Conditions for the Success of National and Cultural Projects (Based on the Material of National Movements in the North-Western Region of the Russian Empire in the Second Half of the 19th Century)

The article deals with investigation into the conditions of the success of national movements. The analysis is based on comparing contrastive cases – the relatively successful Lithuanian and the relatively unsuccessful Belarusian national movements, as well as the policy of “Russification” of ethnic Lithuanians. The rise of national movements in the western part of the Russian Empire in the second half of the 19th century took place in the context of the restrictive measures by the imperial government against the Polish language and the Catholic Church and the decline in prestige of the previously dominant social group – the Polonized gentry after the defeat of the uprising of 1863–64. The success of the Lithuanian national project is due to the Catholic clergy of the territories inhabited by the ethnic Lithuanians – as an influential social group that enjoyed authority among the local population as well as among the local nobility. Considering government measures against the “harmful Polish influence” as well as the project of a “Reverse Union” (a certain united Orthodox-Catholic confession under the authority of orthodox clergy) in the Northwestern Krai of the Russian Empire, ethnic Lithuanians as a flock were for the local Catholic church a community that provides not only influence and prosperity, but also existence itself. In order to distance itself from the “Polishness”, the Catholic clergy promoted the idea of a catholic Lithuanian nation. The anti-Polish orientation of Lithuanian nationalism, the relatively low number of ethnic Lithuanians, significant linguistic and religious differences between Orthodox Slavs and Catholic Lithuanians also reduced the imperial administration’s interest in ethnic Lithuanians as an object of Russification. In the case of the Belarusian national movement, there was no such an influential social group in the second half of the 19th century, for which Belarusians as a nation would be a community providing basic social needs. The Greek Catholic Church, which could have become a national Belarusian church, joined the Russian Orthodox Church in 1839 and it was abolished later. The similarity of the Belarusian language, on the one hand, with Russian, and on the other hand, with the Polish languages led to its perception as a kind of “deviation from the norm”, significantly reducing its prestige as a literary language.