Volume 51, Number 2 · February 12, 2004
Pulling the Rug Out from Under
By Anne Applebaum
The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939
by Terry Martin
Cornell University Press, 496 pp., $58.00; $28.95 (paper)
During the summer just preceding the collapse of the Soviet Union, I spent several days in Minsk, the capital of newly independent Belarus, in the company of a group of young people who called themselves Belarusian nationalists. One of them had recently converted to Orthodoxy, or rather to a new, 'independent' branch of the Orthodox Church. Another translated English texts into Belarusian—he was particularly interested in contemporary poetry—and he told me of a friend who had translated Ulysses into Belarusian as well. A third, although not himself Jewish, was trying to resurrect the lost history of the Belarusian Jews. In different ways, each was obsessed with the notion of an authentic national identity. What they wanted, they explained to me, was to find a way of being 'Belarusian,' which was different and distinct from the kitsch 'Belarus' identity that had been defined for them over the preceding decades by the Soviet state.
Review, 3551 words
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