Leader Pushes Belarus Back Toward Russia : Europe: Former Soviet republic was once gripped by nationalism. Now its president wants ‘Slavic unity’ with Moscow.

School No. 216 here, a public academy for gifted children grades one to four, is a few weeks younger than the sovereign Republic of Belarus and a good indicator of where this former Soviet state is heading.

Opened in early 1992, the school was required by a new law to offer a curriculum in the renascent Belarussian language alongside the traditional one in Russian. Many parents chose Belarussian for their kids. “It was a craze,” one mother recalls. “We were intoxicated with independence.”

But when No. 216’s smartly decorated classrooms opened for school this month, the native tongue was all but silent. Once rated among the top Belarussian-language schools, No. 216 now teaches the three Rs--along with special courses in design, computer skills, psychology and etiquette--in Russian only. Starting this academic year, so do most other Belarussian schools.

The turnabout is a giant leap in Slavic Belarus’ retreat from a separate national identity that most of its 10 million people never asked for. Of all Soviet orphans, Belarus is the most reluctant of nations, the most eager to return to the bosom of Mother Russia.

The back-to-Russia movement is led by Alexander G. Lukashenko, a former Soviet collective farm boss who was elected Belarus’ president 14 months ago. Belarussian nationalists say he is using dictatorial methods to diminish the new nation’s culture, impose his vision of “Slavic unity” and plant a Moscow-backed, anti-Western dictatorship in the middle of Europe.

But they admit that most people here either welcome these features of a Soviet-style order or passively go along.

“Under totalitarianism, language was the only distinctive feature of our nation, and it was dying,” Vasily V. Byikov, Belarus’ leading writer, said in a recent interview. “With independence, we got a unique chance to revive it. But we were too clumsy to handle such an unexpected and luxurious gift, and now it is being taken away.”

Lukashenko says his first mandate is to forge an economic union with Russia, but “if the people call for it, we will also have a political union that is even closer than the Soviet Union was.”

So far, he has signed a customs pact abolishing the border with his eastern neighbor and has agreed to maintain two Russian military bases here. He requires all foreign religious workers except Russian Orthodox ones to register with a state monitoring committee.

Claiming that “you cannot express anything of significance” in such an “impoverished language,” the president has halted a state policy to promote use of Belarussian through school curricula, academic research and publishing.

He tried to restore Soviet history texts--which overlooked the Belarussians’ few attempts at independence--in schools. Told that these books no longer exist, he ordered new ones written for next fall under the guidance of the onetime local ideology chief of the Soviet Communist Party.

The few who openly oppose Lukashenko are silenced by press censorship and a growing police force under his personal control. In April, Interior Ministry troops with submachine guns, helmets and black masks stormed Parliament and clubbed 18 nationalist deputies, ending an all-night fast to protest the president’s expanding powers.

An identical anti-riot force attacked nationalist labor activists in August and halted a strike by Minsk subway workers protesting a two-month delay in their paychecks. Three strike leaders were jailed and two independent unions banned.

Lukashenko’s alliance with Moscow troubles the West because he has cited it to justify halting the shipment of nuclear missiles to Russia and the destruction of Soviet-made tanks, commitments Belarus made under arms control treaties. He has unnerved Poland by allowing Russian troops to patrol this side of its border while accusing the Polish trade union Solidarity and “Western secret services” of fomenting the subway strike.

The most chilling throwback to the Cold War was a Belarussian military helicopter’s deadly shoot-down of two American balloonists crossing this country’s airspace last week during an international race across Europe--an incident Lukashenko’s government “regretted” but did not apologize for.

“The United States understands that Belarus will continue to have close ties to Russia,” U.S. Ambassador Kenneth S. Yalowitz said in a speech here earlier this year. But he added: “Strategically, we see the future of Belarus as being part of the new, larger Europe--a Europe no longer divided into East and West.”

But Lukashenko looks eastward these days. He fits into a club of other post-Soviet leaders, in Central Asia and the Caucasus, who ignore parliaments and rule by decree. Newspapers here suggest he is campaigning for a bigger role in a more imperial Russia led by someone like the neo-fascist Vladimir V. Zhirinovsky, whose populism and charisma are often compared to his own.

