2023-06-15 14:38:19
“Adventures of ARA in Belarus” – this is the name of the book about the largest humanitarian aid to the population of Belarus in the 20th century. Why is this event important? Why is she forgotten? What does the memory of historical events mean and what role does it play in shaping the future?
We talk about this with the author of the book, Alyaksandr Lukashuk, journalist, researcher of the history of Belarus in the 20th century, until recently the director of the Belarusian service of Radio Svaboda.
8:01 – why the war in Ukraine helped Belarus not to lose the world’s attention.
9:27 — how Alexander Lukashuk became interested in the American Aid Administration and its activities in Belarus in the 1920s.
12:18 – did the American administration understand a hundred years ago that they were working in Belarus, not in Russia.
15:53 — why the history of ARA activity in Belarus was completely forgotten.
20:48 – what are the specifics of the war in Ukraine for Belarus, what is the war actually being fought for.
26:08 — how the fate of ARA employees who worked in Belarus turned out.
28:06 — what can be the politics of memory in the future democratic Belarus.
A fragment of the conversation between the anchor Serhiy Ablameyka and Alexander Lukashuk:
— At the end of your book, you wrote an article for the future encyclopedia of free Belarus, where you summarized the results of the aid provided to Belarus by the American Aid Administration (AAA) in the 1920s. The figures and facts given there are impressive. I quote a small passage:
“In 1922-1923, three ARA districts worked in Belarus (on the administrative territory of the BSSR and the RSFSR). In total, more than 14,440 tons of American aid was received (including 6,825 tons in Minsk, 4,441 tons in Vitebsk, and 3,175 tons in Gomel) worth more than 2,730,000 dollars. Delivered more than 10 thousand 110 tons of food parcels worth 10 dollars each for the total amount of 1 million 732 thousand dollars (18.5% of all ARA parcels). 988 tons of food rations were given free of charge to children, sick people in hospitals and refugees. ARA took care of more than 300 orphanages, in addition to food, it supplied clothes, shoes, and medical supplies. Contributed to the repatriation of refugees who left Belarus during the First World War. Sanitary equipment was delivered, food and medical assistance were organized in the Kozirov refugee concentration camp (the largest at that time in the world). More than 1 million people were vaccinated. Medicines, sanitation materials and equipment with a total weight of 484 tons, the cost of which exceeded 470 thousand dollars, were received by more than 300 medical institutions. The medical work of ARA protected Belarus and Poland from the typhus epidemic.”
– Why was this story forgotten?
– She was not forgotten. This is a classic result of the politics of memory. She was not forgotten, but erased, forbidden. It was a deliberate policy to ensure that this memory would not be preserved.
At first, the Soviet government thanked the ARA in every possible way. There are acknowledgments from the heads of the Soviet government from Moscow, which in the 1920s were received by the American Aid Administration and personally by Herbert Hoover. The authorities of Belarus also thanked ARA. In the newspapers of that time, you can find official reports on this topic.
But over time, for example, some leaders who signed those thanks were arrested – for example, Zinoviev or Bukharin – and, accordingly, everything associated with their names was deleted.
But not only. The fact is that from the very beginning, when the Americans first arrived and started working on the territory of Soviet Russia and Soviet Belarus, they were closely watched by both the authorities and the Cheka-GPU. Lenin gave direct orders to control, not to allow. And the authorities all the time quite strongly prevented the ARA from working.
The main problem was control. To whom should these parcels be distributed? The authorities wanted the Americans to deliver aid, but they wanted to distribute it themselves. The Americans did not agree to this and until the end preserved independence in who will distribute the aid.
They went out all the time with inspections to orphanages and other places. It is such a lively, dramatic economic and sometimes criminal story.
But if you look at the Soviet encyclopedias of the 1920s, 1930s and post-war years, you can see how the articles about the ARA changed. At first they were sympathetic, then neutral, and then openly hostile. In the 1970s, the book “Subversion under the banner of aid” was already published by the publishing house “Politisdat”. There was already non-scientific fiction, there were already such pins working against ARA that I read it with great interest. They tried to present this story, completely excluding any positive universal quality and significance of this aid, which saved millions of people in Russia, and completely underlined everything with their ingratitude.
– You study the politics of memory – its significance is especially clearly visible on the example of the barbaric war of Russia against Ukraine, which is sometimes called the war for the past. What are the specifics of this war in the 21st century in general and for Belarus in particular? For what heights or areas are the most important, in your opinion, battles in this war?
– Let’s look at the neighbors. The replacement of other people’s names, monuments, and the return of one’s own names happened a long time ago in the Baltic countries, in Poland, and is being completed in Ukraine. In my opinion, this is not a rewriting of history or even a restoration of historical justice – I call it an act of moral hygiene. This is a sanitary-medical operation: wash the wound, pull out the stapes, foreign body, operate on the cataract, which will block the vision.
In my work here in Washington, I have identified two criteria that have helped me to select the themes and events of history that I believe most clearly correspond to the theme of the politics of memory. The first is some historical event or memory of it, which is now actively used in politics – either by the government, or by the opposition, or by some minority. This means that it is now working, although it happened a long time ago. For example, the Kalinowski uprising or the Second World War.
The second criterion for choosing this topic is the opposite of the first. If no one pays attention to it – neither the government, nor the opposition, nor anyone else, although they should.
These two principles helped me identify half a dozen, in my opinion, very significant historical events, the memory of which is extremely important for the preservation and development of the subject of Belarus. This is not only the Kalinowski uprising or the events of 100 years ago, repressions or post-war resistance. This and what we call not even recent, but modern history – the events of 2020, are the voices of the prison, which are now very important to hear.
Now, the prison book of Oleg Gruzhdilovich is published on the website of Radio Svaboda – in my opinion, it is one of the best that has been written in Belarus over the past decades on the subject of prison. I can only compare it with Ales Bialiatski’s work “Prison notebooks”, which also impressed me a lot. And I was impressed not by horrors – everyone goes through horrors there, but by their vision, feeling of prison life and its transmission.
Belarusian national memory is also being created today in Ukraine. These are also volunteers, people who, together with the Ukrainians, are experiencing this barbaric aggression, who, together with their loved ones or their children, descend into bomb shelters under the sirens.
This is also the memory created now by Belarusians in exile who continue to study and work. Some of them keep their cultural identification, some assimilate. These processes, it seems to me, have historical significance. They should be noted and saved.
I had the opportunity to talk about this with Svetlana Aleksievich, who postponed her planned books about love and old age and is now writing a sequel to the book about the red man. As it turned out, it did not end at all. I also talked about it with Anne Applebaum, a researcher of Soviet and post-Soviet history. For them, the importance of recording this process of creating a new memory is unquestionable.
And you know, no dictatorship will be able to do anything with this process of memory fixation. The historical lessons we know with the politics of memory are actually very optimistic. It is only a matter of time, but not a matter of whether or not it will happen. It will be. The only question is when.
Audio book by Alexander Lukashuk “Adventures of ARA in Belarus”
The book “Adventures of the ARA in Belarus”, its text with many illustrations and historical archive documents is available on our website at the Library of Freedom:
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