Belarusian Popular Front "Revival" or BPF (Belarus during the perestroika times. Its first and most charismatic leader was Zianon Pazniak.
The Belarusian Popular Front was established in 1988 as both a political party and a cultural movement. Membership is open to all Belarusian citizens as well as any democratic organization. Its goals are democracy and independence through national rebirth and rebuilding after being nearly destroyed culturally and economically during the times of the Soviet Union.
The main idea of the Front was the revival of the national idea, including the rebirth of the Belarusian language. Initially its orientation was pro-Western, in particular, pro-Polish and anti-Russian. At one moment they propagated the idea of the union from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea that would involve Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania, similar to Józef Pilsudski's "Miedzymorze".
Among the significant achievements of the Front was uncovering the truth about the burial site of Kurapaty near Minsk, where the NKVD performed its secret killings.
Initially the Front had significant visibility because of its numerous active public actions that almost always ended in clashes with police and KGB. The BPF adopted the historical Belarusian symbolics: white-red-white flag and the Pahonyacoat of arms . The same symbols were used by the unfortunate BNR. This fact allowed communists to label the BPF as "fascists". People used to get arrested in the street for wearing a white-red-white scarf.
In 1994 the BPF formed a so-called “shadow” cabinet consisting of 100 BPF intellectuals. Its first Prime Minister was Uladzimir Zablocki. It originally contained 18 commissions that published ideas and proposed laws and plans for restructuring the government and economy. Its last economic reform proposal was published in 1999.
We call upon the servicemen of the Belarusian Secret Services not to break the law, to stop persecuting the democratic youth, and to take heed rather of the threat to Belarus’s independence caused by Lukashenka’s regime, as well as to the cases of the disappearance of well-known politicians from the opposition”.
During the debates, the members of the BPF stressed the necessity of preserving the BPFÂ’s autonomy within the framework of the integrated campaign network for the candidate, and also that an appropriate role should be secured for the BPF in his integrated campaign headquarters:
The chairman of the BPF “Adradzennie” Vincuk Viacorka made the following comments on the event: “It is fortunate that the agreement between the two candidates has been signed, initialed by the leaders of the democratic parties which are members of the CCDF.
A popularfront is a broad coalition of different political groupings, often made up of leftists and centrists who are united by opposition to another group (most often fascist or far-right groups).
The term "national front", similar in name but describing a different form of ruling, using obstensibly non-Communist parties which were in fact controlled by and subservient to the Communist party as part of a "coalition", was used in Central and Eastern Europe during the Cold War.
Trotsky also argued that in popularfronts, working class demands are reduced to their bare minimum, and the ability of the working class to put forward its own independent set of politics is compromised.
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