Minsk, Belarus
A children’s magazine popular since 1924 has become the latest victim of the Belarus government’s campaign against the Belarusian language. The government gave no reason for shutting down Byarozka, the only Belarusian-language weekly for kids, leaving the political opposition to conclude that the language was the culprit. President Alyaksandr Lukashenka, who has an avowed nostalgia for all things Soviet, disdains Belarusian, which he considers a primitive bastardization of the more elegant Russian language. “It is impossible to express anything complex in Belarusian,” he once said. Lukashenka has been trying to promote the speaking of Russian as part of his campaign to reunite Belarus with Russia. Over the past decade, he has cut funding for Belarusian textbooks and closed publishing houses.
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