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Imposing an Ideology in Belarus

The president of Belarus pushes universities to promote the

state's views by rewriting textbooks, firing professors, and

punishing students





By BRYON MACWILLIAMS



Minsk, Belarus



Higher education in Belarus had it relatively good, once.

While the president of the newly independent country spent

most of the 1990s strengthening his political grip, he

largely left universities alone. Private institutions

enjoyed academic freedom and international exchange. Even

their state counterparts had a degree of financial

independence.



Then, things changed. Some say that universities were

targeted as nests of opposition. Others say it was all part

of a grand design. Clearly by the spring of 2003, the

autocratic president, Aleksandr Lukashenko, had higher

education in his sights.



Textbooks began to be removed from libraries, and to be

rewritten to support the president's policies and narrow

view of history. Rectors who flattered the president were

installed. Less-than-compliant professors were forced out.

Potentially controversial doctoral research was cut off.

Largely because it was financed by Western organizations, an

independent humanities institute was shuttered. The

country's foremost private university, arguably the best of

its kind on former Soviet territory -- and also financed by

the West -- was abruptly forced to close.



Mr. Lukashenko, who holds diplomas from teaching and

agrarian colleges, characterized the moves as reform, a

series of measures meant to restore "the best traditions of

the Soviet-era education system." To that end he also

introduced to college campuses the Belarus Republican Union

of Youth, an organization similar to the Komsomol, or Young

Communist League of the Soviet Union.



Yet none of his measures were given greater priority than

what he called "ideological work" with students. This

academic year a mandatory course, "Foundations of Ideology

of the Republic of Belarus" -- whose ill-defined mission

ostensibly is intended to instill patriotism and allegiance

-- is being taught nationwide for the first time.



"They've made higher education a tool of politics," says

Vladimir Dounaev, first vice rector of the European

Humanities University, the highly regarded private

institution that has moved into exile in Lithuania to

survive. "It is a major blow."



Those attempts to bring higher education to heel reach from

the cities to the underdeveloped regions, where recently

established quotas are intended to bring students from

villages, the president's political base, into aca-deme. The

trend is unlikely to ebb anytime soon. Several months ago

Mr. Lukashenko declared victory in a rigged referendum that

allowed him to run for re-election, indefinitely.



Representatives from the United States and the European

Union have appealed to Mr. Lukashenko to spare higher

education from what is tantamount to a reverse perestroika.

He faces sanctions and bans on travel from many countries.



But so far, outside pressures have proven feeble. Belarus

recently ordered a British professor from King-ston

University London to leave the country for unstated reasons

connected to his nonacademic work with youth. It also

revoked the operational licenses of IREX, a U.S.-financed

nongovernmental organization that promotes academic

exchange, and a host of foreign and domestic NGO's.



The Ministry of Education has been unequivocal in ordering

universities to fire professors and lecturers who oppose, or

are not committed to, the state ideology. "If you do not

accept the ideas declared by the government and the

president, do not apply to a state university for a job,"

Mr. Lukashenko has said.



A Vague Directive



The role of ideology in the country has been likened by Mr.

Lukashenko to the role of the immune system in a living

organism. Despite his avowal of its vital importance, its

functions are more than a little fuzzy.



The country's 57 institutions of higher learning -- 43 of

which are owned by the state -- are still unsure how to

teach the "Foundations of Ideology" course. The course was

supposed to have begun in the fall of 2003, but a lack of

direction from the Education Ministry meant that rare

lectures often were composed of selected excerpts from

speeches by the president.



The first substantial textbooks on state ideology were

published only last year, and in many instances are

contradictory in content. Among the several textbooks on the

subject for sale at a popular bookstore in the capital, one

is overtly communist in tone, and another is nationalist.



The author of two of the more moderate textbooks, Yadviga S.

Yaskevich, believes that Belarussians have been suffering

from an identity crisis since the collapse of the Soviet

Union, and its accompanying ideology. Bordered by Russia to

the east, and Poland to the west, the country -- which,

prior to 1991, was independent briefly in 1918 -- has been

subjugated by larger forces with competing sets of values.



Responsibility for teaching the course, which consists of 16

hours of lectures and 8 hours of seminars, falls on the

departments of law and political science. In April educators

must propose the first specialties of scholarly expertise

within the field of state ideology.



