Belarusian Culture: Searching for a New Land

Maxim Zhbankov

Summary

The “year of pause” that is how it is tempting to call 2022, but this would be both true and fake. The political stagnation and lack of any real breakthrough on all fronts are obvious. The victory did not happen. Struggle in Belarus has ceased to be news, and Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has substantially depreciated the image of Belarusian people: from the heroic peaceful protester to the dubious citizen of the co-aggressor country.

Belarusian culture had to designate its European priority for the second time after the wave of emergency evacuation in the wake of the 2020 election. But does Europe need: Belarusian culture or cancellation of it, and what can Belarusian culture offer in this situation? In all these matters, Belarusian culture has been an auxiliary resource, which was manifested in its restrained anti-imperial thinking, its modest presence in the anti-war public field, and its low-key solidarity with Ukraine.

Nevertheless, its soft media presence gave Belarusian culture a chance for an organizational and semantic reboot and realignment. The policy of repression and coercion ultimately pushed subsidized state culture beyond any meaningful creative process. Both dimensions of live cultural work — domestic counterculture and foreign visits — demonstrated their capacity for creative adaptation in crises throughout the year.

Trends:

Administrative terror: loved ones are not to be parted with!

The current status of Belarusian culture is predetermined by its geographical, political, mental and stylistic dissociation. Cultural divisions are correlating with the gaps between political and social.

The most visible feature of the cultural dimension is the increasingly distinct identification of the two oppositely directed development paths — westernization (gradual integration into the European cultural space) and russification (bureaucratic coercive pro-government pressure on creative communities). This is not simply a movement in different directions, but an existence according to different maps of meaning.

The further we move, the more obvious the naiveté of all era-of-stability hopes for a harmonious alliance between the state culture industry and independent creativity. At the moment, these two are not only about different work techniques and interpretations of culture and culturality. They represent incompatible forms of life, where each perceives the opposite as an ideological challenge and a direct threat.

The results of the brutal mopping up of disloyal cultural activism alongside the conceptual and stylistic lethargy of state ideology are quite obvious: official culture is irreversibly turning into a simulation project of the colonial administration.

No alternative is in sight. Loyal art becomes agro-trash,1 transmits banalities, and broadcasts as if a local media service targeting parochial agro bosses, making the concepts of artistic quality and national identity not so much non-existent as utterly unimportant. The bigger part of what happens in the public cultural field is taking the ritualistic declarative format of a weird game with neither purpose nor meaning.

Police terror became a top agitation resource, and the most widespread manifestation of love for the motherland – repentant videos of cultural figures.

The Black Hundred: return of the wild hunt

Throughout 2022, state culture completed its definitive shift toward the authoritarian and repressive branch of the security agencies. In fact, the bureaucratic and ideological vertical of pressure on cultural figures was shaped, its apparent purpose being to punish for improper reposts and hunt for disloyal members. Inertial homogeneity becomes the primary characteristic of a cultural product that satisfies the regime, and controllability – the undeniable quality mark.

The dismantling of civil society and hard persecution of activists, along with the massive flight of cultural figures and the regime’s desperate attempts to enlist popular support, bring about an enabling environment for hyperactive outcasts to gain social weight. Hysterical and undereducated pseudo-patriots come to the fore, embracing the format of a pro-government popular inspectorate of the cultural landscape, which is essentially a whistle-blowing practice to disclose public enemies.

Amidst this sweeping purge of local culture, two wild hunts paradoxically confuse their missions and butt heads — professional propagandists and improvised popular controllers. They start to act as enforcers and work as investigative teams. In May, a group of television propagandists came to the opening of the Januškievič publishing house book store with an inspection (the shop never worked even a day).2 Eventually this trend quite logically developed into a hunt for their own: in February 2023, the regular grassroots snitch Bondarava publicly accused MP Marzaliuk of nationalism.3

In a state of permanent self-defense against everything alive and informal, the country’s cultural field remains divided according to the prison principle: the supervisors and the supervised. This, in turn, forms peculiar schemes for cultural work in times of crisis: mental censorship, repressive centralism, noise enthusiasm, and encouragement of grassroots snitching. This is not a matter of conceptual choice, but pure pragmatism: the intimidated layman is encouraged to protect themselves (from the frightened authorities) by telling on their neighbor.

