Paul
Goble
Staunton, September 18 – Sometimes
the simultaneous appearance of two stories apparently unrelated sheds light on
issues more clearly than either of them does on its own. That is the case of
two stories today from Belarus, one about Moscow’s promotion of Russophile
books in that country and the other about the release of a Belarusian version
of “Forrest Gump.”
Nasha Niva has investigated how
money from the Kremlin has passed through the CIS-EMO, an apparently innocuous
organization that stands for the Commonwealth of Independent States – Election
Monitoring Organization, money to support books for Belarusians promoting
pro-Russian attitudes (belaruspartisan.org/politic/395008/).
The CIS-EMO ostensibly was to be the
counterpart of the OSCE’s Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights,
but its real purpose is to promote pro-Russian attitudes in former Soviet
republics. It has attracted attention
for books like Human Rights Violations in
Lithuania and The New Europe of
Vladimir Putin (with Marie Le Pen on the cover).
Since 2013, this organization has
been headed by Aleksandr Bedritsky of the Russian Institute for Strategic
Studies (RISI). Among the books with a
Belarusian dimension it has released since then are Belarusian Nationalism Against the Russian World, BSSR and Weestern Belorussia, and The White Guard of White Rus, all of
which are in Russian.
The CIS-EMO organization gets its
money from the Russian state budget via grants for “the development of a
humanitarian foundation of Russian-Belorussian integration and the countering
of falsification of history.” Last year, it received some 500,000 rubles or about
45,000 US dollars (grants2016.oprf.ru/grants2016-1/operators/perspektiva/requests/zhurnal/rec6880/).
The Russian
propaganda books are distributed in part for free but also sold in several
Russian Orthodox Church bookstores in Belarus.
How many people read or are influenced by them is unknown, the
Belarusian paper suggests. Also unknown is the number of Belarusians who are
ready to accept their message.
But this weekend, a competing
message will be offered in the Moskva Theater in Minsk when the
Belarusian-dubbed version of the American film “Forrest Gump” will be shown to
what are expected to be large and enthusiastic audiences who will demonstrate their
interest by paying for tickets (charter97.org/ru/news/2017/9/17/263205/).
Indeed, in what is
a kind of competition between the Zelig-like American film star and the kind of
stick propaganda figures in books like The White Guard of White Rus, there is very
little question as to who is going to win.
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