Since 2004, the course “Foundations of the Ideology of the Belarusian State” has been mandatory for most students at Belarusian universities. However, there is no single textbook for the subject: different universities use their own teaching materials, written by local lecturers and researchers.
This study analyses 16 textbooks on the foundations of ideology published between 2005 and 2021. Its aim is to identify which elements of state ideology are reproduced most consistently in university teaching materials, how authorship shapes their content, and what conclusions can be drawn for the future de-ideologization of education in Belarus.
The full version of the study answers the following questions:
- What role do universities play in reproducing state ideology?
- Which core ideological narratives and ideas about Belarus underlie the textbooks?
- Does the year of publication affect how ideologically charged the textbooks are?
- Does authorship affect the content of the textbooks?
It also offers a set of recommendations for the de-ideologization of education, should democratic reforms take place in Belarus.
Since 2004, the course “Foundations of the Ideology of the Belarusian State” has been a mandatory part of the curriculum at almost every university in the country. Yet despite how widely the discipline is taught, no single, standard textbook for it has ever been published. On the contrary, almost every Belarusian university has its own version of the syllabus, authored by local educators and researchers. This raises a question: what exactly is the difference between these versions, and how does authorship shape the way ideology is presented across different universities over time? By establishing which elements of ideology appear most often in these textbooks, and who their authors are, this study puts forward a set of recommendations for the de-ideologization of education at Belarusian universities as part of transitional justice[Transitional justice refers to the process of seeking justice for systematic human rights violations after wars, and during the transition from an authoritarian regime to a democratic one (OHCHR 2023).], should democratic reform take place in Belarus.
How does education shape ideology?
Vitali Silitski counts education among the mechanisms of “preemptive authoritarianism” — where an undemocratic regime takes consistent steps to prevent a change of power before any threat arises (2009). As a central mechanism of Louis Althusser’s “Ideological State Apparatus,” education directly shapes state ideology (1971): it shapes political opinions, values, and moral norms, and maintains the existing relations of power and subordination. This is the role the “Foundations of the Ideology of the Belarusian State” textbooks set out to play, while transmitting a particular notion of national identity, history, the country’s political structure, and Belarus’s place in the world.
What does the ideology course teach?
The present study analysed 16 books on the “Foundations of the Ideology of the Belarusian State”, published by Belarus’s largest universities between 2005 and 2021 and publicly available. While this sample does not cover all existing manuals, it allows us to identify the main ideological narratives in the education system. Twenty-five categories of Belarusian ideology were identified, grouped by content (national identity, belonging to Russian civilization, historical narratives), mechanisms (propaganda, ideology as objective science), the systematic concealment of facts, and rhetorical features such as naming and then negating concepts. The categories were drawn from existing research (Bekus 2008; Leshchenko 2008) and from the texts themselves. Each feature was measured on a scale from 0 to 3, where 0 means the concept is absent and 3 a high concentration of ideological narrative. Scores combine a count of lexical markers with close reading and verification. The score for each row in Figure 1 is the mean across all sixteen books, so a longer bar indicates a feature that appears both frequently and consistently throughout the whole corpus.
Figure 1. Components of State Ideology: Average Intensity Across a Corpus of 16 Textbooks
average intensity by category (0 = absent · 3 = saturated)
The explicit description of the mechanisms of ideological propaganda is, logically enough, present in the overwhelming majority of the texts. Describing a unique Belarusian national identity and tying it to “Russian civilization” is likewise one of the most overt narratives in the textbooks. It is important to note that the vast majority of them present ideology as a scientific worldview, as in Soviet times, in order to give the state narrative the status of objective, indisputable truth (Pateman 2019, 3). Presenting ideology in this way leaves little room for criticism and discussion.
The books repeatedly use vocabulary that may read as neutral from the outside but is understood “by insiders” — that is, people within the Belarusian context. Words like “internal threats,” “stability,” and “strong leader” carry great weight there. At the same time, categories that directly glorify the sitting president, the security forces, or the Belarusian nation appear in the textbooks relatively rarely. Another important focus of the analysis was the facts kept hidden from those taking the course. Some historical episodes — such as the “Night of the Executed Poets,” an example of Stalinist repression and the campaign against the intelligentsia on Belarusian soil — are absent from many textbooks or mentioned in passing, as are the country’s problems: hyperinflation, the loss of the Belarusian language and Belarus’s cultural artefacts. The reproduction of ideology, then, happens not so much through direct praise of the political leadership as through the spread of particular historical, cultural, and political ideas about Belarus.
Does the year of publication matter?
Figure 2 shows each textbook’s overall ideological intensity by year of publication. Summing the scores across the twenty-five categories gives each book an intensity score, and comparing these against publication year reveals a downward trend. The foundational texts show the highest values: the 2005 manual of the Academy of Public Administration under the President of the Republic of Belarus, edited by S. N. Knyazev and S. V. Reshetnikov, and the Belarusian State Pedagogical University textbook written by a team of authors together with V. V. Shinkarev in 2008. These first “canonical” textbooks, released soon after the recommendation to introduce the course, are still in use at several universities. Later books, including those published after the 2020 protests, show lower intensity. Strikingly, the post-2020 hardening of state rhetoric — the language of “extremism,” “colour revolutions,” and “genocide” — leaves no trace at all in the corpus of textbooks analysed.
