ABSTRACT
Throughout the postwar period, Belarus was one of the most Russified of the Soviet republics. In 1960 only one-third of all books published in the republic were written in the Belarusian language; the remainder were largely in Russian. A Belarusian Popular Front with a national democratic program was formed in June 1989. Its focus was directed primarily toward three main issues: rescuing the Belarusian language from oblivion, revealing the crimes committed under Joseph Stalin against the Belarusian people, and the Chernobyl disaster. The winds of nationalism blowing across the wide plains of Belarus also swept into the Supreme Soviet of the republic. The power struggle with the Communist-dominated Belarusian Supreme Soviet continued until November 1996, when the parliamentary majority produced a draft constitution that would have abolished the presidency. Today a great many Western observers would hold that for historical and structural reasons Belarusian nationalism is doomed to remain too weak to catch on.
