Some Lithuanians Are Turning Against The Pro-Western Belarusian Diaspora

Lithuanians don’t want to share the legacy of their eponymous Grand Duchy with Belarusians.

Several dozen Lithuanians recently protested in Vilnius demanding that the government revoke the accreditation and funding that it gave to the local office of Svetlana Tikhanovskaya. She’s the leader of Belarus’ non-systemic opposition that tried to overthrow President Alexander Lukashenko in 2020. The protest was sparked after her husband Sergey, who Lukashenko released from prison earlier this year, made a remark about creating an autonomous Belarusian district that he says was misunderstood.

The issue is very complex, but the present piece will seek to simplify it for interested readers. The pro-Western Belarusian diaspora’s historical narrative aligns their country with the erstwhile Grand Duchy of Lithuania (GDL) of which contemporary Lithuania claims to be the exclusive heir. To this end, they’ve even employed symbols from that era, including a variation of the GDL’s coat of arms. This contrasts with the “Sovietized”/“Russified” version of history that Lukashenko began to promote early on in his rule.

Some of the ~200,000 Poles that live in Lithuania, who remained there after the rest were “exchanged” with post-WWII Poland’s Lithuanians at the USSR’s “encouragement”, are considered by some to be East Slavs who speak Belarusian or a related dialect and are thus at least partially “Russified”. They self-identify as Poles though because they’re Catholic. This minority, which mostly lives in Vilnius and the Vilnius Region, sought autonomy from 1989-1991 in order to preserve their socio-cultural rights.

That precedent combined with the influx of pro-Western Belarusians (~50,000) from 2020 onward to make some Lithuanians worried that some of the newcomers might try to “further Russify” (or “Belarusify”) the Polish minority and then revive these autonomy plans. Even if these Belarusians don’t have any separatist intentions, this could still challenge contemporary Lithuania’s historical narrative, not to mention lead to some of this community being co-opted by the Kremlin (or so they fear).

As regards the first consequence, Tim Snyder’s “The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569–1999” compellingly argues that contemporary Lithuania misappropriated the legacy of the GDL. He’s nowadays a hardcore Russophobe but that part of his 2003 book is worth at least skimming through if someone is interested in this subject. As regards the second consequence, fellow Russophobe Edward Lucas warned about this earlier in the summer in a piece that can be read here.

Interestingly, Putin’s 2021 magnum opus “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians” and his “Interview to Tucker Carlson” last year each touched upon the GDL’s Slavic identity, which readers can learn about by doing a keyword search (CTRL+F) for “Lithuania” in the preceding links. The mid-19^th-century “Millennium of Russia” monument in Novgorod also pays homage to four Grand Princes from the GDL. The pro-Western Belarusian diaspora’s historical narrative therefore has some truth to it.

Not all of them subscribe to this “Litvinist” interpretation, but enough do that some Lithuanians are now worried about their political intentions. Even so, self-identified Poles aren’t likely to become self-identified Belarusians, but they might cooperate to revive their autonomy plans due to convergent socio-cultural interests. This wouldn’t be a “Kremlin plot”, but the authorities would probably misportray it as such to justify a brutal crackdown that might provoke precisely the unrest that they seek to avoid.