administrations, Polish embassies, and civil society organizations (the book focuses on the latter). In parallel, the author makes a comparative analysis of Belarusian and Ukrainian projects realized with Polish support. This comparison of two countries, of their national contexts and specific democracy assistance projects, is one of the book’s main strengths.

The chapter about Polish civil society is focused on exploring the Solidarity movement’s legacy and its positive influence on Polish NGOs. It also demonstrates the importance of foreign assistance for the development of civil society in Poland and subsequent reciprocal processes, when Polish organizations became important actors first in the process of democratization in their own country, and later in providing democracy assistance to neighboring countries.

The book’s main findings (Chapters 4 and 5) indicate that Polish democracy assistance differs considerably in its goals, principles, methods, and actors compared to its Western counterparts. These differences, in the author’s opinion, lend the Polish programs many advantages, including the possibility to reach broader target audiences in Belarus and Ukraine. Pospieszna stresses the fact that Polish NGOs as partners in transnational democracy assistance networks are potentially more effective democracy promoters than other organizations. However, the book does not always succeed in providing clear and convincing evidence in support of its broad conclusions.

Much of what is problematic about this book arises out of the very methods and materials of the research. Thus, the sources include interviews, analysis of relevant documents, and case studies of several projects. Interviews were conducted with a number of Polish democracy assistance actors, including officials from the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs; representatives of NGOs working with Belarus and Ukraine; and representatives of one foreign donor sponsoring Polish NGO projects, the National Endowment for Democracy. The book’s findings indeed demonstrate certain differences in the design of the Polish assistance programs. But no comprehensive framework or tools for the assessment of the results and efficiency of Polish–Belarusian or Polish–Ukrainian cooperation is provided here. The assessment is based mostly on the opinions of the respondents, their personal evaluations of own projects and organizations. The author herself acknowledges this problem with evaluation, pointing out that “it is difficult to gauge the tangible results” (151) and “[i]t is up to future research to determine the long-term outcomes of third wave democracy assistance” (162). This makes it difficult to see on what grounds the results of Polish assistance programs are evaluated so positively, or to judge the validity of the author’s policy recommendations.

Furthermore, nowadays we are witnessing very different tendencies in Polish Foreign Ministry assistance policy, including the demise of some of the cross-border projects that are positively evaluated in this book. For example, the Radio Racyja and Belsat television channel projects have both recently suffered serious funding cuts, to the point where their very existence is now in question. In addition, the information on Ukrainian projects used as typical examples of assistance (Appendix 5) is already out-of-date. Thus, the websites of many organizations and projects mentioned in the book are no longer active; related Internet searches do not turn up any reliable information; and in general, the current status of these projects is very unclear. The apparent failure of these projects is evidence that Polish assistance policy outcomes may not be as successful in the long-term perspective as the book suggests.

Nonetheless, given the original and under-researched topic of cross-border democracy assistance and the richness of the data marshaled by the author, this book is well worth the time for those who are interested in the political situation in Poland, Belarus, and Ukraine. It is also useful for understanding the policies of international and national donors in the region, and the specifics of democracy assistance tools, goals, and actors.

Tatsiana Chulitskaya

European Humanities University

Vilnius

Aliaksandr Dalhouski, Tschernobyl in Belarus. Ökologische Krise und sozialer Kompromiss. 1986–1996, Wiessbaden: Harrassowitz-Verlag 2015. 220 pp.

In this book, Aliaksandr Dalhouski traces the impact of the Chernobyl catastrophe on the relationship between the authorities and citizens over the space of a decade, spanning from five years before through to five years after the Soviet collapse. The main part is devoted to an analysis of the public negotiations conducted between Soviet citizens exposed to radioactivity and the leadership of the Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic (BSSR). Dalhouski’s analysis sharpens our understanding of the relationship between the 1986 Chernobyl disaster and the end of the Soviet Union. The author is not claiming a causal relationship between the two events, but he does show how Soviet rule changed as a result of both perestroika politics and the impact of the Chernobyl catastrophe. In the years after Chernobyl, the growing public perception that people’s lives had been placed under threat by the negligent policies of the Soviet authorities was an important factor shaping the evolution of the relationship between the BSSR’s leadership and citizens. The key elements of this change were the emergence of new spaces of public debate combined with the use of more traditional forms of social protest, namely, letters written to high officials. Archival research into the practice of skarha (Belarusian for a written petition to official (in this case, Soviet) structures) provides a sound empirical basis for Dalhouski’s analysis. As he convincingly shows, inhabitants of the south-eastern territories of the BSSR were surprisingly effective in requesting and attaining the relocation of resources in the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster.

The book’s core argument is that in the direct aftermath of the explosion there still existed an unwritten social contract between the inhabitants of radioactive areas and the Soviet authorities at the local, oblast’, and republic levels. This contract granted both a relative stability and the redistribution of social and medical goods in exchange for loyalty. Dalhouski is right to focus on practices of public negotiation on the part of those who had to leave the 30-kilometer exclusion zone and other heavily polluted parts of the BSSR. The author argues that because of this modus vivendi, until 1988 the catastrophe was perceived not so much as a national as a regional problem. It was only the relocation of inhabitants from the radioactive areas to other districts across Belarus and the ensuing conflicts over housing which made the Chernobyl disaster a republic-wide catastrophe in a majority perception.

