While ongoing repression at home takes its toll on higher education and independent publishers, emigres attempt to keep the language alive in exile.
Andrei, a lecturer at a Belarusian technical university, has not heard the Belarusian language at work for several years. Neither teachers nor students speak it.
“Belarusian has always been rare in our university, but three years ago there were two or three teachers who used to give lectures in the language. Now they don’t work here, and none of the new ones are willing to teach in Belarusian. A new vice-rector has recently appeared at the university. Everybody knows that he is a former KGB officer. It seems that he has plans to search for dissenters inside the university.”
Dissenters, these days, include those still speaking Belarusian in higher education. In 2020, after the disputed presidential election and the subsequent protests, the use of the Belarusian language once again became a symbol of resistance and the struggle for democracy. Many Belarusians who previously did not speak Belarusian began to learn it as a sign of their support for the opposition and resistance to President Alyaksandr Lukashenka’s regime.
In that environment, the future of the Belarusian language now depends on whether the diaspora will be able to create Belarusian-language institutions abroad, including schools and publishing houses, and whether those who remained at home will be able to preserve the language – while waiting for the possibility of its free development at some point in the future.
Language as a Marker
In the 1990s, the Belarusian language was associated with opposition and disloyalty to the authorities, as the language was used as a tool to oppose Russification and promote Belarusian national identity. In the mid-2010s, Belarus saw a surge of interest in the national culture and native language. This trend reached its peak in 2020, when the Belarusian language began to play an important role in the protest movement that erupted after Lukashenka’s controversial election for a sixth term – widely considered fraudulent in the West.
Public outrage led to a harsh crackdown by the authorities, who have detained over 35,000 people since 2020, The Associated Press reported in April. Of those, according to the human rights center Viasna, over 5,000 people have been subjected to politically motivated trials, with almost 1,400 currently imprisoned on various charges. Belarusian, rarely used by the majority of the population and ignored by the authorities, became an important tool of self-identification for opposition-minded Belarusians. Many activists, fearing persecution, had to leave Belarus; those who stayed found themselves under close surveillance by the security services.
If in emigration their native language helps Belarusians to unite and serves as a marker of common cultural customs, beliefs, and values, in Belarus the authorities label Belarusian-speaking citizens as freethinkers and dissidents subject to control and neutralization. The words “we will find [them] and clean [things] up,” which were used to threaten the protesters, remain in force, including in the hallways of academia.
The country has never had a national higher education institution where all subjects were taught in Belarusian. But there were some teachers who taught their courses in the language. After 2020 their number has come down significantly, as Andrei noted (all names have been changed to prevent reprisals from the authorities for speaking about the current situation).
“At the end of the academic year, two professors were fired from our department for nothing,” he said. “A photo with protest themes was found in the Facebook archive of one of them, and the other had once long ago put a like under a post of some independent media outlet – he doesn’t remember which one. These sound just like stories, but this is our reality. Of course, the official reason for the dismissal was something like ‘non-renewal of contract,’ but in private conversation they were given those very reasons.
“If you speak Belarusian, you are 100 percent under suspicion and 100 percent you will be checked. … People prefer not to take risks.”
Around two or three years ago, the authorities started introducing the positions of “deputy director for educational work,” “vice-rector for security,” and “deputy for security, order, and personnel” at all public institutions, and some private ones followed suit. People from law enforcement usually fill these positions, and their main duty is to monitor the staff, particularly to identify and get rid of employees they suspect of being disloyal to the regime. They also interview job applicants, and they have many more questions for Belarusian-speaking candidates, Andrei said.
A Mass Exodus
Similar practices have also affected the earlier stages of the educational system. In Belarusian-speaking elementary and secondary schools, such sweeps of “dissenters” have led to a decline in the level of education, say many experts. Currently, one in 10 pupils attends a Belarusian-language school. The mass dismissal of qualified teachers has put these children in unequal conditions compared to children attending Russian-language schools, which haven’t seen such purges.
For six years, Polina took her daughter to a Belarusian-language gymnasium, or academically oriented high school, in central Minsk, the capital, as there were only Russian-language schools in their district. But after the mass protests, the institution lost a significant part of its teaching staff, and the administration was unable to find qualified replacements.
“In 2020, teachers simply began to leave the gymnasium en masse. Some of them went abroad, some of them were forced to quit by the administration – among the teachers there were many who actively participated in the protests,” Polina said.
“In their place came ideologically correct teachers, who had not been fined for speaking out during the protests, but had low knowledge of the Belarusian language.”
Polina described the arrival of a new class teacher who met with parents both in person and in the class’s online chat room. “Everything was in Russian only, although parents asked him many times to switch to Belarusian. In response, the teacher said that many parents do not understand Belarusian, so it is better to communicate in Russian.
