In addition to speaking to students in Lithuania and Germany about the legacy of Stalinism and the manifestations of totalitarianism in contemporary life, Professor Ramanava also organises events dedicated to developments in Eastern Europe. One such event was a recent international conference at the European Humanities University in Vilnius, which focused on the history of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.
After the conference, Ramanava talked to journalist Laisvė Radzevičienė about the relationship between the present and the past, unlearned lessons of history, the Belarusian regime, and the war in Ukraine.
– You have been researching and studying the impact of memory on current events, society and politics for many years. Perhaps you have found the answer to why people, countries and governments do not learn from past mistakes?
– It is possible to learn from mistakes, especially if you are willing to learn, if you learn and if there is someone to teach you. How one teaches is also important. When we talk about war and its violence, it is not enough to say that good and evil in this situation are relative and abstract concepts. It is far more important to teach people to understand the consequences of evil or good. It is not for nothing that we say today that education is based not only on knowledge but also on critical thinking.
For years I have been researching Stalinism and totalitarianism, and how they are rethought and interpreted today. With students from the European Humanities University in Vilnius, we talk a lot about how societies often unwittingly become involved in repression, and how their members become part of this terrible mechanism without wanting to be. We have been looking at many archives and documents, trying to understand how and why this process took place. We can observe the same processes that took place so many years ago in our real life.
Today, I regret that I have only talked about these phenomena, their effects and meanings, in closed classrooms, with students, or occasionally in a single article or a film. It should have been talked about loudly, publicly, extensively and constantly! In the world of Belarusian science, these topics are impossible, long since banned. It was because of them that I was dismissed from the Institute of History of the National Academy of Belarus back in 2012.
The complex themes of the past are not only therapeutic; they are also relevant to contemporary politics. History is the science of the past, which tells us about the present. Germany has done a lot of work in discussing the memory of its country, and I am also interested in what is happening in Lithuanian memory politics. Belarus has never publicly discussed its totalitarian past; Stalinism has never been condemned. While Europe has been victim-oriented in its memory policy, Belarus and Russia have been focused on either heroes or villains. Today, we can clearly see where that policy has led.
– I wonder if historical facts and patterns can explain what is happening these days in our region, in Europe, and the world?
– When protests broke out in Belarus and protesters were beaten up and arrested, the media and the academic community asked me: is it legitimate to draw parallels between the violence in Belarus at that time and the Stalin era? It is hard to believe that we are dealing with the same phenomenon.
Why is such horrific violence even possible in the present? The truth is terrible: it has always existed. The Belarusian police killed, raped and tortured, while the public simply was not aware. Either it did not want to know, or, even if it knew, it did not react in any way. Mikola Dziadok, a well-known blogger, alumnus of the European Humanities University, Belarusian activist and political prisoner, has said this: “The regime’s previous actions were directed against certain relatively small groups, i.e. Roma, anarchists, football fans, LGBT, bribers and so on. Unfortunately, society did not understand that if the state perfects a repressive machine for one group, eventually it would be applied to a second group, a third, a fourth, and then, if the regime was in danger, to all of society.”
That is exactly what happened. The people of Belarus only realised what kind of country they were living in when the repressive practices that had been applied to marginalised groups for decades were finally imposed on all of them.
– What is happening in Ukraine today is a terrible crime against humanity. Is there any explanation for the brutality of the Russian troops?
– We were trying to find it when confronted with unprecedented violence by siloviki, the power structures, in August 2020 in Belarus. It is difficult to understand how locals can beat and torture their own compatriots in this way. There was even a version that, rather than locals, they were sent from Russia.
Created and used by modern politics, the image of the enemy serves as a moral justification for those who use violence today. The image of the enemy is indispensable; it always makes you feel that you are on the right side of history, and that what you are doing is good and right. It is not new; under Stalinism, people were also labelled as spies and enemies. The vast majority of siloviki and Russian soldiers understand this information at the most superficial level.
Violence is a natural human trait. In an open society, this quality is weakly expressed, whereas in a closed military community, a concentrate of violence is created. Extreme experiences program consciousness; in the military, violence underpins the value system, creating an ideology that shapes values of the community members. In the military environment, social relations are established by transferring responsibilities from inferiors to superiors. An order serves as both as a command and a justification for the actions of the lower ranks.
We must realise that in both Russia and Belarus, which have conscription, the army is made up of people with secondary education. They are led by those who have already expressed their cruelty, cynicism, inhumanity, and blind obedience, the best of the best in this sense. Of course, it is also significant that many of them have themselves experienced violence in society or family.
