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The Accidental Revolutionary Leading Belarus’s Uprising

By Dexter Filkins

On the north side of Independence Square, in the Belarusian capital of Minsk, is the House of Government—a row of cuboid white buildings, each with a checkerboard of identical black windows. Members of parliament go in through the main entrance, passing a towering statue of Lenin and a forlorn line of trees that stand amid several acres of pavement and brick. People who want to visit the Central Election Commission use a small entrance to the right. On the afternoon of August 10, 2020, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya went in through the smaller entrance, to complain that her victory in the Presidential election had been stolen.

Tsikhanouskaya was not a career politician; she was the daughter of a truck driver, a mother of two who had set aside a career as an English teacher in order to help her deaf son learn to speak. An improbable series of events had propelled her to challenge President Alexander Lukashenka, the last dictator in Europe, for the leadership of Belarus .

A few months before, Tsikhanouskaya’s husband, a journalist named Siarhei Tsikhanouski, had declared his own candidacy against Lukashenka, whom he had relentlessly derided as an incompetent autocrat, a “cockroach” who was despoiling the country. For years, Lukashenka had regularly staged Presidential elections, and each time claimed an easy victory. This time, though, there was a strong popular reaction, inspired in part by Siarhei’s reports. He was arrested and thrown into a “punishment cell,” a dank concrete box without a window. Hundreds of others had already been imprisoned for questioning the regime.

With Siarhei in jail, Tsikhanouskaya decided to run herself. At first, she was reluctant. When I met her recently, she radiated earnest charm: her face is broad, framed by straight brown hair, her voice plain and strong. “I am accidental,” she told me. “I am not building my career, I am not settling scores, I do not know the language of politics, I do not like this business. I am doing this for the Belarusian people, and for my husband. They jailed him for nothing.”

Tsikhanouskaya’s platform consisted of only three demands: freedom for political prisoners; a new constitution that reduced the powers of the Presidency; and fresh elections. But her speeches were galvanizing. “State officials have failed to understand that it’s not individual candidates but the people who threaten their power,” she told a boisterous crowd in Minsk. “And the people are fed up with living in humiliation and fear.”

Lukashenka declined to debate Tsikhanouskaya, and evidently didn’t consider her enough of a risk to have her arrested. “Our constitution was not written for a woman, and our society isn’t ready to vote for a woman,” he told a gathering at a tractor factory in May. “The President will be a man, I am more than sure.” But, with surprising speed, Belarusians took her side against the regime. The opposition adopted a white-and-red flag—a symbol of Belarus’s brief first attempt at independence, in 1918—which Lukashenka has since banned. They also began wearing white ribbons, as a signal of support. Tsikhanouskaya’s rallies drew enormous crowds. “We set up a stage and a microphone in a field, and five thousand people came,” a press aide named Gleb German told me.

On Election Day, August 9th, Belarusians flocked to the polls, with hundreds of thousands wearing white ribbons on their wrists. Tsikhanouskaya and her allies were certain that she had won. But, that night, Lukashenka declared that he had captured more than eighty per cent of the vote—a preposterous claim, which brought outraged protesters to the streets . As Tsikhanouskaya implored the crowds to remain peaceful, Lukashenka’s riot police threw stun grenades, beat and teargassed demonstrators, and arrested thousands.

The next day, with the streets again swarming with protesters, Tsikhanouskaya and her lawyer, Maxim Znak, approached the election commission to file her protest. Near the entrance, they found a cordon of security officers in dark suits, with guns at their belts; two men were waiting inside. They recognized one of them as Andrei Pavlyuchenko, a notorious enforcer who has served as Lukashenka’s head of security and his chief of Internet police.

The men told Znak to step away, then led Tsikhanouskaya to a dark room and closed the door. “Your campaign is over,” Pavlyuchenko told her. They gave her a choice, she recalled. She could go to prison, leaving her son and daughter to be raised by others. Or she could leave the country immediately; a car was waiting. “All I could think about was my children,” she said.

A few hours later, the two officials led Tsikhanouskaya toward a rear exit. On her way out, she passed Znak. “Sorry, Max,” she said as she was hustled out the door.

The men drove Tsikhanouskaya across town, past throngs of protesters, some chanting her name. The chants were so loud that the car windows seemed to vibrate. “Look what you have done,” one of the men said. Minutes later, they arrived at Tsikhanouskaya’s home, and the men told her to pack a bag. There she was joined by Maryia Maroz, her campaign manager. She, too, was being expelled.

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The men loaded them into Maroz’s car, with Pavlyuchenko in the passenger seat and police vehicles ahead and behind. At about 3 A . M ., they arrived at the Lithuanian border, where Maroz’s two young children were waiting to meet her. Pavlyuchenko got out and told them to drive through the border post, which seemed prepared for their arrival. Tsikhanouskaya thought for a moment that she might be shot, but the car kept moving, and she crossed into Lithuania.

The next morning, two videos of Tsikhanouskaya surfaced online. She looked exhausted, sad, broken. In the first, made while she was being detained in Belarus, she told the protesters to go home, that the protests were over. In the second, recorded after she had fled the country, Tsikhanouskaya was free, but her message was even more final. She told the people of Belarus that she had been defeated. “I thought that this campaign had really steeled me and given me so much strength that I could cope with anything,” she said, fighting back tears. “But I guess I am still the same weak woman that I always was.” Moments later, the video went dark.

When I visited Minsk, this past July, I expected to find a grim post-Soviet state, with concrete high-rises and downtrodden workers plodding the streets. I was half right. Much of the city center was hemmed in by brutalist buildings and Soviet monuments; the Avenue of the Conquerors was shadowed by the Stela, a fifteen-story obelisk with a knifelike point. In other neighborhoods, though, wide boulevards and outdoor cafés made Minsk feel as cosmopolitan as Berlin. I spotted only a few remnants of the protests: a white-and-red flag unfurled from a second-story window and quickly pulled back in; a procession of women dressed in white, who walked silently and soon disappeared.

The iconography of the current regime is far more present. One morning, as I rode in a taxi past a convoy of military vehicles, my driver laughed and pointed. “Lukashenka,” he said. “Boom-boom-boom-boom.” Lukashenka is sixty-seven, a bombastic figure with a huge square head, a closely trimmed mustache, and a thick neck that bulges against his dress shirts. “He has a kind of negative charisma,” Pavel Latushka, a former culture minister who fled Belarus last year after denouncing the repression, told me. “From the moment you meet him, he is dominating you.” At cabinet sessions, his ministers are often afraid to meet his gaze. Once, Latushka told me, the President paused a discussion of government business to warn him, “If you ever betray me, I will strangle you with my own hands.”

Lukashenka has often met challenges with threats. After he claimed victory over Tsikhanouskaya, Western nations imposed sweeping sanctions on his regime. In response, Lukashenka oversaw a bizarre scheme to destabilize neighboring states, in which tens of thousands of people from Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere were invited to use Belarus as a springboard for migrating west. As refugees clustered in desolate camps on the borders of Poland and Lithuania, much of Europe was embroiled in the crisis. By the time it was resolved, this fall, the election that set it off was largely forgotten in the West.

Within his own country, Lukashenka has imposed a kind of harsh paternalism. “He considers himself to be the protector of Belarus—from the West, from Russia, from extremists within,” a person who has known him for many years told me. “He thinks that everyone else is an infant, a child, against his greatness.” Lukashenka, this person went on, has maintained order, mostly through the force of his will and the prodding of his security forces: “The streets are clean, people go to work. Belarus is still a Soviet state, and Lukashenka is a Soviet personality.” The country’s fearsome secret police force is still known as the K.G.B.

Lukashenka, the only child of an abandoned mother, grew up in the village of Kopys, in what was then the Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic. He began his career as a minor Soviet functionary, working as a border guard, an ideological lecturer, and the head of a state-owned pig farm. When the Soviet Union collapsed, in 1991, Russia became independent, and the Belarusian Republic, shorn of its anchor, followed. Lukashenka was thirty-seven.

Belarus had gained independence before, in the turbulent period near the end of the First World War, but it didn’t last long enough for a sense of national identity to flourish. Between 1937 and 1940, most of the élite was wiped out, as Stalinist purges swept the country. Many victims are buried in mass graves at Kurapaty, a forest outside Minsk, which might hold as many as a quarter of a million people. Visiting there, I found crosses extending so deep into the pines that the farthest reaches were invisible in the shadows. Belarusian nationalism was not so much suppressed as destroyed.

When independence came again, there was a chaotic period of adjustment. Then, in 1994, Belarus held its first and only free election. Lukashenka ran as a populist, battling corruption; during the campaign, he wore the same jacket every day. In office, he promised to preserve the safety net and the stable employment of the old order, standing against the chaos besetting the post-Communist states that had attempted rapid transitions to market economies. “We did not follow the path of destruction,” Lukashenka told Russian reporters in 2005. “We stood on the foundation that was created in the Soviet Union, here, on this land, and began to build a normal economy.”

In the following years, Lukashenka pushed through constitutional changes that allowed him to consolidate power. Several of his political opponents disappeared, and were presumed to have been murdered on his orders. In 2001, with the press silenced and parliament cowed, Lukashenka staged what was widely regarded as a rigged election; several others followed. “They decide ahead of time, Lukashenka is going to win eighty-eight per cent of the vote,” Jaroslav Romanchuk, who ran in 2010, said. Whenever protesters took to the streets, riot police cracked down. In a speech this summer, Lukashenka warned the country’s intelligentsia to stay out of politics: “Before you do something, think—watch your every step.”

The key to Lukashenka’s survival was an unspoken Russian guarantee. Beginning in the nineteen-nineties, Russia agreed to sell Belarus vast quantities of oil and natural gas at discounted prices. This arrangement insured Belarus a relatively high standard of living, while allowing Lukashenka’s government to resell the oil products abroad at market prices. Prominent Belarusians and Western diplomats estimated that over the years the profits to Russian and Belarusian energy companies amounted to tens of billions of dollars.

According to these officials, Lukashenka, too, grew rich from the sale of Russian gas and oil, and from smuggling between Europe and Russia. A report for the U.S. Congress, published in 2006, estimated his personal wealth at a billion dollars. It has almost certainly grown since then; a former senior Belarusian official put it closer to ten billion, adding that Lukashenka ran the country as “a family business.”

Lukashenka’s officials remain loyal, in part because they are allowed to get rich, from smuggling, kickbacks, and whatever other means they can devise. Stanislav Luponosov, a former security officer who investigated organized crime and corruption, told me that Lukashenka’s office and the K.G.B. routinely identified people not to pursue. “When that happened, one had to obey,” he said.

From the beginning, Lukashenka affirmed his country’s affinity with Russia, “our elder brother.” He made Russian the official language. Textbooks were rewritten to emphasize the shared culture of the two countries; immigration controls were all but eliminated. Lukashenka consistently downplayed Stalin’s crimes, once declaring, “I’m absolutely not of the opinion that Stalin is the enemy.” A few years ago, he voiced approval of a restaurant built in Kurapaty, overlooking the graves of Stalin’s victims. It was called Let’s Go and Eat.