In cultural terms, this implies that mechanisms are put in place to destroy local communities, degrade horizontal ties, and further atomize repressed society.

Visible and invisible: the secret life of Belarusian culture

In the context of an escalated frontier regime and permanent visa extremes, private life and business become a geopolitical choice. It is better to refrain from publishing your itinerary: for an average Belarusian cultural activist any departure from the place of residence looks disturbingly alarming. On these scales, last year’s two tours — that of Petlia Pristrastija in Europe and of LSP in Russia — look equally problematic. The visit of the Belorusskie Pesniary to Moscow’s Blue Light New Year show sounds like a political declaration. You will have to report to the regime for singing in the West, whereas fellow citizens will condemn you for entertaining the East.

A few years back, a group visit of Belarusian artists to the St. Petersburg Concrete Trampoline exhibition would have been treated as another cute escapade with a commercial implication. However, currently any trip to the aggressor country appears to be inconsistent with the rules of wartime. Therefore, the visitors encountered a wave of harsh criticism that was unexpected (yet quite logical).4

The organizers of Pradmova, the (now) offsite Belarusian intellectual book festival, had invited Russian writers as headliners in the spring of 2022, after the war broke out. As a result, the entire Ukrainian delegation and many Belarusian authors refused to participate. There was neither determination nor will to defuse the scandal.5

The sharp narrowing of European contacts with artists from the co-aggressor country multiplied by the mopping up of risky themes and unwanted people creates the illusion of a stagnant, locked and stifled internal Belarusian culture. But this is not the case. Lukashenko’s cultural policy reproduces the obsolete Soviet approaches — with exactly the same (i.e. opposite of the desired) effects.

On the one hand, the harsh cultural censorship ensures the least problematic public environment for the regime. On the other hand, it inevitably gives rise to an incarnation of the catacomb culture of the Soviet times: the secret theater, behind-closed-doors film screenings, home reading-rooms, lightning-fast street actions, and clandestine workshops. Play of meanings, complex metaphors, encrypted messages... Authors and their audiences are under the radar of the authorities together. They do not exist. But they are still there. Such as Aleksiej Strelnikov, the theater critic and director, who died before his time in December 20226— the significance of his work in recent years has been broadly appreciated only recently.

It is no longer about discoveries and revelations. The live cultural environment inside the country is focused on the preservation of its human and creative resources. It illegally replicates the fundamental patterns of creative experience — the freedom of expression, active subjectivity, and work of imagination, and critical judgment skills. The main outcome and quiet victory of informal culture is the very fact of its existence.

The dusty regime brings back to life ancient and, it would seem, long exhausted forms and themes. And once again encourages covert creativity. It turns out that at our collective farm, there are some eternal values: cultural guerrilla warfare and cultural terror.

In the presence of absence: the return of planners

Hopes of a creative breakthrough and victory of the revolutionary street design were crushed along with the white ribbon parades. Progressive agitprop art was transformed into musical satire and battle chants, only to remain a background soundtrack (or a museum exhibit), rather than a generator of events.

Attempts to feed to the public the outdated Belarusian mythology-2020, stories of protests and sufferings still prevail, although they are not intended for long-term use, having originated as short-lived media effects. There is no future in this scheme. There is, at best, a heroic past.

Our revolutionism made in 2020 is a beautiful episode that has yet to be embedded into a coherent chain of events. The fundamental incompleteness of the Belarusian cultural project inevitably brings forth immature authors, half-baked events, and hasty texts. It is still in many respects emergency amateur art.

The perceptible absence of any fresh ideas and stagnation of creativity are especially conspicuous against the backdrop of heightened attempts to build up Belarusian cultural institutions abroad. The main resource required for the design of new flight control centers is formed by ex-cultural functionaries and active Euro-dilettanti. The natural desire to reanimate the former bonds and vertical contacts turned out to be inevitably flawed in the new context, because our chaos does not fit well into global matrices and administrative timesheets.

The Belarusian Council for Culture, Inbelkult 2.0, the National Revival Program, the Belarusian Independent Film Academy, PEN Belarus in Warsaw, the Book Institute... Having no clear vision of the situation and no understanding of the context, confusing ambitions with competencies, new constructors are building scenarios and claim to be leading the way, gathering coalitions and fighting for resources. Their best result would be a center for crisis cultural administration, whereas the worst-case scenario will see another unnecessary superstructure hanging over the live flow of cultural practices. The bureaucratization of Belarusian culture is another challenge and a real threat to free creativity.