– We live in incredible times of change. Could we have expected to become a generation that had never seen war? Why could such a dream be impossible?
– None of us could allow ourselves to think that what is happening in Ukraine is even possible in real life. Signs were there, though. We simply did not want to see and acknowledge them, even though today they make sense. I remember well when we went on historical expeditions to collect oral history interview, the older people would often say: the most important thing is that there is no war, while the lack of work and democracy is secondary. Yes, it is important not to have a war, but it is the attitude that everything else is less important that leads to the war. We know that authoritarian regimes start wars.
– Undoubtedly, Lithuanians today are particularly interested in the question – will Belarusians go to war for Russia?
– Every time I turn to the news pages on the internet, my biggest fear is to learn that Belarus has already sent or is sending troops into Ukraine. I would like to believe that this will never, under any circumstances, happen: that there will be no order, that they will refuse to obey this order, and so on. Unfortunately, the army operates according to different laws.
– Not so long ago, you organised and hosted an international conference on the history of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania at the European Humanities University in Vilnius. Is this topic also the subject of your historical research?
– This conference pursued ambitious strategic goals. As you know, historical education in Belarus is going through difficult times. Many researchers and teachers have been dismissed. While some of them are still in prison, some have been forced to flee their country to avoid arrest. Along with our colleagues, students are also in prisons, including those from the European Humanities University.
The largest group of historians affected are those who have studied the history of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. The international scientific community could not help them, because for all these years Belarusian science existed in isolation from international science, and our scientists are still little known in the Western academic world. We decided to organise not just a scientific conference, but a kind of presentation: to introduce an independent school of Belarusian history to the Western world. We planned the conference at the Justus Liebig University in Giessen, Germany, but the war broke out on 24 February. Belarus turned out to be an accomplice of the aggressor, resulting in an almost immediate announcement by Western universities that they were breaking off all cooperation with Belarusian scholars. We were cut off not only from our homeland but also from support. Fortunately, this policy was quickly revised, and today only the cooperation with official Belarusian scientific institutions is banned.
Along with hosting the conference, we thought that the European Humanities University could also offer a platform for broader international cooperation. The conference was held in the most important city for the history of Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Belarusian researchers presented their research at the conference. These were also scholars who received support for their research from the project Lithuania-Belarus. Dialogue on the Past. Initiated in late 2020 by Alvydas Nikžentaitis, the Director of the Lithuanian Institute of History, the project targeted Belarusian scientists who became victims of repression.
– When were you yourself acquainted with Lithuania?
– Lithuania has always meant a lot to Belarusians. First, as a place where the national Belarusian movement emerged, as a place associated with Skaryna, and where the first national newspaper Naša Niva was founded. I could go on and on. Belarusian children know what Vilnius and Lithuania are, and what they mean to Belarus and to Belarusians, since they were in school. However, while they receive this knowledge together with the Belarusian narrative, their knowledge of today’s ‘Lithuanian Lithuania’ is quite weak.
During my studies at the Belarusian State University, we often visited Vilnius to walk the streets of the Old Town, to sightsee places that we only discovered in history in the early 1990s, and to have coffee in cafés that we could only dream of in Minsk at that time. This is a typical story of Vilnius as ‘our Europe’. At that time, it was accepted as another world. I could not even think or dream that I would ever work or even live in this city.
Now Lithuania and Vilnius have become the only home for many Belarusians. Your country has done and is doing a lot for Belarus. And the most important thing, despite all the difficulties, is that Lithuania shows us how the country’s path would have developed if we had continued what we had started in the mid-1990s instead of abandoning all the important beginnings.
– The European Humanities University in Vilnius is a Belarusian university in exile. You are also in exile, living in Germany for some time. What does it mean to be an exile?
– In fact, the European Humanities University is a unique university of Belarusian origin, operating in Lithuania under Lithuanian law. Its goal has always been to become an international university for the region. After the events of 2020, it has become much more than that – not only a university providing higher education that meets European standards, but also a space of new beginnings for Belarusians abroad.
The university has welcomed students expelled in Belarus for political reasons and launched a programme to support repressed scholars. We are grateful to the international community for its support and encouragement. After 2020, we have become even more aware of the importance of having our own university; the European Humanities University is ours. Thank you Lithuania for making this possible. For us Belarusians, the political philosopher Hanna Arendt’s phrase that without the rights of the citizen, human rights are impossible, is particularly relevant now. The Belarusians do not have these rights today.
The interview is translated from Lithuanian.
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