Figure 2. Ideological Intensity by Publication Year and Author Type
Over time, ideology took on a more scientific character. Whereas the earliest textbooks are marked by a vivid emotional tone, with the authors’ opinions clearly showing through, the later editions read like dry scientific facts that cannot be challenged or called into question. Some editions, however, still leave room for independent judgement — presenting the Belarusian People’s Republic (BNR), for example, from two viewpoints: as an important part of Belarusian national self-determination, or as an unrecognized state. While the Polotsk State University edition of 2009 and the Belarusian State Technological University edition of 2010 describe both, more recent textbooks state plainly that the BNR “was not a state formation even in a ‘puppet’ form,” echoing the words of V. A. Krutalevich, a Belarusian historian of the Soviet period (1999). Yet even balanced textbooks give the BNR’s importance only a few lines and the limits of the Republic’s role several paragraphs, reinforcing a particular view through discourse.
Given that the level of ideology in the textbooks did not increase over time but, on the contrary, declined, it is impossible to conclude that the way Belarusian ideology is taught at universities has become more standardized or radical over the years. If anything, the opposite is true: its radicalism decreased as the textbooks grew more scientific and the emotional intensity of the narratives declined.
Different textbooks, different ideology
The diagrams discussed above, however, do not reveal the differences in how ideology is described from one textbook to another. To capture these, the study divided the university textbooks by their civilizational orientation into more Russia-centred and more Belarusian-national ones. Unlike the other features, it was precisely this categorization that showed that the intensity of ideology depends not only on the particular set of narratives chosen, but also on certain underlying assumptions about Belarusian identity.
Figure 3. How Textbooks Differ: Civilizational Orientation × Ideological Intensity
Plotting the textbooks on a chart by ideological intensity and civilizational orientation reveals a clear trend: the more Russia-centred editions tend to have a higher intensity of ideology, while the textbooks written around the idea that Belarusian national self-determination matters in its own right, apart from other states, conversely show a lower level of ideology across the twenty-five categories defined above.
Who writes the ideology textbooks?
Having identified the most common narratives and the influence of publication year and ideological alignment on a textbook’s intensity, the logical next question is whether the books’ authorship affects how ideology is presented. The authors were divided into three categories: ideological functionary, academic functionary, and regular academic. Author categories were determined using publicly available sources, such as university websites, publication records, and biographical profiles. The classification considered factors such as publication history, primary research areas, involvement in ideological activities, and experience in governmental or administrative structures. Each book was sorted by the type of author who wrote most of its text. One thing can be noted right away: the top three most ideologically charged textbooks all belong to ideological functionaries — that is, they are state ideologists directly, many of whom have few or no publications outside ideological work.
Among the editions that follow, authorship is distributed between academic functionaries and regular academics. Academic functionaries are university employees affiliated with the current government through special state grants or particular posts they hold in government organizations, and who have on their CVs other works on the ideology of the Belarusian state or pro-government, Russia-centred texts. Regular academics, by contrast, do no visible ideological work and often come from other academic fields. It is notable that some of the most ideologically saturated textbooks are written by authors whose professional activity is connected first and foremost with state ideological structures rather than with academic research and publication. It is precisely in such chapters that emotional statements and opinions appear most openly, unconcealed by academic language — which may point to limited academic review.
Figure 4. Ideological Intensity of Textbooks by Lead Author Type
✦ = co-authored / mixed team (different author types). 16 books; Knyazev 2004 textbook excluded.
This network of authors involved in producing ideological teaching materials — together with the fact that the most ideologically charged textbook anchors a course at a pedagogical university, which spreads ideology further through its graduate teachers — returns us to Althusser’s theory of ideological state apparatuses (1971). As the central link in the educational ideological apparatus, the textbooks and their authors are meant to teach new generations the ideology of the Belarusian state, so that young people will go on defining themselves through the lens of state ideology and be less inclined to oppose the regime.
The difference between textbooks of high and low ideological intensity, then, has more to do with the type of authors behind a given edition and their civilizational orientation, while the year of publication has, on the whole, a limited influence on the books’ content. Because Belarusian state ideology is taught on a mass, systematic scale, in recent years it has been reproduced from earlier texts rather than developed and disseminated anew.
What should be done next?
Now that the books’ main themes, differences, and similarities have been identified, these findings can inform recommendations for reforming the education system in Belarus as part of a transitional-justice process, should the political system be democratized.
- Replacing the state-ideology course
A democratic reform of higher education should move away from compulsory ideological instruction altogether. Instead, universities could expand opportunities for students to study topics such as constitutional governance, human rights, media literacy, and civic participation through courses that encourage debate, critical reflection, and engagement with multiple perspectives. - Revising the content of curricula
Because several of the categories used to analyse this body of literature also appear in school history and social-studies textbooks, the study offers a picture of what ideology is made of at both the university and the school level. Its results point to the topics that are especially important to address when rewriting university and school curricula in order to de-ideologize education: the Russia-centred approach to defining Belarusian national identity; the disregard for Russification and the loss of the Belarusian language; the revision of Belarusian history, especially the glorification of the Soviet Union; and the centrality of the president and the role of the security forces and propaganda in the state. - Developing critical thinking in higher education
As for the scientific character of ideological education at universities, it is worth focusing on developing and encouraging critical thinking, especially in the study of the social sciences. These subjects should be taught as ideas that call for deep reflection, where criticism and questions are not only appropriate but an important part of learning. Through open-ended questions and additional training for university teachers, the development of critical thinking could become the key to a more democratic and pluralistic society. - Lustration and institutional reform
An important step in the transitional-justice process is lustration, whereby individuals who were previously involved in the functioning of an authoritarian political regime are removed from work in organizations of this kind (Horne 2014). The list of authors of ideological education makes it possible to identify those whose role in reproducing state ideology warrants further study as part of lustration and institutional reform.
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