Euro-locals: withdrawals, search, adaptation

Belarusian culture of the transition period boils down to practices of self-determination and upgrade. A time of patchiness. The overall breakdown of conventions and communications (both inside the country and internationally) remains a challenge and problem for creators and cultural managers, deprived of their former comfy status as a cultural alternative living off subsidies of domestic patrons and foreign donors.

The prolonged creative block of culture in exile — many of those who left had expected a brief exit and a quick return — increasingly call for a conceptual and stylistic reboot along with a search for effective schemes of an author’s presence in new landscapes.

On the one hand, those creative groups and projects from Belarus' inner Europe that went abroad and renewed their European contacts have been given a palpable impetus to grow. They have evolved as independent culture embassies, as the now Berlin-based Minsk’s “Ў Gallery” team. On the other hand, much of what had previously been acceptable, appeared to be unsustainable and unable to make a name in the new environment and attract a fresh audience. In the depressed community of emergency refugees and displaced guerillas, the new old émigré style is still in demand.

Verses, stories, stand-up, readings. Recognizable household know-how without any quality improvements. Invariable conversational genres. More Kupala Theater alums. Even more vehemence. Readings of Orwell’s works are followed by washed-out Sphagnum by Viktor Martinowitsch. The tour of the Krasnaya zelen satirical couplet performers ended, and the sarcastic novel Pigs by musical journalist Aliaksandr Carnucha went viral.7

However, many patterns have been broken as well. Belarusian cultural migrants are rediscovering Europe, this time not as transit visitors, but as permanent residents. The nervous “I Want to Go Home” (a characteristic title of a Warsaw exhibition) still serves as a label of experiences typical of a certain part of cultural activists. But in parallel, a thoughtful search for a new identity is underway. New codes are explored, the environment is probed, and relevant vibes are searched for.

The highlight of visiting Belarusian culture is the international success of a new project by Belarus Free Theater. The production of Alhierd Baharevich’s “Dogs of Europe”8turned out to be an ambitious mix of Belarusian schizo, Euro-grotesque, well-rehearsed chaos and aggressive multimedia. Mikita Laurecki’s award-winning Date in Minsk constitutes a no-budget dive into the shadows of the collective soul. Another striking example is the odd double of 2022. A couple of musical noir albums from both sides of the border: Minsk’s Sonk from the industrial post-rock project Syndrom Samazvanca and Berlin’s “Over!” from the alliance of Svetlana Ben and Galya Chikiss. The origins are different: the former played advanced progressive rock and broken electro-pop, while the latter focused on melodramatic art-chanson. The mission is the same: to become the radio of the broken era. It is here that Ben’s subtle lyricism and Syndrom’s angry energy are woven into a common soundtrack of the collective soul.

It is about the crazy age and irreparable shifts of consciousness. About the irreversible loss of harmony and the tragic sweetness of personal loneliness and daily despair. A critic labeled “Over!” as post-traumatic pop — and couldn’t have put it better.9

In lieu of the conclusion

Creative resources sprout up on the debris of the demolished cultural ecosystem formed during the era of conventional stability. The wreckage of prior opportunities and arrangements contributes to a new wave of creative pursuits.

Personal cultural self-determination (whatever the address and place of residence) becomes a solo venture, an experimental uncensored exploration of the patchwork cultural space. New authors enter the zone of the unobvious, which lends the incomplete project of new Belarusian culture a savory flavor of risk and unpredictability.

The coming of a new lost generation seems inevitable — a new group of creative youth lacking quality education and legal opportunities to make a statement, relevant cultural experiences, a developed system of values, and clear self-identification. Their intuitive Belarusianism has a slim chance in their homeland, but gradually forms a critical mass of those discontented with the current state of affairs. Spontaneous Belarusians are trending again — even though their clumsy texts in Belarusian limp on both feet.

When it comes to cultural events and initiatives held abroad, they create a new Europe rather than a new Belarus. Belarus Free Theater’s most recent experience is quite telling. Our unique local expertise and special energy multiplied by state-of-the-art foreign technologies and coupled with European management open a fundamentally different window of opportunities, in contrast with the provincial retardation of our country of origin. Two years after the cultural shock, the era of texts and events is coming.