The 41-year-old Belarussian leader denies such ambition. But the Russia he wants to rejoin is clearly not the Russia of President Boris N. Yeltsin, who he said should be “damned” for helping the Soviet Union break apart. One of Lukashenko’s top security chiefs is a Chechen who joined the armed revolt against Yeltsin at Russia’s White House two years ago.

“Political integration with Russia is necessary, but it is hard to describe the shape this will take,” Vladimir P. Zametalin, a leading Lukashenko adviser, said in an interview. “It’s a hypothetical question, just as hypothetical as what Russia will be like after the 1996 presidential election. It will not depend entirely on us.”

Belarus, which means “White Russia,” has spent most of its history as a province of Russia, Poland or Lithuania. As flat as Kansas and nearly as large, it was locked in the Russian empire for most of the past 300 years and became a relatively prosperous agricultural and technological center of the Soviet command economy.

The crash of that system threw workers at Belarus’ outdated defense plants, collective farms and computer factories into poverty. Some survive as migrant laborers in Russia and Western Europe; others cling to old jobs with little work and dwindling pay. The hardships, nationalists admit, outweigh any stirring of national pride and make many Belarussians long for the past.

“You cannot overestimate how strong the Soviet mentality is here,” said Alexei B. Ilnitsky, a former customs official. “Instead of changing, people would rather wait for someone on top to take care of them. Instead of independence, they would rather go back to a bigger, more powerful flock.”

So far, Lukashenko’s rapprochement with Russia has not paid off. Belarus has not received the cheaper Russian oil it expected. And Moscow has rejected a common currency that would mean subsidizing its neighbor’s unreformed, state-run economy.

With his promise of quick prosperity unmet and his popularity waning, Lukashenko staged a masterful recovery by holding a referendum in May on the one other question that gets people here agitated--the language question.

An eastern Slavic tongue, Belarussian is spoken mainly among the country’s shrinking rural population and is dying in the cities. It is comprehensible for most Russian speakers. But writing and speaking it in school are another thing, and after independence, parents were not always free to choose the language of their children’s studies.

At School No. 216, for example, two first-grade sections last year were taught in Belarussian and one in Russian. Parents could opt for one or the other--until the Russian section filled up. Under the unpopular nationalist policy, everyone else had to take Belarussian, like it or not.

“We wanted to develop the language, but it shouldn’t have been done by force,” said Oleg A. Badalov, the principal at No. 216.

Zenon S. Poznyak, leader of the Belarussian Popular Front, did not help his nationalist cause in the referendum by attacking Leo Tolstoy and Alexander Pushkin, superstars of Russian literature, as linguistic “chauvinists.” Lukashenko smeared the Popular Front unfairly as extremists and fascists.

In the voting, 83% answered yes to the question “Should Russian have parity with Belarussian as the state language?” That made Belarus the first post-Soviet republic outside Russia to make Russian official. Voters also dropped the state seal and flag used since independence in favor of the old Soviet ones, minus the hammer and sickle, and gave Lukashenko the right to dissolve Parliament. Poznyak’s Front, which had 27 of the old Parliament’s 350 seats, was shut out in the election of new deputies that day--a stinging defeat for the national revival movement.

The vote inspired an assault on the Belarussian language. The Culture Ministry axed dozens of pending Belarussian titles from state publishing houses, including nine Soviet-censored volumes by Yanka Kupala, the late Belarussian poet.

Belarussian educator Adam Maldzis and a visiting scholar were hassled on the street by thugs who ordered them to speak Russian. “It’s none of your business what we’re speaking,” Maldzis said.

“It soon will be!” a thug warned.

The government instituted a new system of majority rule by parents and students. As a result, the number of Minsk’s 226 schools that teach in Belarussian fell from 161 in the last school year to 63 this fall.

“We had an illusion that we would survive on our own, so we rejected everything Russian,” said Bronislava M. Fastovich. “But time has clearly shown that without Russia we are nothing”--a feeling most people here share.