"A state can't be without ideology," says Ms. Yaskevich, a

vice rector at the Republican Institute of Higher Schools,

which performs research and provides support to

career-oriented scholars, at Belarus State University. She

provides students more history and philosophy than outright

direction. "I'm oriented toward what the student thinks, how

he came to his conclusions ... and do not tell him what to

think."



The Education Ministry, however, is less tolerant of

latitude of thought. At a seminar last September at the

Academy of the Presidential Administration of the

Belarussian Republic, educators were instructed to emphasize

trust and a sense of "personal closeness" with the

president, and to increase the visibility on campuses of the

national flag and coat of arms.



Mr. Lukashenko has said that the basis of state ideology

should be Orthodox Christianity, which he says has

supplanted communism over the past decade.



The rector of Belarus State University, the country's most

prestigious university, plans to write a definitive textbook

to alleviate the vagueness. Vasily Strazhev's prescription

would be familiar to the American electorate: a system of

values, in this case guided by a national idea (Fatherland),

a religious idea (Orthodox Christianity) and a social idea

(fairness).



Mr. Strazhev, like many educators who remain in the good

graces of the government, is sensitive to assertions that

the compulsory state ideology on campuses -- as well as at

workplaces with more than 300 employees -- is integral to

the totalitarian regime of a president regarded widely as

the last dictator in Europe.



"In Belarus nothing is happening that isn't happening

anywhere else, America included," he says. "I can tell you

that, in America, there's also an ideology. In America

there's even a very powerful ideology -- they just don't

call it that."



"I can even envy the success of the American system of

bringing up citizens and patriots, how Americans instill a

love of the country and of its symbols," he says. "But would

you call that totalitarianism?"



The creators of the new curricula, like most educators

interviewed for this story, believe that an official

ideology is necessary in Belarus regardless of who runs the

government. "You only have to be scared," Mr. Strazhev says,

"when ideology becomes totalitarianism."



For some, the line already has been crossed. "Everyone is

afraid," says Mr. Dounaev, of the European Humanities

University. "A sense of totalitarian fear exists in the

country. It is literally the restoration of Soviet times."



While education policies are Soviet in appearance, they are

not in substance. Communists fought for an ideology to gain

power, whereas the government is conjuring up an ideology to

justify power, according to Vitali Silitski, a political

analyst in Minsk.



"The state ideology is brainwashing, so to speak," Mr.

Silitski says.



A New Order



The Chronicle has obtained a copy of an order of the

Education Ministry, dated April 1, 2004, that outlines

"urgent measures" for instilling elements of ideology in

academe. The order, while technically a public document, has

been suppressed by the ministry, which refused several

requests to comment for this story.



Rectors are instructed to enlist students and professors in

promoting the state's official symbols, the institution of

the president, and the president as a personality. They must

promote the spread of the Belarus Republican Union of Youth

in all ways possible, as well as assert greater control over

the content of college newspapers and the Internet. They

must take more severe measures to punish students who speak

out.



The order lists 26 ways in which to increase control over

international cooperation and foreign sources of financing;

to prevent students from working and studying abroad; to

persuade students and professors to celebrate anniversaries

of Soviet achievements; and to monitor and influence the

collective moods in student dormitories.



The Education Ministry is working on a slate of parallel

measures for the reorganization of higher education.

Students whose tuitions are paid for by the state would be

required to work off the costs of their education over three

to five years -- up from two years, and longer than during

the Soviet period -- at a job in a location of the

government's choice. A graduate of Belarus State Medical

University reportedly killed herself rather than obey

instructions to leave the capital to work in a village.



The government has also instructed universities to steer

first-year students into the hard sciences and technologies

in order to replenish the aging work forces in state-run

industry and agriculture. It founded a new university last

fall in Barnavichy, a small city in the west, in part to

directly meet the needs of an economic system in which the

government regulates price and production levels.



It also has ordered universities in the cities to increase

the enrollment of students from villages by up to 17

percent, ostensibly because children in the regions are

underrepresented. "We are going to educate our elite, the

future leadership of the country ... in the regions in

particular," Mr. Lukashenko told students last fall.



