the beginning didn’t favor Belarus in the sense that once they finally gained independence it was taken from them and the one thing that made Belarusian, their language, was replaced with the language of those who intended to rule them. When the Bolshevik leadership took power they did not abandon their attitude on the merger of nations and ethnic groups, which in practice meant Russification and absolute enslavement to the central government. On the other hand, they emphasized the need to develop nationalist expression in various fields (Altshuler 1998). This is the ethnic-national conflict. Each Union Republic was regarded as a sovereign state unit and given a form of Soviet government. They had state flags, anthems, and other such emblems that gave expression to their nationality. The more Communist party rule became dominant and laid down the law in all walks of life and down to the last detail, the institutions and emblems designed to reflect sovereignty and/or ethnic autonomy had less and less real meaning (Altshuler 1998). This didn’t solve any of the problems because it supposedly recognized national rights and deprived them at the same time. So as long as the Communist party had power of intervention, the power of individual nations would never take precedence. This conflict would continue even though efforts were made to make people feel as though their nation was run by leaders of it’s own descent. This was the Soviet policy of taking each nation’s managerial elite along with Russians and appointing them to prominent posts within the Republic (Altshuler 1998). These elite groups were completely dependent on central authorities and the problems were not averted. So it can be said that the Communist party would solve ethnic-national conflict by increasing individual nation’s power but diverting it to the central power of the Union.During the transition stages the choice to seek unificat...
