Belarusian national historiography and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania as a Belarusian state
ENOver the past two centuries the movements for national self-determination in Europe gave rise to new and often contradictory conceptions of regional history. In the greater Baltic area the case of Belarus, a country usually bypassed by Western scholarship, has been no exception. By the 1920s the Belarusian national movement produced a historiography which defined the Grand Duchy of Lithuania as a Belarusian state. The Belarusian Interpretation of regional history distinguished between a strictly ethnic Lithuania and the poly-ethnic Grand Duchy where East Slavs made up most of the population. It thereby established Belarusians' historical-geographical identity as "Lithuanians." Some versions added an ethnic component based on archeological and linguistic evidence of a Baltic substratum in Belarusians' ethnic makeup. Belarusian historians, echoing their Ukrainian counterparts, looked to the Grand Duchy to separate their people's ethnogenesis and early history from Poland and particularly Muscovite Russia. The Belarusian claim to past statehood promised to make Belarus a historical nation worthy of renewed statehood in the 20th Century, instead of a non-historical ethnic minority subject to assimilation by Russians and Poles. The national conception of Belarusian history, compromised by Stalinism, has seen a resurgence among academics in post-Soviet Belarus. Ideologically it remains one of the elements of Belarusian national identity opposed to President Aleksandr Lukashenko's policy of cultural and political reintegration with Russia.