“But it’s not true – before that we parents had been communicating in the chat room in Belarusian without any problems. As it turned out later, it was the class teacher himself who did not know Belarusian well, rather he spoke in trasianka – an informal mixture of Russian and Belarusian. Parents tried to complain to the director, but in response they heard only that there were not enough teachers, and it was extremely difficult to find a Belarusian-speaking teacher.
“Some of the new teachers were of pre-retirement or retirement age. That’s what they told the children – we’ve been plucked from retirement, be thankful we come to class at all.”
In response, Polina’s daughter transferred to a regular school near their home, which had managed to preserve the teaching staff, though the quality of education was not high, she said.
Banning Books
Those in search of the Belarusian language are also increasingly hard-pressed to find books in their desired tongue.
With the permission of the Ministry of Information, state publishing houses print books written by Belarusian authors in the Belarusian language – mainly folklore, children’s books, and classics. Independent publishers used to be the primary source for books more in demand, such as history, fiction, and literature in translation.
The authorities have, however, closed most of the independent publishers, and revoked the publishing licenses of a number of others. Some found it possible to continue their activities in exile, but their books are usually not allowed in Belarus.
Jana, who is now living abroad, translated and self-published a manual for music students into Belarusian.
“We had to leave Belarus for security reasons, and now we live in Poland. In Belarus, I worked in education, and we never spoke Belarusian at work – not with our pupils or among ourselves in the teachers’ room. Of course, switching to Belarusian would be difficult for most of my fellow teachers, and not all of them would want to learn musical terms in Belarusian and teach them to their students. But I know several private tutors who want to conduct lessons in Belarusian, and they simply need such a manual,” Jana said.
“I’d really like to give them at least a few copies. But I have no idea how to do it yet. The import of ‘extremist’ literature is monitored at the border, and although the music manual does not fall under this category, the fact that it is written in Belarusian may attract the unwanted attention of the customs officers, and the person bringing it in may have problems.”
Competing in Exile with Russian
In Vilnius, Lithuania, a state gymnasium named after Francysk Skaryna – a famed Belarusian humanist, physician, and translator – has educated students in Belarusian for many years. However, with the influx of refugees that followed the 2020 crackdown, parents have found it difficult to get their kids into the school. There is also a private Belarusian school in the city, but at about 500 euros per month, not all parents can afford to pay so much for their child’s education. Belarusians have asked the authorities to open another school, but so far to no avail.
Russian-language schools have thus become an alternative for children of Belarusian migrants – there are 28 such schools in the country.
Katerina emigrated with her family in 2021 to Lithuania, but no Belarusian schools could be found where they settled. Intimated by having to suddenly learn all school subjects in Lithuanian, her son asked to attend one of several nearby Russian-language schools. Yet even here in a foreign country, the use of Belarusian led to friction.
“In Belarus, my son studied in a Belarusian-language school, and in the new school for the first year he labeled his notebooks sshytak in Belarusian, not using the Russian word for ‘notebook.’ ”
Then her son got into a confrontation with the Russian language teacher, who insisted he label his notebooks “lesson in the mother tongue,” she said.
“But my son wrote not ‘mother tongue,’ but ‘Russian language.’ The teacher asked him many times to correct it, and once he himself crossed out the word ‘Russian’ with a red pen and corrected it to ‘mother.’ But my son said that he could not write it like that because Russian is not his mother language.”
Unfortunately, Katerina said, the necessity to learn so many languages at once has pushed the Belarusian language into the background. “We would like to keep the children interested in Belarusian, but taking into account that there are three languages at school – Lithuanian, Russian, and English – it is a very tough task. My daughter, for example, finds foreign languages very difficult.”
Another country that received a large number of Belarusian migrants was Georgia. One of them, Ania worked for many years in preschool education in Belarus, and has managed to stay in the field even after her move, teaching the children of Belarusian emigrants. She developed her own teaching materials and now uses them in her private class of six youngsters.
“The children willingly learn Belarusian – they realize that it is their native language,” Ania said. “Strange as it may seem, but it was here, in Georgia, in emigration, that the Belarusian language became much more present in my life. I have friends who always speak Belarusian in everyday life, and there are many places where Belarusian migrants gather and speak their native language.”
Pointing to the growing popularity of Belarusian among young people, Ania sounded a note of optimism, saying that TikTok, for example, now has an increasing amount of clips in the language, a big contrast to pre-2020 days. “The Belarusian language has a future. If parents explain to their children that the language is important, it will be preserved.”
Good teachers of Belarusian can still be found in Belarus, she said, praising their dedication despite the obvious risks. “Some work as tutors and have their own pages on social networks, where they popularize their native language.
“Nowadays in Belarus such pages are monitored, and law enforcement can come to check” the teachers, Ania said. “That’s how it is now.”