In the late nineteen-nineties, Lukashenka proposed uniting Russia and Belarus into one country, which he imagined he would lead. Instead, Vladimir Putin came to power and began encroaching on Belarus’s independence. The two men often appeared together, Putin inscrutable and slight, and Lukashenka flamboyant and imposing. But it was always clear who dominated; in a photo from 2018, Lukashenka stood with his legs wide apart to lower himself to Putin’s height. During a meeting last year on the Black Sea, the Russian news media showed Lukashenka frolicking in the frigid waves, while Putin stayed safely on dry land. State television reported that Putin had asked him to get into the water. “Putin enjoys humiliating him,” Latushka, the former minister, said.

Still, Lukashenka flourished. An ice-hockey fan, he sometimes played for the cameras, with conspicuous success. He fathered at least one child out of wedlock—a boy named Nikolai, who is widely believed to be his chosen successor. He has also maintained a string of mistresses. The woman rumored to be his latest, Maria Vasilevich, was crowned Miss Belarus in 2018. (Vasilevich has denied that the relationship is romantic.) The pair appeared together at hockey matches and at a formal dance. Early in 2019, Lukashenka awarded her a state medal for contributing to a “spiritual revival” in Belarus. In that year’s elections, which resulted in a sweep for parties loyal to Lukashenka, Vasilevich won a seat in parliament.

Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya was born in 1982, during the last years of Soviet dominion. She grew up in Mikashevichi, a granite-mining town in southern Belarus, where her father drove a truck for a cement factory and her mother worked as a cook in a cafeteria. In free moments, her parents read as much as they could, but they had to be careful about what they discussed with their children. “Like every family, we talked about politics,” Tsikhanouskaya told me. “But in the kitchen, whispering, so no one could hear.”

When Tsikhanouskaya was three years old, the Chernobyl nuclear plant melted down across the border, and a vast cloud of contamination spread. Some seventy per cent of the fallout landed on Belarus, and created an unprecedented public-health crisis. Radiation poisoned the rain, the grass, the milk and meat of cows. Thousands of people became ill. “We couldn’t escape,” Tsikhanouskaya said. In the hope of fending off sickness, her mother had her drink red wine—one small glass a day.

As a girl, Tsikhanouskaya studied English, in an experimental program that used American textbooks, and the language inspired curiosity about the world. “I knew there was something more than what we were living,” she said. In 1996, when she was thirteen, a charity called Chernobyl Lifeline invited a group of Belarusian children to spend the summer in Roscrea, Ireland, an ancient market town in County Tipperary. The children were selected because fallout had left them frail. Tsikhanouskaya was healthy, but her English teacher added her to the group anyway, because she was her star student.

Henry Deane, one of the organizers of Chernobyl Lifeline, told me that the Belarusian children were fed heroically, taken to doctors and dentists, and celebrated throughout Roscrea; when he organized garden parties for them, hundreds of locals came. On drives through the countryside, Deane put Sviatlana in the front seat, so that she could translate for the other kids. The conversations ranged broadly, across such contested subjects as God and politics. “Sveta was curious about everything,” Deane said.

Tsikhanouskaya returned to Ireland for three more summers, and was struck by how open and cheerful the citizens seemed. “I saw that people can be happy and polite every day—it’s not normal for Belarusians,” she said. “When I went home, I tried to be polite. I smiled. People thought I was strange.”

After high school, Tsikhanouskaya enrolled in college in Mazyr, a small city two hours’ drive from her home town, and began training as an English teacher. As it happened, Siarhei Tsikhanouski owned a night club in Mazyr—one of a series of ventures, which also included organizing concerts and producing music videos. He and Sviatlana met at the club, in 2003. They were married a year later, and soon had two children.

When their son, Korney, was born deaf, things changed. “I put my ambitions aside,” Tsikhanouskaya said. The family moved to Minsk when Korney was two so that he could be given a cochlear implant. By then, though, he was behind his peers in speaking and comprehension. Tsikhanouskaya spent the next eight years teaching him, often working ten hours a day. “He had missed a critical window, when children learn how to talk, so progress was very slow,” she said. She recalled an existence that was “half isolated.”

By 2020, Korney had caught up and was enrolled in a regular school. For the first time in years, Tsikhanouskaya had a measure of freedom. Then the coronavirus swept through Belarus. Although the government insisted that the case numbers were low, the virus was ravaging the country. Vladimir Martov, an anesthesiologist in Vitebsk, told me that covid -19 patients flooded the city’s hospitals, overwhelming the stock of beds and oxygen.

When Martov asked the Ministry of Health for help, he was reprimanded. “As a matter of policy, the coronavirus did not exist,” he told me. “Their slogan was ‘Just wait, and it will go away.’ ” Last March, Martov gave an interview about the situation to Tut.by, the country’s most aggressive online newspaper. He was fired soon afterward, and, when his colleagues protested, they were told that nothing could be done. “It was in the hands of the President,” Martov told me. A few weeks later, Tut.by was shut down and its editor-in-chief arrested.

In public appearances, Lukashenka derided his citizens for being afraid of COVID -19, suggesting that a hardy Slavic constitution could easily overcome the virus. “You should not only wash your hands with vodka but probably also drink forty to fifty grams of pure alcohol per day to poison the virus,” he said in a televised meeting. “It’s nice to watch on TV—people working on their tractors, no one talking about the virus. There! The tractor will heal everyone!”

The government’s assurances did not relieve Tsikhanouskaya’s fears. Though the schools stayed open, she pulled her children out; though Lukashenka didn’t wear a mask, she and her family did. “We were misinformed,” she said. In February, Lukashenka himself seemed to have contracted the virus. During a speech before the Belarusian People’s Congress, he lapsed into fits of coughing, as the cameras for state television jerked away to pan the audience. “This infection has come to me again,” he said, between coughs.

Many Belarusians told me the epidemic made them realize that Lukashenka and his ministers held ordinary people in contempt. An English tutor in Minsk, who asked to be identified only as Dmitry, said the virus killed so many of his peers that he drafted his own obituary. “Lukashenka started humiliating people, laughing at doctors, laughing at the dead,” he said. “In my opinion, that was when everything started.”

As the pandemic raged, Siarhei Tsikhanouski was making a name for himself as an independent video journalist, with a show called “Country for Life”—a mocking reference to one of Lukashenka’s favorite sayings. Tsikhanouski was charismatic, and he was doing what no official in the regime had done: travelling the country and talking to people about their lives. In the town of Hlybokaye, he interviewed a woman who identified herself as Lyudmila. She wore a medical mask, which both announced her position on the COVID -19 epidemic and disguised her face. While Tsikhanouski held the microphone, Lyudmila delivered a ten-minute tirade; she complained of pitted roads, substandard health care, scarce opportunities, high food prices, the lack of a coherent response to the virus. Barely pausing for breath, she spoke directly to Lukashenka and his inner circle. “You are not masters—you are servants of the people,” she said. Then she addressed the audience. “All of the officials, they live like kings. They prosper, while you live in poverty.” She went on, “People, rise! . . . If we do nothing, you will all just die.”

Moments like this one exhilarated Tsikhanouski’s viewers. Normally, the government would not tolerate such overt criticism. But the show was distributed by an encrypted messaging app, Telegram, which was nearly impossible to block without entirely shutting down both cell-phone and Internet service. Across the country, Telegram hosted an explosion of activity: news channels, some funded from abroad; independent local reporters; citizens discussing the country’s direction.

Many young Belarusians were also energized by travel to Europe; each year, the European Union granted about seven hundred thousand visas to Belarusians. Among them was Oksana Zaretskaya. In 2007, she was a young mother in Minsk when her husband was transferred to a job at the United Nations office in Geneva. Zaretskaya was captivated by the Swiss system of local governance, in which ordinary citizens influenced civic decisions, even on such questions as whether to buy a particular kind of fighter jet for the Air Force. “I participated in everything, every activity,” she said. “I was so amazed to see these people engaging in political life.” She took exhaustive notes. “I wanted to create the same story in Belarus.”

In 2018, Zaretskaya’s family returned home, and she began giving talks on Swiss democracy and its local possibilities. She formed a network of like-minded friends, often communicating on Telegram. Their discussions facilitated what Zaretskaya described as “internal emigration”—leaving Belarus in their minds. “You create a life in the country that is not touched by the government,” she said. “You are trying to save your soul.”

One of the places where this was possible was OK16, an arts center in Minsk. It was supported by Viktar Babaryka, the chairman of Belgazprombank, one of the country’s largest financial institutions. Babaryka was known for leading a revival of Belarusian art; he had helped secure works by Marc Chagall and Chaim Soutine, both of whom were born in towns that are now part of Belarus.

Babaryka, like others who gathered at OK16, found that the exchange of ideas about art led to larger questions. In early 2020, he declared that he would challenge Lukashenka for the Presidency. As his campaign manager, he chose Maria Kalesnikava, an intense and charismatic woman who was OK16’s artistic director.

Kalesnikava, trained as a flutist, had worked as a musician for twelve years in Germany. When she returned to visit, she would point out to her father, Alexander, that people in Europe enjoyed liberties that did not exist in Belarus. “Human rights, freedom—I didn’t understand them fully, and I did not fight for them,” Alexander told me. “One of the things that I have come to learn this year is that the children were smarter.”

Babaryka was an unprepossessing figure, whom Lukashenka dismissed as a “potbellied bourgeois.” But he was a wealthy member of the establishment, and his candidacy gave followers hope that things were about to change. Hundreds of thousands of people came out to support him. Everywhere he went, he told audiences, “Belarus has woken up.”

Others jumped into the race, including a former diplomat named Valery Tsepkalo. In May, 2020, Siarhei Tsikhanouski announced his candidacy. In videos on YouTube and Telegram, Tsikhanouski had enumerated the crimes and failures of the Lukashenka administration, urging his viewers to “stop the cockroach!” The government, which was mostly middle aged or older, had been slow to register what was happening online. But, as Tsikhanouski’s popularity surged, the regime began harassing him.

On May 6th, he was detained while campaigning in the city of Mogilev. The ostensible charge was participating in an anti-Russia demonstration, six months before. But the timing of the arrest suggested a different reason: it came just nine days before the deadline to file qualification papers. Tsikhanouski’s supporters, hoping to keep the campaign viable, released a prerecorded video, in which he affirmed his candidacy. “For twenty-six years, the dictator has been running the state, and running it with mismanagement and criminal negligence,” he said. But, with Siarhei in prison, someone had to file the paperwork for him. The task fell to Sviatlana.

On May 14th, she visited the Central Election Commission to register on his behalf, but officials refused to accept her signature. Tsikhanouskaya went home dismayed. “I thought it was over,” she said. That night, though, she hit on an idea: what if she filed to run for President herself? Tsikhanouskaya filed her application hours before the deadline. When the commission’s judgment was due, five days later, she returned to the offices, carrying a speech to read if her candidacy was denied. The commission’s chairwoman seemed surprised by her presence. She asked if Tsikhanouskaya really intended to run for President, or if she would just serve as a “sparring partner” for her husband. Tsikhanouskaya replied, “I’ve dreamed of this all my life.”

