Patriot писал(а):
Hello.
What makes that Belarus must be dependent from Russia?
Known matter is self-insufficiency of energy.
I know about another factors, but I would like to hear about them from you, Belarusians.
It might be helpful when building Isthmus.
Z pavahaj.
Economy and industry inherited from the USSR. It's pretty much the main factor.
1) Belarusian soviet economy was mostly based on industry. BSSR was called an "assembly line" of the Soviet Union. We were sitting on the top of USSR production chains (IT, computers production, machinery productions, chemical industry), without much of local resources or market, completely dependent on raw materials and parts import, energy import and external market to sell our goods. In addition, strategic decisions and marketing was in Moscow, we just specialized in technical/production operations.
When USSR collapsed, Belarus was cut off from old production chains and markets. In addition, our main products were quite complex and it is a challenge to keep them competitive on the global market. It's not like crude oil. Western markets were pretty much closed for these types of products we had.
2) Belarus was not ready for independence, there was no internal fight for it, we got it pretty much accidentally as a result of USSR collapse.
Therefore, local elite groups (government, bureaucracy, high-rank management, top of police, army and special services) remained the same as in the BSSR, and their natural response for this sudden disaster/opportunity was to preserve what they got, try to restore old order of things.
The only way to do this, was to restore old soviet production chains. And the only way to restore them was to reintegrate with Russia - which remained the main market and was always the source of most raw materials and energy import for our economy.
3) As long as Belarus still got something to milk from soviet production heritage - Belarus will continue doing it. All the rest stuff about national identity and so on - is secondary to this.
In the nutshell, Belarus choice was very simple: dump soviet production heritage and run to EU or milk it together with Russia. Our elites chose the later. Frankly, there was no choice at all for them.