Youth and Memory in Europe

Defining the Past, Shaping the Future

Félix Krawatzek, Nina Friess

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9783110733600
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Sociología

Im Kontext der kulturwissenschaftlichen Gedächtnisforschung widmet sich diese interdisziplinär ausgerichtete Reihe dem Verhältnis von Medien und kultureller Erinnerung. Die hier vorgestellten Studien behandeln die ganze Bandbreite der durch Medien konstruierten, tradierten und verbreiteten Erinnerung. Schrift und Bild, das Kino und die 'neuen' digitalen Medien, Intermedialität, Transmedialität und Remediation sowie die sozialen, zunehmend transnationalen und transkulturellen, Kontexte der mediatisierten Erinnerung gehören zu den Forschungsinteressen der Reihe. Ziel ist es, eine internationale Plattform für die interdisziplinäre Medien- und Gedächtnisforschung zu schaffen. Eingereichte Manuskripte werden im peer review Verfahren durch externe Experten begutachtet.

Den Herausgebern, Astrid Erll (Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main) und Ansgar Nünning (Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen) ist ein internationaler Beirat aus renommierten Wissenschaftlern assoziiert:

• Aleida Assmann (Universität Konstanz)
• Mieke Bal (University of Amsterdam)
• Vita Fortunati (University of Bologna)
• Richard Grusin (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee)
• Udo Hebel (Universität Regensburg)
• Andrew Hoskins (University of Glasgow)
• Wulf Kansteiner (Binghamton University)
• Alison Landsberg (George Mason University)
• Claus Leggewie (Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut Essen)
• Jeffrey Olick (University of Virginia)
• Susannah Radstone (University of South Australia)
• Ann Rigney (Utrecht University)
• Michael Rothberg (University of Illinois)
• Werner Sollors (Harvard University)
• Frederic Tygstrup (University of Copenhagen)
• Harald Welzer (Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut Essen)

Part I: Regional Perspectives

A Former Soviet Republic? Historical Perspectives on Belarus

Félix Krawatzek

Nina Weller

Following the falsified presidential election in August 2020 and the turmoil that ensued, Belarusian President Aliaksandr Lukashenka announced that parliament was to explore passing a bill making the “glorification of Nazism” a criminal offense.¹ In a meeting with the Israeli ambassador, Lukashenka emphasised that many neighbouring countries have similar anti-fascist measures in place. Yet what is considered a fascist symbol is dependent on political context. Days earlier, Lukashenka dismissed the white-red-white flag, the symbol of opposition to the regime in 2020, as a fascist symbol to be eradicated from society.²

During the 2020 protests, war-inspired rhetorical weapons were deployed in abundance. On the one side, Lukashenka and his supporters defamed the protesters as fascists and argued that during the war Belarusian nationalists had sought to collaborate with the Nazi occupiers to create their own state – and that they had brandished the white-red-white flag as they did so.³ State institutions and government media echoed this line, accusing the protestors of “historical amnesia”.⁴ By suggesting a direct relationship between past and present uses of the white-red-white, Lukashenka elided the reinterpretations and reappropriations that have occurred in the intervening decades. However, such memory campaigns are not new. To discredit the opposition as fascists opposed to the general population has been part of the state’s rhetorical arsenal for years.

The regime’s opponents, which include both intellectuals and – in the summer of 2020 at least – society at large (Douglas et al. 2021), rely just as heavily on the symbolic and rhetorical arsenal of World War II.⁵ As arbitrary police brutality against civilians has increased, so too has the use of emotional and historically charged comparisons with National Socialism. Shock at the indiscriminate arrest of passers-by, the beating of protesters, and the large-scale psychological and physical torture of prisoners since August – which events left at least five peaceful demonstrators dead – was so profound that a comparison between the police and security forces (OMON) and the methods of the Gestapo seemed obvious. These comparisons were particularly widespread in social media networks and independent media.⁶ As violence has escalated, so has the severity of the opposition’s comparisons. The police’s actions have been described as a “genocide” against the Belarusian people.⁷ The Okrestina prison in Minsk, where most of the torture took place, has been compared to Auschwitz (Figure 1).⁸ In turn, in early 2021, the government responded in kind: in an audio recording released online, a voice attributed to Interior Minister Mikalay Karpyankou was heard proposing “a camp” with harsh punitive measures for “especially disruptive agitators.”⁹

Figure 1: Protesters in Minsk in August 2020 with a poster stating Okrestina and Auschwitz © Radio Svoboda.