The same day, Siarhei was released from jail. Sviatlana told me that, when he arrived home, he was shocked to discover that his wife had decided to run for President. Although she was listed as the candidate, she promptly disappeared from public view. Siarhei began a whimsical campaign; on the trail, he posed with a life-size cutout of his wife. Sviatlana told me that her husband didn’t really think that Lukashenka could be deposed. He was running a protest campaign, in the hope of inspiring his fellow-citizens. “He showed people how to be brave,” she said.

Sviatlana did not consider herself the primary candidate. “It was Siarhei’s campaign,” she said. “Everyone understood this.” Still, there are indications that Siarhei was irritated by her place on the ticket. In a video recording, he can be seen talking to Sviatlana by phone while driving with a friend. She was reading a list of local campaign coördinators. “Have you got it wrong again?” he said. “Read on, please. People are waiting!” He signed off, “O.K., see you, Mrs. Presidential Candidate.” Before he finished, Sviatlana had hung up on him. He turned to his friend and said, “I have to put up with it now.”

Under Belarusian rules, anyone running for President needed to collect a hundred thousand signatures to qualify. In past elections, this was a desultory phase of the campaign. This time, Belarusians lined up by the thousands to give their signatures; together, Tsikhanouskaya, Babaryka, and Tsepkalo collected more than half a million. Each candidate represented a distinct constituency: Babaryka, professionals and young people; Tsepkalo, government workers; and Tsikhanouskaya, people from the towns and villages.

With popular enthusiasm surging, Lukashenka tried to seize control of the election. On May 29th, Tsikhanouski was arrested again, charged this time with assaulting a police officer; videos show that the confrontation was staged when he was attacked by an unidentified woman. Babaryka was also arrested, on charges that he had embezzled from his bank. Tsepkalo was denied a spot on the ballot; he later fled the country. Suddenly, Lukashenka was the only major candidate remaining.

Members of the defunct campaigns decided to draft Sviatlana, whose name was still on the ballot, to lead a combined effort. They found her reluctant, conscious that her husband’s aides didn’t respect her. “She was actually crying—it was very emotional,” a former aide told me. But she agreed. “I am doing it for my husband and the people who supported him,” she said.

Only three weeks remained until the election, and Tsikhanouskaya had no training in politics. “She knew nothing—literally nothing,” her aide Anna Krasulina told me. “We told her, ‘You will need a political platform,’ and she said, ‘What is a political platform?’ We told her she would need to meet journalists. She asked, ‘Why do I have to meet journalists?’ ” On the stump, though, she was fluent and forceful, portraying herself as an ordinary citizen stifled by an unresponsive autocrat. “I’m tired of enduring, I’m tired of being silent, I’m tired of living in fear!” she told a crowd in Minsk. “What about you?” The crowd roared back.

There was no time to plan. “We did everything on our knee,” Tsikhanouskaya said. “I was lost, really.” A part of her still wished that she were at home. “I would rather be with my children and my husband, frying up cutlets,” she told supporters. The team decided on a minimal platform. Tsikhanouskaya said that her career in politics would last no longer than it took to accomplish the release of political prisoners, new elections, and the writing of a new constitution. “This put a lot of her potential rivals at ease,” another former aide told me.

Maria Kalesnikava, the flutist who had run Babaryka’s campaign, signed on to join her. So did Tsepkalo’s wife, Veronika. At their first public appearance, a photographer captured the three of them, each making a distinct gesture: Kalesnikava forming a heart with her fingers, Tsepkalo flashing a V, and Tsikhanouskaya holding up a fist. The photo went viral, and they began repeating the pose wherever they went. The crowds grew quickly. Gleb German, the press aide, recalled, “It was like riding a big wave. Everyone just had this feeling that this is the moment we’ve been waiting for, for twenty-six years.”

Skeptical observers suggested that Tsikhanouskaya was merely the beneficiary of unusual circumstances. “The people would have supported whoever was in her place,” Igor Ilyash, a journalist in Minsk, told me. “She was a symbol.” But, to many Belarusians, her distaste for politics made her a more effective vehicle for yearning and anger. Tsikhanouskaya suggested that the right political model for the moment was not an intellectual like Václav Havel, the Czech playwright turned President, but a relatable victim of historical circumstance, like Princess Diana . “She connected with ordinary people,” she said.

The country and the candidate were remaking themselves at the same time, Zaretskaya suggested. “When your qualities are not necessary, they are sleeping inside you,” she told me. “Sviatlana, and many Belarusians, are now in exactly this position, when the times and the conditions demand the special qualities that we’ve been hiding.” Tsikhanouskaya’s role in the campaign required extraordinary resilience. Supporters of the regime threatened to kill her, and to harm her children. Terrified, she sent the kids to Lithuania, where her mother met them. Police arrested volunteers for the campaign, and eventually its manager, Maryia Maroz. “Many times, she told us, ‘I am quitting, I cannot do this,’ ” one of her aides, Anton Radnyankou, recalled.

As the election neared, Tsikhanouskaya and her aides sensed that a nation where civic engagement had been effectively outlawed was turning suddenly political. Andrei Vaitovich, a reporter who had been working abroad for French media, returned home and was struck by what had happened. “The only thing anyone was talking about was the election,” he told me. “That’s when I knew that the country was changing.”

After Lukashenka declared victory, demonstrations spread from Minsk to cities and towns across Belarus. The government shut down the Internet and deployed riot police, many of them wearing large round helmets that hid their faces; protesters called them “cosmonauts.” Luponosov, the former investigator, told me that the Ministry of the Interior ordered police to “beat and maim” the protesters. (In the next twelve months, they would make as many as thirty-five thousand arrests, carrying detainees away in black vans.)

Tsikhanouskaya urged the authorities to show restraint, but she felt increasingly responsible for the people who agitated on her behalf. With protests roiling, reporters pressed her about her plans to try to contain the violence. “The situation is starting to get out of control,” she snapped. “My appearance—would it strengthen the protests or would it, on the contrary, calm them down? I don’t know. I don’t know what to do next.”

When Tsikhanouskaya arrived in Lithuania, she was met by border guards and taken to a safe house in Vilnius. She had nothing with her except her clothes and a small bag containing her son’s spare hearing aid. She felt that she had abandoned the protesters and assumed that they would shun her. “People believed in me,” she told me. “I felt like I had betrayed them.”

But several of her aides followed her across the border, and, when Tsikhanouskaya saw that the demonstrations were carrying on, she gathered herself. Within days, she had declared herself the leader of democratic Belarus. “I am ready to take responsibility and act as a national leader during this period so that the country calms down and enters a normal rhythm,” she said in a video message.

Tsikhanouskaya had no money, no government, and almost no staff, but sympathizers began showing up to help. One of them was Valery Kavaleuski, a former Belarusian diplomat who was living in northern Virginia and working for the World Bank. He told me that, when Tsikhanouskaya arrived in Vilnius, he decided to quit his job and join her, living on his savings until money for salaries could be raised.

Tsikhanouskaya began touring the capitals of Europe, demanding that leaders withhold recognition of Lukashenka. In Berlin, meeting Chancellor Angela Merkel, she wore a navy suit, borrowed at the last minute from a Belarusian stylist in Vilnius. “She didn’t have any clothes,” the stylist, Tatiana Chaevskaya, told me. “We had to tell her that a head of state couldn’t wear the same outfit every day.”

Her first weeks in exile amounted to a triumph of appearance over reality. “It was smoke and mirrors,” Kavaleuski said. She created a stream of images—in Berlin with Merkel, in Brussels with top E.U. officials, in Vilnius with the French President, Emmanuel Macron—that made her look like a European leader. On September 8, 2020, she warned the Council of Europe that “countries or parties that make deals with Mr. Lukashenka do so at their own risk.” Ten days later, the European Parliament voted to deny recognition to Lukashenka’s government after his term ended in November, effectively declaring Tsikhanouskaya the lawfully elected President of Belarus.

Soon after the election, at a construction conglomerate in the city of Hrodna, a worker called out to a gathering of several hundred colleagues, “Don’t be shy, raise your hand—who voted for Alexander Lukashenka? Nobody gets hurt.” A couple of executives raised their hands. Then the worker asked, “Who voted for Tsikhanouskaya?” A sea of hands went up, as the crowd roared.

Maryia Maroz believed that in the days around the election Lukashenka’s regime was close to collapse. “The system was shaking,” she said. When she was in prison, she told me, her guards brought her coffee and let her listen to the radio. “I think we were close.”

Even after the demonstrations subsided, residents of Minsk’s Central District continued to tend a small courtyard that they had decorated with art work and white and red ribbons. The locals called it Change Square. Residents congregated, singing protest anthems and discussing how to make their communities better. “Before the protests, people had never been active in their neighborhoods. People did not even talk to each other,” a resident named Olga Kucherenko told me. “For the first time, people were talking about how to fix things in their lives, like how to improve a playground. And the government was opposing it.”

One night in early November, several agents of the regime appeared at Change Square, wearing civilian clothes and masks, and started to cut down the ribbons. Residents asked them to stop. Kucherenko’s cousin, an Army veteran and aspiring artist named Raman Bandarenka, came down from his apartment to join his neighbors. A confrontation ensued, and the masked men pulled him into a van and sped away.

Five hours later, Bandarenka’s mother, Elena, heard her doorbell ring. It was a group of officials, saying that her son had been taken to a nearby hospital. When she arrived, he was in a coma, brain-dead. A doctor told her that Raman had been beaten, and that the back of his head had been crushed. “The doctor told us it was a professional job,” Kucherenko told me.

Bandarenka was one of at least six civilians killed by security forces; hundreds, perhaps thousands, had been hospitalized for injuries. Thousands more were beaten, and some were raped with nightsticks and tortured as well. No one in the police was arrested or charged.

In September, as Maria Kalesnikava, Tsikhanouski’s campaign partner, was walking near her home, masked men forced her into a van. They took her and two other campaign officials to the border with Ukraine, handed them their passports, and told them to cross. Instead, Kalesnikava ripped up her passport and climbed out the car window. “I won’t leave the country,” she declared. The agents, rattled, dragged her back to Minsk, where they put her in jail and charged her with trying to overthrow the government. She was sentenced to eleven years in prison. Maxim Znak, the lawyer who had accompanied Tsikhanouskaya to the election commission, was given ten.

As the upheaval continued, the spectre of Russian intervention loomed. Lukashenka and Putin spoke regularly, with Putin hinting that he would invade if necessary to keep Belarus from slipping out of the Russian orbit. In late August, he raised the possibility of sending Russian forces in to help the government. “For now, there is no such necessity, and I hope there won’t be,” he said.

By the time of my visit to Minsk, this past July, Lukashenka had reasserted control. The remaining members of the opposition were presumed to be under surveillance. One night, I met a Western diplomat, one of a few left in the country, at a public park, where we sat on a bench and talked. After about twenty minutes, the diplomat suggested we get up: “There’s a guy on the other side of the park who has been watching us the whole time.”

The country’s journalists were even more embattled. One of them told me during my visit that she left home every morning carrying a “prison pack,” a knapsack with provisions in case she was arrested: a toothbrush, socks, underwear. As I was arranging to meet Yahor Martsinovich, the editor of Nasha Niva , one of the country’s leading newspapers, he disappeared into police custody. Most of the journalists I spoke to believed that it was only a matter of time before they were taken in, but none seemed willing to censor themselves—or were even necessarily convinced that it would make them safer if they did. “As a journalist in Belarus, your freedom no longer depends on what you publish. It depends only on whether they want to take you,” Pavel Sviardlou, the editor of the independent broadcaster Euroradio, told me. “This situation makes us free.”

