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Subject essay: Natalya Chernyshova
Belarus in the 1970s was an exemplary Soviet republic and a success story of the Soviet modernisation project. It had recovered relatively quickly from the horrific devastation of the Second World War and embarked on a path of rapid economic development. The Brezhnev era saw this former nameless peasant backwater of the Russian Empire complete its transformation into an industrialized and urbanized national republic. By 1973, Belarus was riding high in the ‘family’ of Soviet nations. It received generous bonuses for its farming achievements in the 1973 All-Union Socialist Competition and asked Moscow for permission to build a metro in Minsk, only the ninth city in the USSR to do so, reflecting the Belarusian capital’s size and importance. The next few years saw the republic garner a raft of prestigious all-union awards and play host to a number of prominent international visitors.
Although it had little industry before the war, Belarus’s industrial output had grown 15-fold between 1940 and 1972. Its industry manufactured relatively sophisticated and high-tech equipment and consumer goods, including colour TV sets, refrigerators, high-precision metalworking lathes, haulage trucks, and computers. It boasted a growing chemical sector and contributed nearly half of the total Soviet potassium fertilizer output in 1970. It also developed its own oil-refining industry.
The republic’s once-primitive farming benefitted from modernization, turning Belarus into a major agricultural producer, which supplied the Soviet economy with meat and dairy products, eggs, grain, flax and vegetables. Over a million tons of Belarusian potatoes went to Moscow, Leningrad, and other Soviet cities and republics every year. In 1975, Belarus was awarded the prestigious Red Banner of the CPSU, Council of Ministers, Trade Unions and Komsomol for attaining the best results in the all-Union socialist competition and fulfilling the 1974 economic plan ahead of schedule.
Belarus exemplified the rural-urban migration patterns in the USSR as a whole. During the 1970s, the republic’s capital Minsk was one of the fastest growing cities in the USSR, with up to 55,000 new residents arriving annually. The capital’s ability to absorb this influx of migrants is remarkable, considering that Minsk was almost entirely razed to the ground during the war, so much so that the post-war authorities briefly considered moving the capital elsewhere. But in the 1970s, it was an attractive place to live, with the continual expansion of industry supplying job opportunities.
Belarus also occupied an important place in the ideological landscape of the Brezhnev era. In the context of the Brezhnev-era cult of the war, it came to be widely celebrated as a heroic and loyal ‘partisan republic’, whose strong partisan movement made a significant contribution to the Soviet war effort. Minsk was awarded the Hero City title in 1974. Such reputation offered more than just ceremonial honours. Former partisans held a firm grip on the local party and state politics well before Brezhnev’s team arrived to power. For most of Brezhnev’s tenure, the Communist Party of Belarus (CPB) was headed by Petr Masherau, a charismatic war veteran, who had received the Golden Star of the Hero of the Soviet Union at the age of 26 for his feats as a partisan commander in the Vitebsk region. Unlike Brezhnev, he did not need to invent his heroic war record.
The ‘partisan republic’ played a key role in another conflict. Belarus was the only other Soviet republic besides Ukraine to have its own seat on the UN Security Council, an obvious asset to the USSR in the context of Cold War politics. It was one of only four republics to be entrusted with nuclear weapons. It hosted important foreign visitors and showcased what the Soviet project could achieve in an ethnic borderland. Josip Broz Tito (1965), Fidel Castro (1972), Georges Pompidou (1973) and Richard Nixon (1974) all made stops here.
But underneath the image of progress and loyalty lurked tensions. Along with industrialisation and urbanisation came the marginalization of the Belarusian language and culture, which frustrated and alienated part of the national intelligentsia. Minsk’s architectural redevelopment was criticized for neglecting its historical heritage. A good share of the republic’s agricultural growth was achieved through a programme of intensive amelioration, especially in the Poles’e region in southern Belarus, which brushed aside those who warned of the destruction of its unique eco-systems.
The full trauma of the Second World War, including the extermination of the Belarusian Jewish community, had to be underplayed in a republic where hardly a family was left untouched by the war. The dark aspects of partisan experience and violence, as well as local collaboration, were taboo. Famous Belarusian writer Vasil’ Bykau, whose works showed that the war was uglier and more complicated than the official version allowed, was both rewarded and harassed by the authorities.
The Belarusians’ influence in the Kremlin began to wane towards the end of the decade, as did the partisans’ near-monopoly in the republic’s political structures. Behind the pride and triumph of receiving the Hero City status for Minsk lurked the uncomfortable fact that it took almost a decade for this recognition to arrive. In 1965, when most other Hero Cities, including Kiev, received their honours, Masherau’s petition was declined. Belarus was made to wait until 1974, when the 30th anniversary of its liberation from the Nazi occupation combined with a series of articles about the heroic Minsk underground resistance in Izvestiia provoked a hail of readers’ letters to the CPSU Central Committee, asking why Minsk had not been awarded the Hero City status. It took ailing Brezhnev another four years to deliver the award to Minsk. It did not go unnoticed that his visit in 1978 was both delayed and short.
Masherau’s own life trajectory is telling. A loyal communist and Soviet internationalist, he joined the Communist Party during the war and rose rapidly through its ranks, exemplifying a whole cohort of Belarusian partisans-turned-politicians who dominated the republic’s post-war politics. Few knew that the hero’s father was an ‘enemy of the people’ who perished in the NKVD camps or that Masherau’s own brief spell as a POW during the war was a ‘stain’ on his biography that nearly cost him his career when a denunciation letter was sent to Moscow in 1949. It seems that he was not Moscow’s preferred choice for the leadership of the CPB in 1965, but the republic’s elites wanted him. His relationship with Brezhnev has been subject to speculation, no doubt fuelled by Masherau’s energetic persona and reputation for incorruptibility, which stood in sharp contrast to the geriatric Brezhnev leadership. But if he entertained any ambitions to move up the party ladder to Moscow, he failed. Masherau’s death in a car crash in October 1980 prompted an outpouring of popular grief and persistent rumours of the Kremlin’s involvement.
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