Such comparisons are emblematic of a public and political discourse saturated with historical references. However, such comparisons are also reductive, since they relativise the extent of the atrocities committed by the Nazis during the Holocaust and against the civilian population in Belarus and neglect the large-scale violence and destruction that occurred when the Red Army returned to Belarus in 1943 (Marples 2012, 16). The prominence of these analogies relates primarily to an emphasis in Belarus’ historical politics on the heroes and victims of the Great Patriotic War. Critical engagement with the past is absent or overlaid by affirmative identification with official historical interpretations. Indeed, opposition figures barely question the importance of the war, as doing so would offer few advantages (Goujon 2010). The historian Iryna Ramanava (2020, 116) argues that historically charged responses to recent events should be seen as the logical result of the contradiction between the obsession with the positive picture of history of violence on the one hand and the repression of trauma on the other.

Belarus’ current mnemonic landscape is therefore starkly divided between memories of positive, violent, and traumatic events. We contend that the country’s historical views are centred around two broad camps and the varying degrees of control the autocracy has over the production of history can be illuminated via three realms: the tightly controlled discourse permissible in educational settings; a political discourse laced with contradictions and cracks; and the diverse narratives produced in the cultural sphere. Each of these realms interacts with the others in limited ways since the rigid state discourse cannot accommodate any modifications without endangering its own existence.

1 Historical representations in Belarus: A tale of two stories?

Despite the view from abroad that Belarus, allegedly the “last European dictatorship”, has created a unified, loyal, obedient and monolithic society, despite the regime’s emphasis on a homogeneous Belarusian post-Soviet people, and despite the nationalist opposition’s demands for ethnic unity, Belarus is not a homogeneous entity. Indeed, the country’s artistic, cinematic and literary cultures have long been extraordinarily vibrant (Lewis 2019).

In spite of this cultural vibrancy and the multi-layered protest movement visible in 2020, Belarusian society is still shaped by competing historical narratives that centre around two polarities. The first, pro-Soviet bloc, looks to the east and reflects the regime’s historical line, maintaining that Belarusian culture flourished during Soviet times, when the country developed in harmony with the country’s historical partner, Russia. In this account of the past, the sixteenth-century Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth is dismissed as a period of oppression. The second bloc cleaves to oppositional, pro-European views. Its scattered political and cultural references revolve around the image of Belarus in a broader pan-European history. That role is symbolised by the nation’s position in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which spanned the thirteenth to the eighteenth centuries, and in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

The polarised division in Belarusian memory is most pronounced in relation to the short period of Belarusian independence in the early twentieth century, when the short-lived Belarusian People’s Republic (BNR) and Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic (BSSR) offered differing visions and experiences of national cultures and autonomies. The opposition between these visions is captured in debates on what are to be the national colours (Leshchenko 2004; Rudling 2017). The white-red-white flag first appeared as Belarus’ flag in 1918 during the brief independence of the BNR. The flag returned in the early post-Soviet years. Following a referendum in 1995, Belarus reverted to the BSSR’s red and green flag (without the hammer and the sickle). The white-red-white, although long unpopular, has today become the sign of a “new assertion of the nation”, as the philosopher Tatiana Shchyttsova stated. It symbolises national solidarity and the value of human dignity shared by the majority of protesters (Shchyttsova 2020, 59).

A strong polarisation of historical views notwithstanding, the actual narratives presented in and about Belarus are significantly more multi-layered. Notions of Belarusian identity fail to map onto clear-cut distinctions (Kazakievič 2015). Indeed, Belarus is a striking illustration of the entangled nature of memory with competing layers of synchronic and diachronic interpretations visible in acts of remembering (Feindt et al. 2014). As a cultural borderland, Belarus has long been the place where influences from neighbouring regions came together – cultural influences often brought by minorities that no longer exist, such as the once sizeable Jewish population (Savchenko 2009).

Belarus was moreover late to the nineteenth-century nation-building stage. The first Belarusian language newspaper, Nasha Niva (Our Cornfield),was founded in 1906, but played a critical role in awakening a sense of national consciousness in the early twentieth century (Nadson 1967, 206). Thereafter, the first Belarusian history was published in 1910 (Lastoǔski 1910), and the first standardised Belarusian grammar appeared in 1918 (Tarashkevich 1918). Writers such as Maksim Bahdanovich, Maksim Harezki, Janka Kupala and Jakub Kolas produced books that accompanied this nationalising movement. Nevertheless, a Belarusian “national idea” had little currency in the following decades.

The lack of a historically unifying n...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Transmitting the Past to Young Minds
• Part I: Regional Perspectives
• Part II: Thematic Perspectives
• Index