One target of the regime was an organization called Viasna, which for years has documented violations of civil and human rights. I rode with the deputy chairman, Valentin Stefanovich, as he went to meet a man whose brother had been killed in police custody. Four Viasna activists were already in prison, and Stefanovich was anticipating a full-scale crackdown. “I think they intend to clean the country of all independent media and civil-society groups,” he said.

As we drove, Stefanovich detailed the government’s recent actions—six hundred political prisoners detained, hundreds of people beaten or tortured in custody, thousands fired from their jobs. “Survival is the most important thing for Lukashenka,” Stefanovich said, “because he can’t imagine his life without power.”

Evidence suggested that political prisoners were being widely mistreated. “This whole year, they’ve been trying to make me regret what I did,” Maria Kalesnikava, the campaign manager, wrote to the BBC from her cell. “I’ve been in hot and then cold cells, without air or light, without people. A whole year with nothing.”

With the protests suppressed, Lukashenka moved to expunge any trace of dissent; he even purged school curricula of books by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and by Svetlana Alexievich , the Nobel Prize-winning author who was one of the revolt’s leaders until she fled the country, last year. In May, Lukashenka ordered a fighter jet to force down a Ryanair passenger plane, in order to arrest a journalist named Raman Pratasevich and his girlfriend. Pratasevich was beaten in jail and forced to confess in a surreal televised interview.

Lukashenka also launched a campaign against opponents outside the country. One tactic was to use Interpol, the international police agency, to gather intelligence on dissidents living in exile and to issue arrest warrants on trumped-up charges. European governments picked up at least two such people, but released them once they realized the mistake. Lithuanian officials told me that they were worried about Tsikhanouskaya’s security; the location of her home was a secret, and not even her closest aides had been there. In August, a Belarusian activist helping dissidents flee the country was found hanging from a tree in Kyiv.

In July, just after I left Belarus, security forces embarked on a nationwide crackdown of civil society, closing fifty N.G.O.s in a single day—ranging from groups trying to protect human rights to organizations helping the disabled. Police arrested several people I had interviewed, including Stefanovich, Viasna’s deputy chairman. In the past, Belarusian dissidents were usually released after a few days or weeks, but this time was different; family members were not allowed to visit detainees, and were given no information about charges against them. Stefanovich’s wife took her children to Georgia. “We are thinking it will be a long time,” she told me.

When the European Union stiffened economic sanctions, Lukashenka gave a rambling hour-long speech, in which he accused the West of conspiring to topple his government. “Look at the unprecedented pressure on the country today, how they want to aggressively teach us a lesson, put us in our place, provoke us using the dirtiest methods and techniques. All this escalation, impotent rage, and envy arise from their failure to stage an insurrection and coup d’état in Belarus,” he said.

Cut off from the E.U., Lukashenka worked to strengthen his ties to Russia. In September, he and Putin met for the sixth time in a year; Putin announced that he would lend Belarus six hundred million dollars, promised to maintain the flow of cheap natural gas, and said that the two countries had agreed to more closely align their tax and legal systems.

When reporters for Belarusian state-media outlets began resigning, Russian journalists arrived to replace them. In September, the two countries undertook a military exercise that involved two hundred thousand troops; the armies simulated a NATO invasion and a Russian-led response. The Russian military opened two joint training centers in Belarus, putting Lukashenka’s security forces increasingly under Russian control. “Lukashenka knows he is a hostage,” Latushka, the former minister, said.

Many Belarusians worried that Putin had his eyes on valuable state-owned assets, including oil refineries and potash-processing plants, which Russian oligarchs have expressed interest in buying. According to a former senior member of the Lukashenka regime, a joint team of Russian and Belarusian officials has begun meeting regularly to make important decisions on the country’s security.

Western officials told me that a formal merger of the two countries was unlikely, if only because such a move could ignite a popular rebellion. “He’s made himself much more vulnerable to pressure from Russia,” a second Western diplomat in Minsk told me. By crushing dissent, Lukashenka seemed to be mimicking his Russian benefactor, and thus obviating the need for Russian intervention.

Latushka told me that Putin had tacitly approved the scheme to funnel migrants to Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia. (A Kremlin spokesperson denied this, saying, “President Putin and Russia have nothing to do with the migrant crisis.”) In late spring, the first of thousands of Iraqis began arriving in Minsk, lured by a promise that they would be allowed to migrate to Europe. During my visit, I found myself waiting out a downpour under an awning with a middle-aged man dressed in a cheap suit. He told me that he was from Iraq. When I asked how he’d come to be in Belarus, he grew flustered—“I have to go”—and hurried off into the rain.

European officials told me that the Iraqis were driven in government buses to the Lithuanian and Polish borders, where they were ushered across. By late summer, hundreds of migrants a day were crossing the frontiers. “Lukashenka has weaponized migration,” Gabrielius Landsbergis, the Lithuanian foreign minister, told me. The migrants were obliged to pay local officials as much as five thousand dollars apiece to reach the border, so it seemed likely that people inside the regime were profiting. On Lukashenka’s watch, some six thousand migrants crossed into neighboring countries.

Tsikhanouskaya, following the developments from outside Belarus, argued that the scheme was merely a symptom of Lukashenka’s ruthlessness. “Supposing this abuse of migrants is somehow stopped, do you really believe the regime’s threats beyond its borders will end there?” she asked the European Parliament. “Do not let the regime manipulate migrant smuggling in order to obscure the human-rights catastrophe inside the country. Both Belarusians and migrants are now hostages of the regime.”

In November, under diplomatic pressure, Lukashenka stopped openly encouraging migrants to come to Belarus, and began sending some home. But there were indications that he was merely pausing his operation; thousands of migrants remained in Belarus. “They have dialled it down,” the second Western diplomat told me. “But they could dial it back up whenever it suits them to do so.”

This summer, Tsikhanouskaya came to New York’s Battery Park and addressed several hundred Belarusian Americans. The Statue of Liberty stood in the background; a sea of red-and-white 1918 flags waved in the crowd. “Over the past year, your actions have directly shaped the events unfolding in Belarus,” she said. “Your demonstrations, your conversations with journalists and politicians, your assistance through solidarity funds—even from so far from home, you are participating fully in the life of our common motherland.”

Her words, though true enough, could have been uttered by nearly any exile leader in the past century. In the history of political exile, leaders forced to flee their countries have often been able to expect two things: they will usually be safe, and they will nearly always be irrelevant. After Poland was captured by Communists, the Polish government in exile met in London drawing rooms for fifty years, but it took a group of dockworkers in Gdansk to spark a revolution. A handful of exiles have returned to power, including Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, in Iran; Ho Chi Minh, in Vietnam; and Lenin, in Russia. But few of them effected change without the military at their backs, and even fewer established democracies.

Tsikhanouskaya and her aides are determined to avoid the fate of similarly situated groups before her. “We are not a government in exile,” she said. Her organization occupies a single floor of an office building in Vilnius, with about thirty employees; exiled Belarusians from Poland, Ukraine, and Lithuania meet with her staff regularly. She said that her team was trying to build a permanent opposition inside Belarus. Her staff is in regular contact with dozens of people; if, as many expect, Lukashenka calls a nationwide referendum to reaffirm his rule, they are talking about organizing a campaign of protest votes. Allies of Tsikhanouskaya’s circulate dissident literature, including the weekly Honest Newspaper; at least a million copies have been distributed in Belarus. I saw one in the stairwell of the building where I stayed in Minsk, stuck to the wall with decals of the 1918 flag.

There are limits to what Tsikhanouskaya’s movement can accomplish from afar. “If you want a beautiful picture—of demonstrations, of protesters—we can call people to the streets,” she said. “But how many victims will it cost us?” Yet, she added, even a regime as repressive as Lukashenka’s had limited means available to control a population that it had already lost. “Lukashenka can’t keep on arresting people anymore,” she said. “Now, when he arrests one person, two more step forward.”

The journalist Igor Ilyash, a veteran of many police detentions, believes that Lukashenka’s government has entered a long period of instability. “It can keep its power now only by violence,” he told me. “History shows it’s almost impossible to continue with force and violence for very long.”

At times, the regime’s efforts to assert control seem merely to demonstrate how little power it has. After the protests, the phrase “Long live Belarus” was banned. But during my visit I heard people call it out on the street, signalling their allegiance. By contrast, in two weeks in Belarus, I saw just one public display of support for the regime: a middle-aged man, wearing shorts and dress shoes, evidently drunk, wandered up to my café table in Minsk. “Long live Lukashenka,” he said, and then belched and wandered off.

The most important pillar of Lukashenka’s government is the security forces. At the height of the protests, some officers quit in frustration; a few threw their uniforms in the trash. But there was little other visible evidence of dissent. Aliaksandr Azarau, who until two years ago was a senior official in the Ministry of the Interior, told me that police officers had been given generous bonuses to keep going. The institution is still largely intact, he said: “Most people in the security forces have not made up their minds.”

In September, I was invited to sit in on a video conference of local leaders inside Belarus. But, by the time of the meeting, about a dozen of the leaders had been arrested. Others had fled the country; they suspected that the regime had placed a mole among them. “People are quite scared,” one of the participants on the call told Tsikhanouskaya. “They are packing their suitcases.”

Some opponents of Lukashenka have attempted a more forceful response. In the past six months, Belarusian officials have arrested several people who had smuggled weapons into the country, in the hope of setting off a revolt. Vadim Prokopiev, an exile leader who lives in Warsaw, told me that he thought Tsikhanouskaya’s measured approach was doomed. “I am pushing her and pushing her,” he said. “But they prefer talking.”

A senior official in the Biden Administration told me that it was difficult to foresee an early end to the Lukashenka regime. In July, Tsikhanouskaya visited the White House; the U.S. tightened sanctions soon afterward, and did so again this month. But more assertive measures to remove Lukashenka seem likely to provoke a regional confrontation. Putin will not relinquish his influence in Belarus without a fight. “She needs to think about the long game,” the official said.

Tsikhanouskaya said that she had no wish to confront Russia; she hoped that some accommodation would be possible. Still, she conceded that it was Europe, not Russia, that could provide a vision of the country’s future: “Europe’s experience in guaranteeing the rule of law, human rights, an independent judiciary, and free media are of primary importance to the new, reborn Belarus.”

The political situation makes fund-raising difficult. Tsikhanouskaya’s group gets very little money from supporters in Belarus, where the government has tracked down donors and put them in prison. The team’s initiatives are supported by Western N.G.O.s and by private contributors, mostly Belarusians living abroad; the Lithuanian government also provides security, office space, and housing. But, if the group accepts money directly from the U.S. government, it risks being depicted in Belarus as a puppet of the West.

Lukashenka’s regime already seems determined to smear Tsikhanouskaya. In July, Grigory Azarenok, an anchor on state-owned TV, called her a “mustached cow” and a “dastardly woman” with “a rotten stench.” Of Tsikhanouskaya’s visit to the White House, Azarenok said, “Such boot-licking, such servility, such joy.” He cut to scenes of bombing in Ukraine, which he falsely claimed were caused by Americans—a prelude to what Tsikhanouskaya’s efforts would bring.