The Education Ministry is also suspected of being behind the

recent call for a review of the dissertation of a prominent

writer, Ales Pashkevich. A panel of experts from the Higher

Examination Board, which oversees postgraduate study, had

recommended the publication of Mr. Pashkevich's research on

the work of 20th-century Belarussian ИmigrИ writers. It also

had been approved by academics at Belarus State University

and Gomel State University.



But the dissertation was marked for review by the

examination board after war veterans condemned it as work

that did not conform to the state ideology.



Siarhei S. Vetokhin, a vice rector at the Republican

Institute of Higher Schools, confirms that other topics for

dissertations have been discredited. The theses, however,

are small in number and related almost exclusively to the

political, not the hard, sciences, he said.



"It really stinks," says Mr. Silitski, a former associate

professor at the European Humanities University who came of

age in the early 1990s, when the country was flush with

independence and Mr. Lukashenko was still the director of a

communal farm.



"At first I became sad, but I'm a social scientist, and I

have to understand the logic of the process. I also

understand that it's not forever," he said. "But you can

forget about things changing [for the better] until the

regime is gone."



http://chronicle.com

Section: International

Volume 51, Issue 25, Page A36

February 25, 2005



________________________________________________________



An Institution Is Shuttered for Its Western Ways

By BRYON MACWILLIAMS



Minsk, Belarus



This was supposed to be the last semester of undergraduate

study for Olga Rak, who was majoring in languages and

international economics at the European Humanities

University here. Instead, she has dropped her studies

altogether.



Ms. Rak was several weeks away from the beginning of her

final year at the best private university in the country

when it was abruptly ordered closed by the government. Some

1,300 students were stranded by the move, which the

country's president has since said was steeped in politics

and deliberately made young people the victims of adult

games.



"This event changed all our lives," said Ms. Rak, who

intends to resume her studies next fall at a university in

France. "I sort of prepared for it, but we still didn't

think it would happen. I still can't believe it happened."



The closure was the culmination of several years of pressure

by the government to bring the European Humanities

University, which is financed by Western organizations,

increasingly in line with the ideology and autocratic

policies of the administration of President Aleksandr

Lukashenko.



As a result, the students and the professors who taught them

have been labeled as dissidents. Dozens of former students

have left the country for universities in Europe and the

United States, while those who have been absorbed into the

system of state universities are being forced to repeat

classes, and years of study.



Among the Best



Mr. Lukashenko has said that initially he viewed the

European Humanities University as an "interesting and

attractive project" because it brought in foreign lecturers

and issued diplomas recognized outside the country. (State

universities still operate largely according to the Soviet

model.)



But when it became clear, he told local reporters, that the

university's goal was to create "a new elite" who would

"carry Belarus to the West," its days were numbered.



Professors at the university, many of whom formerly taught

at state institutions, are now seen as pariahs too dangerous

to take back. So the university has moved into exile in

neighboring Lithuania in order to survive, and is providing

distance learning from there. Its rector, Anatoliy

Mikhailov, and his family, now live in Russia and the United

States.



"We thought that EHU was the best of all other universities,

that there was no way they could close it because, as far as

knowledge is concerned, it was the best," said Maria

Yemilyanova, a third-year student majoring in languages and

civil law who has since enrolled in Belarus State University

here.



"We are kind of hoping that EHU will open up, somehow,

somewhere else," she said. "When you think about it,

Mikhailov is our papa, and EHU is our alma mater -- our

parents, it works out. ... So, for now, everybody who has

gone away is holding within him the aura of EHU, and the

hope of one day coming back."



Some students, in fact, are still taking classes -- across

continents, across oceans -- to uncertain ends: European

Humanities University diplomas are no longer recognized by

the government. Yet the loss of classroom space in the real

world has not carried over into the virtual world. Some

professors continue to work daily from the computer lab at

the university's administrative building.



Viktoriya Kalesnikava has been studying in the United States

but still takes classes at European Humanities via the

Internet. "I have three different virtual classes, and every

week I write a paper and send it off by e-mail," said the

senior at Cabrini College, a Roman Catholic institution in

Pennsylvania.



Ms. Kalesnikava was working last summer in a small resort

town along the Atlantic coast of southern New Jersey when

she learned that she would not have a university to go back

to in the fall: "It was a real shock. We knew that it could

happen. ... But I never thought that it could be so real."



