Paper presented at EAHN 2024,
Eastern Europe Interest Panel,
June 19-23, 2024.
Eastern Europe Interest Panel,
June 19-23, 2024.
A sudden heavy downpour in May. Yet, thousands of people—old and young, single and in groups, with bikes, children and pets, in work uniforms and plain clothes, some with umbrellas, but most without any rain gear—are lining for kilometres in “solidarity chains” along the grand Stalinist-era boulevard in Minsk, the capital of Belarus. Linking hands, holding flowers, singing and waving, they look as if they stepped down from Soviet solidarity frescos. Indeed, in the Spring of 2020, as the rest of the world was still safely tucked in, insulated through layers of COVID-19 regulations, people in Belarus saw their usually sterile environment grow saturated with colours, sounds and people. The usually empty Soviet-planned city centre bustled with crowds while the front steps of “People’s Palaces” staged viral solidarity performances. And while the political history of 2020 events is well-known, the role of the urban environment as it set the stage for solidarity protests and political activism remains unexplored. I am particularly interested in how Soviet-built heritage, which constitutes more than 90% of the urban environment in Belarus, was re-invented and re-conceptualised during these events. I argue that differently from the contended role of post-communist heritage in Ukraine, in Belarus it was re-populated with new images and memories of solidarity and activism.
This contribution investigates these new meanings attributed to Belarusian urban spaces of Soviet heritage, reinvented in the wake of a popular uprising and against the mounting pressure from the state. To do so, I use visual evidence from thousands of online images and a personal archive of “protest archaeology” and investigate how activists from Belarus continue to embed new meanings into Soviet urban heritage from the distance of exile. I argue that Belarus offers a unique case in which heritage was re-invented through political activism and a re-inscribed sense of belonging.