Despite the odds, the opposition professed optimism that Lukashenka couldn’t continue such intense repression indefinitely. “When he begins to reform, it will all unravel,” Franak Viačorka, a political adviser, told me. I found a similarly upbeat mood inside Belarus, even after waves of arrests. Many opposition members cited the example of Havel, who was a political prisoner six months before becoming President. Among the hopeful was Olga Kucherenko, whose cousin Raman Bandarenka had been killed in police custody. “We’re going to win,” she said.

Last month, I spoke to Tsikhanouskaya again. When I asked if she could picture herself fighting the Lukashenka regime five years from now, she recoiled. “I can’t imagine this,” she said. “That my children will go five years without their father—absolutely not.”

Lukashenka seems to have settled in for the long haul. With the possibility of open protests cut off, Tsikhanouskaya said that it was impossible to predict how long he could hold on: “It could last a long time—many months.” But she maintained that his administration was mortally wounded, its legitimacy beyond repair. “The regime has cracked, and the crack is widening. Processes are going on inside the regime that we cannot see.” With the opposition shut out of the homeland, the decisive blow might come from within. “The regime is trapped by its own actions—there’s no one left to blame,” she said. “Someone inside the inner circle may decide that the time has come.” ♦

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By Rebecca Mead

Belarus Geography History Economics and Culture

This essay about Belarus explores the country’s rich history, diverse geography, and dynamic economy, alongside its vibrant culture. It outlines how Belarus, positioned at the crossroads of Europe, is defined by its resilient history from early Slavic roots through Soviet influence, and its economic reliance on agriculture and industry. The essay also highlights the enduring cultural traditions and the challenges faced by the nation in modern times, painting a picture of a nation rich in heritage and poised for future progress.

How it works

Belarus, located in Eastern Europe, encapsulates a profound historical legacy, a varied landscape, dynamic economic structures, and a rich cultural essence that resonates throughout its history. With its fertile grounds and tenacious populace, Belarus presents a story of contrast and intricacy, offering insights into a history shaped by conquests, adversities, and achievements.

Strategically positioned at Europe’s nexus, Belarus features a varied geography that defines its identity and essence. The northern regions are covered with expansive forests that house diverse wildlife, attracting nature lovers.

The southern areas are dominated by extensive fertile plains that bolster agriculture and support livelihoods. Important rivers such as the Dnieper and Neman snake through the terrain, crucial for trade and transport. The west features undulating hills and picturesque villages, whereas the eastern part is characterized by marshlands and wetlands, providing refuge for migratory birds and unique plant species.

Belarus’s history is characterized by persistence and resilience, shaped by numerous conquests and cultural exchanges. Originating from early Slavic tribes, the region was later influenced by Varangians and Vikings. By the 9th century, it was integrated into the Kievan Rus’, establishing its Slavic roots. Over the centuries, it faced Mongol invasions, was under Lithuanian control, and became part of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which included much of today’s Belarus.

The 16th-century Union of Lublin incorporated Belarus into the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, marking an era of cultural and religious diversity. The 18th century partitions of Poland led to Belarus becoming a part of the Russian Empire, which ushered in periods of industrialization and urbanization, profoundly transforming its society and economy.

The 20th century was tumultuous for Belarus, with significant impacts from two world wars and the establishment of Soviet dominance. World War II especially devastated Belarus, including the destruction of its capital, Minsk. Nevertheless, Belarus reconstructed its cities and revitalized its identity post-war.

The Belarusian economy, anchored in agriculture, industry, and services, reflects its historical and geopolitical context. Agriculture remains crucial, with fertile soils facilitating the cultivation of various crops and supporting a thriving dairy sector. Industrial sectors such as manufacturing and chemicals are pivotal, reflecting the Soviet-era industrial base, yet modern sectors like IT and technology are increasingly significant.

Despite promising economic prospects, challenges persist, including energy dependence on Russia and systemic issues like corruption. Efforts are underway to reform and diversify the economy, aiming to attract foreign investment and encourage entrepreneurial initiatives.

Belarusian culture, rich in traditions from its Slavic heritage and historical influences, includes the Belarusian language, which alongside Russian and Ukrainian, underscores national identity. Traditional music, dance, and art are integral, with religious observances from Orthodox Christianity and Catholicism coexisting harmoniously. Seasonal festivals like Kupalle and Koliady highlight Belarus’s deep-rooted folklore, celebrating life’s cyclical nature.

Belarusian literature and arts, with contributions from notable figures like Yanka Kupala and Yakub Kolas, enrich the national cultural landscape. The Belarusian School of Composers, including prominent composers like Jazep Drazdovi?, has notably influenced classical music.

Despite contemporary political and social challenges, the resilience and dedication of the Belarusian people to preserve their cultural heritage continue to underscore the vibrant and enduring nature of Belarusian culture.

Belarus stands as a beacon of the enduring spirit and cultural richness of its people. With its diverse landscapes, complex history, evolving economy, and vibrant culture, Belarus invites exploration and appreciation, making it a compelling destination in the heart of Europe.

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A history of Belarus : a non-literary essay that explains the ethnogenesis of the Belarusians

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Introduction: War and Memory in Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus

• Open Access
• First Online: 06 December 2017

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• Julie Fedor 8 ,
• Simon Lewis 9 &
• Tatiana Zhurzhenko 10  

Part of the book series: Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies ((PMMS))

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This introductory essay begins with a discussion of World War II memory in Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus, in light of the recent and ongoing war in Ukraine. It outlines the main contours of the interplay between “memory wars” and real war, and the important “post-Crimean” qualitative shift in local memory cultures in this connection. Next, the essay sketches out the specifics of the war memory landscapes of the region, and then of each of the three individual countries, before moving on to introduce the key organizing themes and findings of the book.

Julie Fedor’s research for this essay was supported under the Australian Research Council’s Discovery Early Career Research Awards (DECRA) funding scheme (project DE150100838). The Open Access fee was also covered by the same grant. The views expressed herein are those of the author and are not necessarily those of the Australian Research Council.

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Memory and the Wars on Terror

Memory Wars in Post-Soviet Ukraine (1991–2010)

The Politics of Memory on Liberation Day

At the beginning of the war in the Donbas , in early June 2014, long before Russia had filled the region with weapons, pro-Russian separatists in the small town of Konstantynivka in the Donetsk region told journalists that the tank they were using against the Ukrainian army had been taken down from the plinth of a World War II memorial in a local park, repaired, refueled, and “brought back to life” ( Segodnia 2014 ). Regardless of whether the story is true, the metaphor is powerful—it suggests that the ghosts of a war that ended seventy years ago are easily evoked.

This edited collection contributes to the current vivid multidisciplinary debate on memory politics in Eastern Europe, focusing on the re-narration and political instrumentalization of World War II memories in the post-Soviet context. At the same time, our book has a distinctive geographic focus: we concentrate on the three Slavic countries of post-Soviet Eastern Europe—Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus. Together they comprise the epicenter of Soviet war suffering, and the heartland of the Soviet war myth. In all three countries, memories of the war have been central in post-Soviet identity making; yet they demonstrate very different trajectories of nation-building and memory regimes. Contributions to our volume give insight into the persistence of the Soviet commemorative culture of World War II and the myth of the Great Patriotic War in the post-Soviet space. Yet the volume also demonstrates that due to various geopolitical, cultural, and historical reasons the political uses of World War II in post-Soviet Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus differ significantly, with important ramifications for future developments in the region and beyond.

The enduring prominence of World War II as a key theme in the national narratives of our target countries is unsurprising given the special intensity and scale of war suffering in this part of Europe. The war experience was especially traumatic here, where the population experienced unprecedented human losses, the destruction of the basic infrastructure, repressions under two occupational regimes, mass murder, deportations and ethnic cleansings. In this part of Europe, which (together with Poland ) Timothy Snyder ( 2010 ) called the “Bloodlands,” the brutalities of the war itself can hardly be separated from the mass crimes of Hitler’s and Stalin’s regimes. Although the scale of suffering was highest in Ukraine and Belarus, where the entire territory was occupied and devastated, in the Western optic these two countries tend to be subsumed under the sign of “Russia” and disappear from view. In this volume, we set out to offer a corrective to this view by broadening the lens beyond the Russian perspective.

The contributors to this book document the explosion of new memory practices, agents, symbols, and narratives that is currently underway in the Russia–Ukraine–Belarus triangle. At one level, these should be read in the context of an important event that we are presently witnessing: the passing of the last living World War II veterans. Stephen M. Norris has described how the 2010 Victory Day was framed by some Russian media as “The Last Parade” of the veterans and the end of the “living memory” of the war (Norris 2011 ). With the passing of this generation, the war memory is making the transition from the realm of communicative memory to that of cultural memory , to use Jan Assmann’s influential terms ( 2008 ). Assmann distinguished between communicative memory , based on an exchange of direct, biographical experience, and cultural memory, which is “a kind of institution. It is exteriorized, objectified, and stored away in symbolic forms that, unlike the sounds of words or the sight of gestures, are stable and situation-transcendent” (116–117). It is precisely this moment of transition that is reflected throughout the contributions to the book, documenting as they do the compulsive search for new forms of remembering, manifested in the war theme’s renewed prominence in mass culture, and in both public and private life, and in the production of new and reconstituted myths. At this moment of anxiety, as the direct bearers of World War II memory pass away, the memory of the war becomes if anything even more ever-present, and in many ways more unstable, in Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine.

The proliferation of new war monuments , and of public calls to keep the memory of war “alive,” hide a widespread anxiety related to the current moment of generational change and to entering a new world without the “war generation” whose moral authority was almost univocally accepted in fragmented and politically polarized post-Soviet societies. Many of the new practices explored in the book can be seen as part of what Elena Rozhdestvenskaya has called the “hyper-exploitation of the past Victory” which “leads to the constant making-present of the war experience, to the unending search for new methods of commemoration, so as to further extend the life of this event” (Rozhdestvenskaya 2015 ). 1 David R. Marples ( 2014 : ix) has asked: what consequences will the passing of the last veterans have for the ongoing viability of state reliance on the war myth? These consequences are still unfolding, but the contributors to this book go some way towards answering this question.

The book is a late fruit of the international research project Memory at War: Cultural Dynamics in Poland , Russia, and Ukraine, led by Alexander Etkind and based at the University of Cambridge in 2010–2013, and draws on the international symposium “Narratives of Suffering in Post-Cold War Europe: The Second World War in Transnational Contexts,” organized by the Helsinki team of the project at the Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki in September 2012. 2 The production of this volume coincided with (and was delayed by) dramatic events in our region, as discursive memory wars merged with and fueled a real war in Ukraine, following the events of the Euromaidan (2013–2014). These events reconfigured lives, societies, identities, and politics in our region, first of all in Ukraine and Russia. These changes have also reconfigured the field of our research. The book does not focus on these recent changes, although most chapters do address them (and we discuss them in a dedicated section of this introduction).