Dalhouski’s study of late Soviet society in the BSSR and the emerging post-Soviet society in the Republic of Belarus is an edited version of a PhD thesis defended at Justus-Liebig-University of Gießen. It shows how the conflicts over the redistribution of housing in the wake of Chernobyl made the catastrophe a republic-wide issue. It was only at the very end of the 1980s that an interpretation of the catastrophe as a source of national suffering started to mobilize a larger number of Soviet citizens. More research could be done to find out to what extent this was an impact of stronger and earlier national popular movements and the evolving environmentalist activities in the Baltic Soviet republics, particular in Lithuania to the north and the Ukrainian SSR in the south. But Dalhouski’s strict limitation to the Belarusian case does not undermine his argument, because he shows clearly the narrow scope of the national movement after 1991, when the Republic of Belarus emerged in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union. The author explains the rising degree of politicization of Chernobyl as a negative point of reference for public protest against more recent state practices. It becomes clear in the final part of the book that after the election of Aliaksandr Lukashenka as the first elected president of the republic in 1994, there was still some negotiation about redistribution of public goods. Ultimately, however, Lukashenka managed to fully nationalize the logistics of the official distribution of social capital.

Last but not least, the reader learns that it was not just perestroika as such, but the changing modes of public debate—the shifting boundaries of the Sayable—associated with glasnost’, which allowed the relationship between citizens and the state to change over time. The new level of press freedom (albeit within a media landscape which was still far from being unregulated), was used to highlight the second wave of Chernobyl-related disease, which appeared two or three years after the radioactive fallout. For the first time, concrete data about the levels of radioactivity were now made public. The collapsing macroeconomic network added to the problems involved in providing healthy food and consumer goods to the inhabitants of the south-eastern part of the BSSR during this period. Thus, starting from 1988, subjective feelings of insecurity rose significantly, and the social contract came to be perceived as less binding than before.

This book, the fourth volume in a series on Belarusian history edited by Thomas M. Bohn and his Gießen based collective, shows that it is possible to formulate empirical questions with regard to the BSSR without retro-nationalizing the republic. The fact Dalhouski does not exaggerate the national bias of the popular post-Chernobyl critique means that he is able to provide some evidence for continuity between the earlier 1990s and the rise of Lukashenka. At the core of this argument is continuity in the state’s public redistribution of goods to the resettled population. This is described by Dalhouski as an ongoing effort to provide compensation, both symbolic and material, with a view to mitigating the long-term impact of the disaster. In the final, somewhat briefer and less detailed section of the book, Dalhouski shows how Lukashenka has included Chernobyl-related issues into his vision of a social welfare state embodied by the president, presented as personally responsible for the redistribution of social goods. This is striking, because in the same period the level of guarantees provided by the state in fact decreased. Thus, since coming to power, Lukashenka has continued to manoeuver between the symbolic public acknowledgement of group demands, and, in parallel, pursuing his drive to cut the costs of medical care and housing provided for those who had to resettle out of the contaminated zone.

One prominent form of popular commemoration, the “Chernobyl Way,” a march held on 26 April every year since the tenth anniversary in 1996, has been used to express concerns about the state’s ability to guarantee ecological security to all of its citizens. Dalhouski recounts the history of this march and its increasing instrumentalization. In the mid-1990s the level of politicization around the memory of Chernobyl was high, but with his presidential apparatus Lukashenka managed to contain and pacify successive public outbursts related to Chernobyl. For actors related to various opposition parties and a broad range of NGOs, the Chernobyl Remembrance Day is a recurring occasion used to make public political claims. But the presidential apparatus has also made use of this anniversary. Lukashenka himself has by turns ignored the “Chernobyl Way” and used it as an opportunity to publicly bash the protesters in the state media. His administration has subsequently managed to reduce the march’s public presence over the years, without, however, ever succeeding in fully marginalizing it. In the mid-1990s the “Chernobyl Way” was attended by tens of thousands of people. A decade later the numbers dropped to a few thousand. Today, in an overall climate of ongoing planned de-politicization, the march is still perceived by many as a significant annual political event.

Aliaksandr Dalhouski analyzes a broad range of sources. Most impressive is his study of skarhi, an official way to communicate with the Soviet authorities and to bring individual concerns to the agenda of the Communist Party. The author shows that, far from disappearing after 1991, this practice of social communication was in fact institutionalized in the Belarusian Republic. In 1995 Lukashenka organized a referendum to introduce a new constitution, in which the skarha was written into the legal system of the Republic of Belarus. As an outcome, to this day resettlees and others from the south-western part of Belarus still write skarhi to address everyday problems. The state organs are on the one hand constitutionally obliged to react, and on the other, take care not to allow these claims to be translated into political agendas. Dalhouski sees a certain degree of continuity in the bargaining, expressed in the skarhi, which still provides some room for semi-public negotiations between the population and a paternalist state.

Dalhouski’s convincing argument a...