She has remained a philosophy major at Cabrini, which she

describes as a "paradise" for scholarship. "Still, I really

miss my old study group, our spirit of working together, our

discussions," she said. "We were really interested in

learning and discussing different things from different

points of view. ... Our teachers, our lecturers, were really

serious people."



"In general, although our university was not old, it created

a special spirit that united us -- and that's something,"

she said in a telephone interview. "I really like it here,

but if I could get a degree from EHU, I would."



The director of the philosophy department at the European

Humanities University, Ryhor Miniankou, is the former head

of the philosophy department at Belarus State University. It

would be impossible for him to return, however: Because of

his association with European Humanities, he is a marked man

in Belarussian education circles.



He and his colleagues have exhausted their vacation days,

their sick days. "We'd like to stay here and work, and we're

trying to figure out how," he said. "Soon, they're going to

fire us."



Inevitable Closure



The European Humanities University was founded in 1992 by a

group of academics and the Belarussian Orthodox Church to

revive what administrators called a spirit of balance

between church and academe. It was secular in its teachings,

however, and modeled largely on American universities.

Sources of financing, too, were largely American, chief

among them the Open Society Institute, through its

higher-education support program, as well as the John D. and

Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Eurasia Foundation,

and the European Union.



It began with 67 students, and had grown last fall to more

than 1,300 students.



Not even the government could deny its academic merit. A

2003 report by the Ministry of Education rated the

university first overall among all private institutions, and

second only behind Belarus State University -- the country's

wealthiest and largest, with 6,000 students -- among classic

and pedagogical universities, both public and private.



The unpublished report, a copy of which was obtained by The

Chronicle, was suppressed by the ministry. It would not look

good if the ministry once praised the very institution that

it was trying to discredit and, eventually, shut down.



The university's demise had been planned over several years,

Mr. Lukashenko asserted last fall at a public gathering. Yet

the end came swiftly. On July 21, the government informed

university officials that it would terminate the lease of

its main building. On August 1, the Education Ministry

revoked its license -- on grounds of insufficient classroom

space.



The closure, in one respect, was inevitable in the hardening

political climate. "It would have been very difficult for us

to survive and preserve our mission," says Vladimir Dounaev,

the first vice rector. "A university without academic

freedom and autonomy already isn't a university."



Reincarnation?



University administrators are restructuring the institution

to become a regional university with campuses in Lithuania

and, perhaps, Poland, that would bridge old and new Europe

and unite their universities with those in former Soviet

republics in the Caucasus and Central Asia.



Major financial backers have pledged to continue to support

the institution and its expanding mission. The university

also has enlisted as partners two universities in Lithuania,

and one in Germany, as well as the American Councils for

International Education, a not-for-profit educational

organization.



Training and language programs would continue in Minsk under

current plans, but most major programs of study would be

provided from Lithuania via distance learning.



"Of course it's not the same university," Mr. Dounaev says,

"but perhaps it will be even better."



Despite years of planning, the Education Ministry was poorly

prepared for the university's closure: State universities

struggled to absorb its student body and have been

uncompromising in refusing many credits from the outlawed

institution.



Most students are being told that they must repeat classes

in cases where the curriculum at the European Humanities

University differed from the strict standards for state

institutions, which happened more often than not. Ms.

Yemilyanova was accepted by Belarus State University on the

condition that she repeat a year, even though the state

university offers less than half the credits that EHU

offered in civil law, her major.



Moreover, the annual tuition for Ms. Yemilyanova at Belarus

State is $1,500, as opposed to $700 at European Humanities.

"My salary for a year is almost exactly the sum of annual

tuition," says the student's mother, Irina, a single mother

who also has a teenage son.



Ms. Rak opted to work this year for a French company here

after she was told that most of her credits would not

transfer to Belarus State University. She would have had to

study an additional three years, she said, plus take 29

exams to verify her aptitude in a battery of subjects.



So she intends to return to her studies next fall, only at

one of the universities in France that has agreed to take in

students from the European Humanities University at no

charge, or at reduced tuition.



"The university is closed," she says, "but we also have the

whole world before us. Ironically, we now have many

possibilities."



http://chronicle.com

Section: International

Volume 51, Issue 25, Page A38