Instead, the book offers a deeper and broader contextualization of the politics of war memory within the Russia–Ukraine–Belarus triangle. We present here a collection of empirically rich case studies exploring political, social and cultural dimensions, and on multiple scales, from the local—Sevastopol , Narva , Karelia ; to the national; and through to the transnational, since the cultures of remembrance analyzed here are not limited by state borders. 3 Several of the chapters trace back the evolution of these memory cultures and narratives since the early 1990s, and some go back further still. In this way we set out to add historical depth to our understanding of the present situation in the region, and also to offer a more differentiated view on history and memory politics in the different countries under discussion.

In this introductory essay, we begin by discussing World War II memory in our region in light of the war in Ukraine that is ongoing at the time of writing (2017). We outline the main contours of the interplay between “memory wars ” and real war, and the important “post-Crimean” qualitative shift that we see in local memory cultures in this connection. Next, we sketch out a brief overview of the specifics of the war memory landscapes of the region, and then of each of the three individual countries, before moving on to introduce the book’s key organizing themes and findings.

From Memory Wars to Real Wars

The post-Soviet “memory wars ”—the ongoing struggle to define and narrate the past as a foundation for present and future identities—and the real war currently underway in the Donbas , are deeply interconnected on multiple levels. Memory politics have shaped and driven the current violence in Ukraine in important and complex ways. The ideological justification for Russian aggression against the fledgling Ukrainian state has been based heavily on claims about the memory of the past, and the current war in Ukraine is routinely imagined, narrated, and justified as a continuation of World War II. Pro-democratic forces in Ukraine have been systematically demonized in the Russian media as “neo-Nazis,” intent on erasing the historical memory of the Soviet Victory and perpetrating genocide against Russian and Jewish minorities. The “fascist” label is routinely applied not just to Ukrainians, but to a diverse range of objects at home and abroad, from Russian schoolchildren researching their family histories (Pavlova 2016 ), 4 to Western human rights activists (Obukhov 2016 ). 5

At one level, this is nothing new. For decades now, the past has been a key battleground in the struggle for the present and future in our region. Memory activism played a prominent driving role in protest movements in the twilight days of the Soviet bloc, and ever since, symbolic politics surrounding the past have been a crucial site of contestation, reflecting and shaping post-Soviet evolution in important ways (Miller and Lipman 2012 ; Tismaneanu et al. 2010 ; Stan 2008 ). In particular, debates over how to commemorate victims of state violence in the past have been closely intertwined with debates over human rights in the present, as they have elsewhere in the world. (On the linkage between human rights and remembrance, see Huyssen 2003 ; Winter 2013 .)

But with the beginning of the war in Ukraine, we can talk about a new quality of post-Soviet memory politics, or perhaps even a new phenomenon that goes beyond the usual ways of instrumentalizing the past. In the current Russian–Ukrainian conflict, we are witnessing the emergence and in some cases the cultivation of what amounts to a new temporality in which elements of past and present are fused together, and linear historical time collapses.

Some of the most striking manifestations of this dissolving of the boundaries between past and present have involved the public performance of memory . Consider the following example. In Donetsk , on Ukrainian Independence Day on 24 August 2014, Ukrainian prisoners were forced to take part in a “parade of shame,” paraded in front of angry crowds of civilians who were encouraged to pelt them with rotten food and spit on them, while a street-sweeping machine followed behind the parade to cleanse the road in their wake. Importantly, this parade was staged and framed as a re-run of Stalin’s famous 1944 “Parade of the Defeated,” when German prisoners of war were marched through Moscow, followed by street-sweepers symbolically cleaning the road. It was precisely this parallel that steered the collective emotions at work here. Here, then, seven decades after the Great Patriotic War ended, a sacralized narrative of the history of that war was used by proto-fascist Russian organizations to legitimize a ritualized act of violence and humiliation staged around the public performance of memory .

The prominent role played by historical re-enactors in the current war in Ukraine offers another example of the radical blurring, even dissolving, of the boundaries between past and present, and fantasy and reality, enacted through the performance of memory . Certainly, historical re-enactments have become a global phenomenon, one of the many new forms through which contemporary societies are engaging with their past. And yet, in our region we see something new. What is elsewhere usually an innocuous hobby for amateur historians, nostalgists, and medieval enthusiasts, has gained a more sinister hue. Amateur battle reconstruction enthusiasts provided many recruits and indeed leaders for the pro-Russian separatist movement in Ukraine (see Zhurzhenko 2015a ; Mitrokhin 2015 : 228–229). In this way, as Alexander Etkind put it, historical reconstruction began to “swallow up the present” (cited in Zemtsov 2014 ), as historical play and reality became confused and interchangeable, with destructive consequences. 6

Moreover, historical reconstruction has become an instrument for manipulating public memories and mass emotions, merging popular entertainment and state-sponsored political spectacle. Re-enactments of battles have been a visible feature of the lavishly funded shows staged annually in the Crimean city of Sevastopol by the Night Wolves patriotic bikers’ club—a new high-profile memory actor that regularly stages flamboyant performances of memory, skillfully courting global media attention, and enjoying the patronage of the Russian president. The Night Wolves ’ annual shows offer abundant compelling examples of the performance and narration of memory. Their 2014 show, entitled “The Return” in honor of the Crimean annexation, featured a procession of thousands of motorbikes, organized into columns, culminating at the local World War II memorial complex, as well as the use of military hardware provided by the Black Sea Fleet (Savchenko 2014 ). The 2015 show, “Forge of Victory,” took World War II as its theme, and in the finale, the audience re-lived the war memory, which was performed by present-day soldiers using genuine World War II weapons:

At midnight exactly, the lights went out, and then a German Messerschmitt appeared and bombardment commenced. And then: the Victory battles … Real military hardware from World War II took part in the show. The tanks and “Katiushas” had shot at German soldiers 70 years earlier. Military men with combat weaponry served as extras. (Khanin 2015 )

These spectacular historical re-enactments are reminiscent in some respects of the mass street theater re-enactments of the October Revolution staged to mark revolutionary anniversaries during the early Soviet period. It is often claimed that more people died during the 1927 re-enactment of the storming of the Winter Palace than during the original 1917 events; in any event, in both cases we see clearly that the re-enactment exceeds the original event, and reinvents the past for the purposes of the present. Indeed, for Russian neo-imperialist ideologue Aleksandr Prokhanov , whose “Fifth Empire” concept provided the theme for the Night Wolves show in August 2016, this show was “bringing a new reality into being” (cited Meduza 2016 ). 7

These are just a few examples of the extraordinary ways in which recent performances of memory in connection with the war in Ukraine have aimed at endowing the past and present with meaning. Jay Winter writes that: “Memory performed is at the heart of collective memory ” (Winter 2010: 11 ), and several of the contributors to this book explore the ways in which various commemorative rituals serve to delineate the boundaries of post-Soviet identities, and often to identify and construct “enemies.” We examine the phenomenon of historical re-enactment (in Chaps.  3 , 7 , 8 , and 14 ), and other new performative practices that redefine the relationship between the living, the war dead, and the unborn, such as the Immortal Regiment processions in which people march through public spaces bearing photographs of their ancestors who fought in the war (Chap.  11 ), or the popular fertility rituals performed by newly weds at tanks and other World War II monuments (Chap.  8 and  15 ). Apart from being important contributions to memory research, these chapters advance our understanding of the mechanisms of collective mobilization in times of political crisis. More specifically, they help to find answers to one of the central questions of the Ukrainian–sRussian conflict: how is it that historical myths and visions of the past projected onto the present can make people see the current war as an unfinished battle of World War II, even motivating some of them to take up arms?

A Region of Memory? Beyond National Memories in Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine

The emerging subdiscipline of East European Memory Studies often deals with the Western/Eastern Europe divide, with Russia bracketed out to one side as something of an exceptional case. Our focus on Russia–Ukraine–Belarus is aimed at presenting a more differentiated picture of (this part of) Eastern Europe. The current Ukraine–Russia conflict obscures the fact that there are still many continuities with the Soviet era, when these three Republics constituted the Slavic core of the Soviet Union and the memory of the Great Patriotic War shaped the essence of the late-Soviet identity. It was of course Ukraine (with the exception of its western regions), Belarus, and the western regions of Russia where the collective experience of World War II corresponded most closely with the official Soviet narrative of the Great Patriotic War; this helped to foster its acceptance by the local populations and its successful usage by the post-Soviet elites. At the same time we are now at the point where emerging national myths of World War II are dramatically diverging.

The post-war Soviet Union drew its legitimacy from the victory over Nazi Germany, and the official representations of the war were based on a triumphalist and heroic narrative of the “Great Patriotic War” that was elaborated in the Brezhnev era (Weiner 2001 ; Dubin 2005 ). This policy helped to suppress the traumatic memories not just of the war itself, but also of the unacknowledged Stalinist repressions (Etkind 2013 ). It also contributed to consolidating the collective identity and to shaping the supranational community of the “Soviet people” (on which see Brunstedt 2011 ).

The myth of the Great Patriotic War was the cultural foundation not only of the “new historical community of Soviet people” more broadly, but also more specifically of the subset of the three Slavic republics which comprised the ethnic and cultural core of the USSR. The myth of the “common victory” played a special role in relations between Moscow, Kyiv and Minsk ; it corresponded to the basic historical paradigm of East Slavic unity and “brotherhood” (Yekelchyk 2004 ). In Ukraine, it helped to silence the counter-memory of the anti-Soviet nationalist resistance and its collaboration with the Nazis (cf. Grinevich 2005 ). In Belarus, the mythologized self-image as the “Partisan Republic” that had played a key role in defending the Soviet Union and enabling the Victory became the defining feature of the post-war polity.

While Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus shared the basic symbols and narratives associated with the Soviet myth of the Great Patriotic War, the post-Soviet histories of that myth have diverged in important ways across the three countries. While in Russia the myth of the Great Patriotic War has been integrated into the new official narratives of Russian identity, state patriotism and military glory, in Ukraine a “divided culture of memory” prevented the national elites from a consensual view on World War II. In Belarus, where the Soviet war myth has been even more important than in Russia, the traditional Soviet narrative preserved by the Lukashenka regime has been increasingly challenged by oppositional intellectuals who are practically not represented in the state-controlled public space. Meanwhile, recent years have seen ongoing struggles for “ownership” of the Victory. Most notoriously, in 2010 Putin stated that Russia would have won the war “even without Ukraine.” 8 Both in Ukraine and Belarus the narrative of “common victory” and “common sacrifice” has been appropriated by the pro-Russian political forces. In post-Maidan Ukraine, a new consensus has emerged on World War II as a tragic rather than a heroic event in the nation’s history, and the Great Patriotic War formula has disappeared from museums and textbooks. At the same time, references to the Great Patriotic War are not rare in the public speeches of Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko in the context of the Russian aggression in the Donbas .

