Whose Grand Duchy? Contesting the multicultural past in Lithuania and Belarus

ENOn August 23, 2020, two weeks after the contested Belarusian presidential elections that resulted in a long-term wave of protests and unprecedented political turmoil in the country, two former Lithuanian presidents were among over fifty thousand people who formed a human chain from Vilnius to the Belarusian-Lithuanian border. The occasion was the thirty-first anniversary of the Baltic Way demonstration of 1989, an iconic show of transnational popular protest against Soviet rule, and the Lithuanian commemorative initiative in 2020 was thus intended as a sign of solidarity with the Belarusian pro-democracy movement. Yet in the three decades since the collapse of the USSR, Lithuanian and Belarusian civil societies have perhaps been at odds with each other more than they have been in congenial agreement. One of the main points of contention has been over which nation can “rightfully” lay claim to the legacy of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania - a dispute that, mostly, has been constituted as a zero-sum game. Whereas both societies seemingly had similar goals in the wake of the collapse of state socialism - to reconstruct sovereign national identities and consolidate national memories - the politics of memory in Lithuania and Belarus have in recent decades been cardinal contrasts. In the Lithuanian case, national and state narratives have been closely aligned. Although since approximately the turn of the twenty-first century, there have been pioneering historical treatments of non-ethnic-Lithuanian themes - especially Polish and Jewish ones - by prominent public intellectuals, the dominant vision has remained very ethnocentric. The Belarusian case, meanwhile, has been less consolidated. After a brief period of pluralism until 1994 - when Alexander Lukashenko won the country’s first, and to date only free and fair presidential elections - a neo-Soviet interpretation of the past gained the backing of the state.It argued that the Belarusian state was a creation of the October Revolution, and preached historical brotherhood with Russia. In parallel, a national narrative has also flourished, mostly as the preserve of the political opposition, although more recently (since approximately 2005) the state has also mobilized the symbolic capital of this narrative. The dominance of “national narratives” in place of more “objective” history is especially prominent in the historiography of “smaller” nations whose very existence has been threatened, as Anthony F. Upton observes. In such cases, a desire to write history from an impartial perspective with a critical attitude toward the dominant narrative can often turn scholars into traitors in the eyes of their own compatriots. Thus, while source-based academic studies remain normal practice in Belarus and Lithuania, researchers - whether consciously or unconsciously - often select topics for research and draw conclusions in line with their respective dominant national narratives. The memory of multiculturalism illustrates the paradox of the similarities and differences between the two countries’ dominant narratives. In both Lithuania and Belarus, notwithstanding some specific exceptions, these narratives have often made symbolic claims to the historical diversity and “tolerance” of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (thirteenth century - 1795), depicting it as a country of many nations, religions, and languages. In Lithuania, especially in recent decades, the coexistence of different peoples has been presented as one of the greatest achievements of “historical Lithuania.” The moment when Gediminas (Bel. Hiedzimin, Pol. Giedymin; grand duke, 1316–1341) invited western Europeans, mostly artisans from northern Germany, to settle in Lithuania has been regarded as the starting point of the country’s unique diversity.Characteristic is this passage about religious and cultural tolerance in a history of Lithuania published on behalf of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs: “The boundaries of tolerance later narrowed in both Poland and Lithuania, but changes took place slowly and without compulsion, and multiconfessionalism survived right until the twentieth century. Western Europe’s situation in the sixteenth century is characterized by the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in Paris (1572), which became a symbol of religious intolerance in European history. Are all of the aforementioned not enough to conclude that Lithuania, in the mid-sixteenth century, was Europe ’s cradle of tolerance?” [p. 205-207].