I'll be brief about your question of self-awareness, of identity. It is a tragedy in Belarus today, because in the past 15 years the government has constantly been destroying in people's minds their linkage to history, to culture, and to their language. It is a paradoxical situation in a country when you have to save your national language and it is one of two official languages. It is the first language, the first official language, and the majority of people don't speak it, because in the past 15 years all possible conditions were created to make another language the first official language. That is Russian, the one I'm speaking now, and not Belarusian.
So in those past 15 years in Belarus, schools that worked in Belarusian were closed. Before that, people used to come in from the village schools where everybody spoke Belarusian. For those who come in from the village schools and go to university, in the schools they write a Russian language exam, which means that the government has done everything... You'll understand what I mean if you talk about the hundred-year history of Belarus, where they spoke their own language and talked about a national culture. But to talk about unification of the country would have been difficult--not a partnership, but I'm talking about unification.
Our history with Russia started at the end of the 1900s, but the president says you must be very happy, there's no war, and everything is fine. That's what they talk about when they talk about societal issues.