With the disintegration of the Soviet Union , Brezhnev’s memory empire did not collapse at once; its fragments were instrumentalized by the political elites in the new independent states. Scholars of East European memory have tended to focus on the processes of the nationalization of memory after the end of the Cold War (see for example Müller 2002 ), but the instrumentalization of memory in our region does not necessarily serve the purposes of creating new national independence narratives. One example is the Prokhorovka war memorial (1995) near Belgorod which was integrated into a new narrative of Slavic unity and became a mandatory site to be jointly visited by Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian leaders (Zhurzhenko 2015b ). An Orthodox chapel with a “Bell of Unity” was erected for the meeting of Putin, Lukashenka, and Kuchma in Prokhorovka in May 2000; it is decorated with the icons of three saints—the patrons of the three Slavic countries. Patriarch Aleksii II, who had inaugurated the meeting of the three presidents in Prokhorovka on the occasion of the 55th anniversary of the victory over Nazi Germany, stressed the issue of Slavic unity in his speech:

Sons of the Russian, the Ukrainian and the Belarusian nations fought here heroically against the common enemy, protecting their common Motherhood. Many of them gave their lives for our peaceful and free future. Nobody can separate their graves. In fight, in sacrifice, in Victory they were together. They share military glory and we share the memory of their deeds … Our best gift to their memory will be a strong union of the Ukrainians, the Russians and the Belarusians. (“Patriarch” 2000 )

By the mid-2000s Prokhorovka became a symbol of the “East Slavic reunification,” understood as the political, economic and cultural reintegration of the three former Soviet republics. Political elites interested in this project have sought to reinscribe the “Great Victory” into a new discourse of pan-Slavism and Orthodox unity, adapting Soviet symbols, narratives, and rituals to this end.

Thus, the self-defined (or, arguably, Russia-defined) East Slavic core of the former Soviet space is a paradigmatic region of memory, that is, a “discursive arena above the level of the nation-state but not fully universal” (Olick 2015 : x). This memory region is both institutional and experiential: it is observable both in the mnemonic interactions of state and non-state organizations and in the shared history of wartime suffering and post-war Soviet politics. The case of Prokhorovka shows that political elites in Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine have built legal, bureaucratic, and symbolic structures to attempt to unify the narrative of the war and promote claims of shared identity. Another example is the commemoration of the “International Day of the Liberation of Nazi Concentration Camp Inmates” on 11 April, a calendar holiday unknown outside the post-Soviet states (Bekus 2016 ). More recently, in the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Eastern Ukraine and Crimea , such top-level commemorative cooperation has declined. For example, in 2015 Belarus enacted a symbolic rejection of Russian memory models when it introduced an alternative to the St George’s Ribbon , the Flower of Victory, an apple flower on a red and green ribbon now worn by veterans and spectators during the Victory Day celebrations of 9 May. 9 Nonetheless, it remains clear that memory symbols and narratives are closely intertwined in this region: the sharing of tropes has increasingly given way to memory conflict, but the connectivities of memory remain strong.

This regional perspective is a fruitful prism for studying the memory cultures of Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine because it recognizes that the specific Soviet myth of the Great Patriotic War was hugely formative for these three countries, whilst also allowing for the dynamic study of how memory regimes have evolved and influenced each other across national borders. Thus, our decision to focus on the Russia–Ukraine–Belarus triangle should not be read as indicating a tacit acceptance of the ideological construct of primordial East Slavic unity and brotherhood. 10 The essays in this volume overwhelmingly show that memory is contested both within and between states.

The trajectories of memory in these former Soviet countries also provide an instructive counter-example to the popular argument that the Holocaust has become a global symbol of twentieth-century suffering (Levy and Sznaider 2002 ). Somewhat paradoxically, in the very lands where the mass killing of Europe’s Jewish population was unleashed on an industrial scale (alongside Poland , Hungary, the Baltic States, and other East European states), the metanarrative of the Holocaust’s centrality to global memory culture is debunked. The Holocaust is certainly not forgotten here, despite the fact that the official Soviet narrative allowed no concessions to the specific suffering of Jews , instead generalizing about the deaths of “peaceful Soviet citizens” (see Al’tman 2005 ). However, the Holocaust is decidedly not a principal pillar of memory in the region; rather, it competes for supremacy with other foundation myths, including the cult of Victory and national martyrologies (see Chap.  12 ).

Meanwhile, the memory of the Holocaust can be seen as a site of negotiation between the local and global. Political elites, regardless of their views, cannot avoid references to the Holocaust as a universal symbol of twentieth-century history. The global discourses of Holocaust remembrance and human rights have been appropriated and adapted in various ways by the Putin regime as a self-legitimizing move (see Fedor 2015 : 2), while Ukraine’s pro-Western government addresses the issue of Holocaust in order to demonstrate its commitment to European values. At the same time, the unprecedented public commemoration of the 75th anniversary of Babiy Yar in Kyiv in September 2016 and new memorials created by the efforts of civil society (such as the Space of Synagogues in Lviv) testify to a new trend towards integrating the Holocaust into the national historical narrative.

Overall, all three memory cultures remain fundamentally structured by the Soviet Great Patriotic War myth. This applies even when and indeed especially when their positions on that myth are starkly opposed to one another. As Michael Rothberg has argued, the virulence of conflicts over memory is in part a result of “the rhetorical and cultural intimacy of seemingly opposed traditions of remembrance” (Rothberg 2009 : 7; original emphasis). Rothberg’s observation that our relationship to the past always has “unexpected or even unwanted consequences that bind us to those whom we consider other” (Ibid.: 5) is particularly apt here, where seemingly radical attempts to reject the Soviet paradigm so often only serve to entrench it further (see Portnov 2016 ). Bitter debates on the role of Stalin in Russian history, and in particular, his role in the victory over Nazi Germany, which paradoxically unite liberals and nationalists in one discursive realm, prove this point (cf. Chap.  2 ). As Yuliya Yurchuk shows in Chap.  4 , attempts to create an anti-Soviet nationalist narrative glorifying the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) as national heroes often copy the traditional Soviet narrative and borrow from its stylistic repertoire. The same can be said of some nationalist narratives in Belarus (see Chap.  13 ), where, at the same time, the ruling regime is increasingly borrowing from the opposition’s depository of symbols and narratives (cf. Chap.  3 ).

Mark D. Steinberg suggests another perspective on Eastern Europe that is useful for framing our approach here. He writes:

if we hold to the definition of region as a space constituted by social relationships rather than by commonalities of culture, eastern Europe is very much such a relational space, with its distinctive legacies of enormous diversity and often sudden change, and especially of forceful modern attempts to unify and stabilize relationships by absorbing difference into empires and multinational states or attempting to eradicate difference. (Steinberg 2014 : 75–76)

In the case of our three countries, it is relevant to mention that their relations have often been imagined and structured by kinship narratives and metaphors linked to kinship, rather than, say, to “neighborly” relations or “partnerships.” Recognition of this is crucial for understanding the emotional dimension to the memory wars . It is frequently asserted in the Russian press, for example, that what makes the post-Soviet memory wars “especially hurtful and bitter,” as one journalist put it, is the fact that “kindred [ rodstvennye ] Slavic peoples are included in the circle of main enemies” (cited in Maevskaia 2009 ). The old metaphors of Slavic brotherhood and Slavic blood ties thus continue to exert symbolic power, but now often carry a negative charge. Whilst insisting on shared collective kinship among the peoples of the USSR, Soviet propaganda also denounced Ukrainian nationalists during World War II as “betrayers of the Motherland” (cf. Chap.  4 ), and this accusation echoes in the recent memory wars in post-Soviet space. A new monument to the “victims of the OUN and UPA ” erected in Simferopol in Crimea in 2007 under the title “Shot in the Back” represents a wounded Soviet soldier embraced and supported by a woman. The history of this metaphor goes back to the imperial period of Ukrainian–Russian relations (Kappeler 1997 ). This fact helps to explain the emotional power of the notion of “treachery” in the context of the current Ukrainian–Russian conflict as pro-Western Ukraine is presented as a Trojan horse of US imperialism. Thus, the dominant trope of “fraternity” has now effectively been turned inside out, and transformed into the new key organizing metaphor of “betrayal”. The persistence of this underlying idea serves to radically limit the available role categories to a stark choice: brother or traitor.

In post-Soviet space, successful instrumentalization of war memory has been enabled by the fact that, at the level of popular attitudes, the myth of the Great Patriotic War has remained even more important than at the level of elite politics. Frederick Corney has observed that: “Successful foundation narratives are commissioned in a complex relationship between rulers and the ruled”, and that their viability “depends on their ability to draw individuals into the process of meaning-making” (Corney 2004 : 2–3). Victory Day (9 May) marking the end of the war is the most important commemorative date on the Russian official calendar; it also happens to be the only post-Soviet holiday that is genuinely popular in Russia (Levinson 2015 ) and beyond its borders (Gabowitsch et al. 2016 ). As Nina Tumarkin puts it, during the late-Soviet period, Victory Day “was both the tool of propagandists touting its triumphs and a memorial day for millions of relatives and friends of the war dead” ( 1994 : 37; original emphasis). The powerful emotional connections between the levels of individual/family and collective memories of the war mean that the Great Patriotic War myth continues to fulfill the criteria set out by Stephen Kotkin in his study of Soviet ideology and propaganda. Kotkin points out that it is not possible simply to impose propaganda from above. In order to be effective, Kotkin writes, propaganda “must offer a story that people are prepared at some level to accept; one that retains the capacity to capture their imagination, and one that they can learn to express in their own words” ( 1995 : 358). The war myth continues to succeed in doing all these things. Seen retrospectively, after Crimea , it still represents the strongest identity marker of the “Russian world,” broadly understood as the East Slavic, or Orthodox civilization. As the “Russian spring ” of 2014 demonstrated, even a quarter of a century after the collapse of the Soviet Union , cultural and ideological attachment to the myth of the Great Patriotic War overshadows political loyalties to the new nation-states.

It has become commonplace to point out that the Soviet Victory is now the single most important historical event capable of acting as a foundation stone for a post-Soviet-Russian national identity (see for example Gudkov 2005 ; Wolfe 2006 ). In important ways, the Victory has come to displace or stand in for other candidates for the role of a symbol of national unity through shared suffering and victimhood, such as the Gulag. The Russian Federation’s position as semi-successor state to the USSR rules out the possibility of externalizing the history of Soviet state violence. Instead, as Serguei Oushakine has argued, the war memory seems to function as a kind of placeholder, a “black hole” into which all of Russia’s unacknowledged twentieth-century traumas can be absorbed (cited in Kosterina 2015 ).

Despite the breaking of various taboos around the Soviet role in the war in recent decades (on which see Carleton 2016 ), the Soviet myth of the Great Patriotic War, now reconstituted and integrated into a new narrative of Russian history, largely retains its status as sacred and untouchable. Successive governments have put significant resources into fostering the use of the Victory cult as an instrument of national consolidation and patriotic education. The Victory myth has been deemed so crucial to the nation-building project that it requires direct government intervention: for example, denial of the Red Army’s Victory has been made a criminal offence.

