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Forum: New Directions in Belarusian Studies Besieged Past: National and Court Historians in Lukashenka's Belarus

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Rainer Lindner
Rainer Lindner*
Affiliation:
East European History at the University of Konstanz, Germany
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Extract

At the beginning of the 1990s, when the former Soviet republics declared sovereignty, the questions of their national histories, long neglected in the Soviet period, once again became important. In taking up the national and cultural traditions of the pre-Soviet era, as well as a literary language that had been reduced to folklore, the post-Soviet national intelligentsias began to develop their own versions of the Belarusian past. As the old Soviet empire declined, new “historical” nations developed against a background of diverse ethnicity and political struggles for power. Western scholars have discussed in detail the changes in historical writing since the emergence of glasnost'. The post-Soviet intelligentsia not only faced a crisis in historical writing and history generally within the late Soviet Union, but were confronted with what Aaron Gurevich has called a “vacuum of historical vision.”

Information

Type
Forum: New Directions in Belarusian Studies
Information
Nationalities Papers , Volume 27 , Issue 4 , December 1999 , pp. 631 - 647
Copyright
Copyright © 1999 Association for the Study of Nationalities 

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References

Notes

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