Stay Out Of It, Minsk Is Not Yours
- 2.05.2025, 12:15
Get out of our town.
When Putin in Volgograd, standing next to Lukashenko, started talking about the heroes of the defense of Minsk, Sevastopol, Stalingrad, I first thought that he simply mixed up: whether it was Brest Fortress or, for example, Minsk Fortress - who can tell them, the Belarusians. But he also named Brest Fortress. So it's not a matter of ignorance, he didn't confuse anything. But the name of Odessa did not sound. And everything became clear: the current Odessa is an enemy city, and it is necessary to replace it urgently with something reliable on the territory of the ally. Let it be Minsk, what could be more reliable?
The historians with whom I spoke after this phrase, said with one voice: there was no such thing even in Soviet historiography. Yes, myths were created - about the heroes-Panfilovtsy, about the difficult combat missions of Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya or about the strong underground organization "Young Guard", which was led by the Communist Party. But even they did not have enough imagination for the defense of Minsk.
Now, decades later, when all the legends of Soviet propaganda have been safely debunked, a new myth is being created before our eyes - about the defense of Minsk. While everyone knows that only the 100th Infantry Division in the area of Ostroshitsky town tried to hold off the German offensive for some time, although the encirclement ring had already closed. But now it has "closed" thanks to Putin's words during his joint trip with Lukashenko to Volgograd, which, to all appearances, will soon become Stalingrad again. And in our country, besides Stalin's line, they will build some other line, bring in masquerades and tell about the defense of Minsk.
Minners, who as children fled with their mothers and grandmothers from Minsk - a city abandoned by the leadership even before the Germans reached Baranavichy - are still alive, by the way. Then there were party lies of the first secretary of the Belarusian Central Committee Panteleimon Ponomarenko, who described in the newspaper "Pravda" how the working class of Belarus in friendly rows took out all the enterprises in evacuation, and the Germans got only empty deserted cities. Only much later, in 1959, the Minsk underground women would write a letter to the Central Committee of the CPSU about Ponomarenko's escape with carpets and flower pots in front of the townspeople. At the same time, in 1959, the rehabilitation of the Minsk underground would gradually begin.
The biggest mystery for me in Soviet historiography was the question: why, after the war, did the USSR fundamentally ignore the resistance on the territory of Belarus? I still, to be honest, don't have an answer. It looks illogical. After the war, everyone was glorified, a memorial plaque was hung on every shed, while at the same time many participants of the Minsk underground were sitting in camps. The same Ponomarenko, who escaped from Minsk, said that the party had not created any underground, and therefore it was Gestapo agents. And after the war Minsk residents, who organized sabotage and printed leaflets under the noses of the occupants, were simply arrested as accomplices of the fascists. The same thing, by the way, happened to the defenders of the Brest Fortress - the survivors were first in captivity, and then in the Gulag.
Let's say, the Soviet ideologists did not like that one of the organizers and leaders of the Minsk underground was Isai Kazinets. A Jew, a stranger, not a titular. But there was also Ivan Kovalev - a pure, propertied, Chechersk native. But no, even after his arrest and death in 1943, Kovalev was posthumously continued to be considered a Gestapo agent and was rehabilitated only in 1990. If not for Ivan Novikov's book "Ruins Shoot at Point-blank Range", perhaps no one would have learned about the Minsk underground. And if not for the book Sergey Smirnov "Brest Fortress", no one would have known about the heroes of the fortress either. But it was already the sixties. Twenty years after the war, ten years after the camps, a few years after rehabilitation. The stories of the Belarusian heroes had to wade through torture in the Gestapo, through barbed wire in Stalin's camps, through the lies of the rear party rats who appropriated their exploits. Today's rats are climbing with their dirty paws into history in the same way, trying to establish their own orders there, to make it comfortable and pliable. Stay out of it. Minsk is not yours.
But I think I understand why the myth about the heroic defense of Minsk is needed. Now Lukashenko, who tells that his father died in the war, will be able to name even the time and place: he died in the forty-first during the defense of Minsk. Thanks to Putin for the tip-off.
Irina Khalip, especially for Charter97.org.