The Soviet role in defeating fascism is also an important element underpinning Russian geopolitical claims to great power status (see further Zhurzhenko 2015a ). The current Russian government has also made wide use of the symbolic capital derived from this in its relations with the former Soviet countries by labeling any moves to depart from the Soviet narrative of the war (or by extension from the Russian sphere of influence) as “fascist.” Since 2014, tropes and images from the Soviet myth of the war have also been “weaponized” to incite pro-Russian insurgency in Ukraine. For example, the tragic events in Odessa on 2 May 2014, when clashes between the Euromaidan and the Anti-Maidan ended with a catastrophic fire in the Trade Union house which took the lives of dozens of pro-Russian protesters, was widely labeled “a new ‘Khatyn’,” that is, a repeat of the massacre of civilians that took place in the Belarusian village of Khatyn’ in 1943 and which later became an emblematic “fascist” crime in the Soviet war narrative. The victims of the 2014 Odessan fire were in turn claimed as martyrs to the cause of building “Novorossiia” in Ukraine (see for example Darenskii 2015 ). The victims were said to have died to enable the beginning of the “Russian Spring ,” on the one hand, and in the name of past Russian military victories, on the other, and these two dimensions were often closely intertwined. One Orthodox priest commenting on these events, for example, described the Odessan fire as “A BURNT OFFERING … an auspicious sacrifice … and an eternal cursing of the Nazis!” [original emphasis—eds.] (cited in Chistiakov 2014 : 3). This is only one example of how the memories of World War II have been mobilized to incite the anti-Ukrainian insurgency by equating Ukrainian nationalism with German Nazism as the embodiment of absolute evil.

Thus, seventy years after the victory over Nazi Germany, Russia claims to be facing the same challenge—the threat of fascism . “Anti-fascism ” has thus become a central element of the new national idea and the motor of mass nationalist mobilization in today’s Russia. 11 This new politics of memory is pervasive: it stretches from official discourse and diplomatic rhetoric to mass media, cultural production (films, plays, even operas) and academic history writing.

The Ukrainian events coincided with a wave of memory wars within Russia itself. In the first half of 2014, Putin signed into law the criminalization of “the dissemination of knowingly false information about the actions of the USSR during World War II” ( Sova 2014 ); a former state security official was appointed head of Moscow State University’s Contemporary History Department (Aptekar’ 2014 ); and the historian Andrei Zubov was sacked (albeit temporarily) from his university post over an article in which he compared current policies on ethnic Russians in the near abroad to the Nazi handling of the Sudeten Germans issue (Antonova 2014 )—to give just a few examples. As this book’s manuscript was finalized, in August 2016, we saw the first case of a criminal conviction being brought down (and upheld by the Supreme Court) under the abovementioned 2014 addition to the Russian Criminal Code, article 354.1, on the “Rehabilitation of Nazism.” 12

Commentary on Russian memory politics often focuses on the issue of continuity between the Soviet Union and the Russian Federation, the prospect of a Russian-led attempt to recreate the Soviet Union, and the advent of a “new Cold War .” We view such notions as something of a red herring, and one that is moreover convenient in various ways for the current Russian regime, whose leaders frequently present themselves as the only alternative to a full regression back into Stalinist habits and practices and ancient tendencies arising inevitably out of the Russian national character. It is in the Putin regime’s interests to use politics around the past in order to distract people away from political choices in the present. Again, this has less in common with the Soviet use of the war myth than it might seem. In contrast to the old Soviet ideology, which represented a coherent and stable system, Putinist ideology is heterogeneous and eclectic, selecting and combining elements of both the Soviet and imperial narratives with the aim of demonstrating Russia’s “greatness.”

It is important to bear in mind that, far from representing an inevitable resurgence of old grievances and “ancient hatreds,” the memory politics currently being conducted are very much a matter of active and deliberate myth making on the part of contemporary elites. Duncan S.A. Bell highlights the fact that myths “do not simply evolve unguided, without active agency … Myths are constructed, they are shaped, whether by deliberate manipulation and intentional action, or perhaps through the particular resonance of works of literature and art” (Bell 2003 : 75). We might view what is happening in Russia not as a climax of cultural and political conservatism but rather as the invention of a new nation, as the Russian oppositional journalist Oleg Kashin suggested in a polemical column on contemporary Russian memory politics on the occasion of Victory Day 2016. In his article, entitled “A New Holiday for a New People,” Kashin noted that while Russians were used to thinking of themselves as an old narod with a rich culture and history, it made sense in fact to think of Russians as:

a new narod , a narod that is in the process of being created artificially right now at an accelerated tempo, like the Turks under Kemal. A narod like this needs precisely a myth like this—a myth of ancestors who smashed the threat from the West in a bloody war, who were loyal to their state and prepared to sacrifice themselves for the sake of its interests. (Kashin 2016 )

In this sense, Russia is in fact not so different from Ukraine and Belarus, which are more often and more readily seen as “new” nations in urgent need of their own history and identity.

Unlike in Russia, in Ukraine conflicting views on the Soviet past and alternative interpretations of World War II have contributed to a profound political conflict which splits the society. In this respect Ukraine resembles a country that experienced civil war, such as Spain (Shevel 2011 ). The right to interpret the historical and geopolitical outcome of World War II has been openly claimed by competing political forces. The reinterpretation of World War II and its role in Ukrainian history is directly linked to the “post-colonial” search for national identity and the problem of geopolitical choice between Russia and the West. While during Leonid Kuchma’s decade (1994–2005) officials referred to World War II as the “Great Patriotic War of the Ukrainian people,” thereby endowing the Soviet narrative with national meaning, in the official discourse of the Yushchenko era (2005–2010) the Ukrainian nation figured as a victim of two totalitarian regimes. According to Sofia Grachova ( 2008 : 4), “the new official historical narrative represented the war not so much as a glorious event, but rather as a terrible tragedy that struck the Ukrainian people in the absence of a national state.” During the Yanukovych era, this approach was marginalized, and some of the old Soviet symbols (such as the Soviet flag in the form of the Banner of Victory) were officially reintroduced, provoking severe conflicts.

In Ukraine, unlike in Russia and much more so than in Belarus, a nationalist counter-narrative to the Great Patriotic War has existed since the late 1980s, referring to the OUN–UPA and its leaders, Stepan Bandera and Roman Shukhevych. This narrative, rather marginal during the first post-independence decade, was elevated to the level of national memory politics in the era of Viktor Yushchenko . His symbolic politics, which aimed at the glorification of Ukrainian nationalism and at denouncing the Soviet regime as anti-Ukrainian, polarized the country. The Eastern Ukrainian regions being the stronghold of the Party of Regions became the main arena of memory wars during Yushchenko’s presidency.

As some commentators have pointed out, these memory wars prepared the ground for the armed conflict in the Donbas : “the war in Eastern Ukraine (called an anti-terrorist operation) officially started in April 2014. The war in peoples’ minds, which now seems to be an integral (and natural) part of the current military and civic conflict started much earlier—when the past became an important element of the present” (Kasianov 2014 ). Addressing the role of identity politics in the current Ukrainian crisis, Zhurzhenko ( 2014 ) has shown how Ukraine’s divided political elite opened the Pandora’s box of memory politics, using it as a tool for mass electoral mobilization, and how Russia has profited from the “war of identities” in its efforts to weaken Ukraine and prevent its reorientation to the West.

Andrii Portnov has offered one of the most balanced and measured accounts of the revival of the Bandera mythology in the course of the Euromaidan protests. He notes that in addition to the far-right adherents of the Bandera myth, there were also those who took up this myth in a gesture of reappropriation in response to the Kremlin’s campaign to represent the Maidan as “fascist,” and often in ignorance of Bandera’s biography and views ( 2016 ). Others too have drawn attention to the ways in which Bandera as a symbol acquired new meanings in the course of the Maidan protests, at least partly becoming decoupled from Bandera’s legacy of exclusivist ethno-nationalism (see Kulyk 2014 ; Yekelchyk 2015 ). Ultimately, as Portnov argues, “many people were trapped by the same propaganda narrative they wished to oppose” ( 2016 ).

Among the most divisive recent developments in the Ukrainian politics of war memory has been the renewed “decommunization” process currently underway. This process must be viewed in the context of the present war with Russia and Russia-backed separatists. This war has, understandably, strengthened the narrative of national liberation struggle officially propagated by the Institute for National Remembrance, led by the controversial historian Volodymyr Viatrovych . Viatrovych, who downplays crimes committed by the Ukrainian nationalists against Jews and Poles during World War II, has long been a target of domestic and international criticism (see letter of Western historians Marples 2015 ; Miller 2016 ). In 2015, four laws on new memory politics in Ukraine drafted by the Institute were adopted by the Ukrainian Parliament on 9 April and later signed by President Poroshenko on 15 May, despite international and domestic criticism and pleas to bring them in line with European human rights legislation (Marples 2015 ).

Most of this criticism was directed against two of the four “decommunization” laws (cf. Chap.  4 ). The first of these is aimed at regulating representations of the controversial UPA and OUN. This law effectively creates an official canon of “national heroes,” thus limiting critical public debate and complicating academic research on these issues. The second law officially condemns the Soviet regime alongside the Nazi regime, both of which are labeled totalitarian, and criminalizes the public use of communist and Soviet symbols. Both laws have been widely criticized as an assault on freedom of speech and as imposing a narrow view of the Soviet period of Ukrainian history as occupation.

The other two laws have attracted less attention but also represent important developments in Ukrainian memory politics. First, free access was granted to the former KGB archives. Second, a significant change was made to the Ukrainian official commemorative calendar: 8 May was now designated the Day of Memory and Reconciliation . This day now coexists alongside the old Soviet Victory Day public holiday on 9 May, which remains in place. In this way, the law partially broke with the (post-)Soviet tradition of Victory Day and with the still persisting narrative of the Great Patriotic War. Ukraine has distanced itself from the Russian symbols of the Great Patriotic War (such as the St George’s Ribbon ) which had been used rather as a neutral symbol in the post-Soviet countries prior to 2014 but became a symbol of pro-Russian separatism after the “Russian Spring.” A new national symbol has been developed by the Institute for National Remembrance—a poppy flower combined with the slogan “Never Again” ( Nikoly znovu ) which clearly refers to the European tradition of war remembrance and its current post-heroic focus on mourning the victims of war. In the official political rhetoric and symbolic politics of the Ukrainian government, the Great Patriotic War does still play a role, however. For example, President Poroshenko makes frequent reference to the war, drawing parallels with the Russian aggression in the East, and official posters advertising service in the Ukrainian military stress continuity with the generation of Soviet veterans. One can argue that new victims, heroes, and martyrs of the war in the Donbas relativize the memory of World War II, although its highly politicized symbols such as the St George’s Ribbon still polarize society, and clashes between the pro-Russian opposition and Ukrainian radical nationalists have become typical for the 9 May public commemorations.

Alternative nation-building projects are underway in the so-called “Donetsk People’s Republic ” (DNR) and the “Luhansk People’s Republic” (LNR) with their own collective mythologies, heroes, and martyrs, and even a new national mission, waged under the banner of “anti-fascism .” The myth of the Great Patriotic War serves as glue holding together heterogeneous symbols, such as the Russian Cossackry, the figure of the heroic working-class miner, and the Orthodox Church . In the rhetoric of the self-proclaimed leaders of the DNR and LNR, the survival of the “young republics” is celebrated as “victory” reminiscent of the Great Victory of 1945.

Belarus is similar to Ukraine in the polarization of memory between pro- and anti-Soviet models, but also very different in that the anti-Soviet mythology of the war is marginalized from public discourse and is unlikely to enter a position of power in the foreseeable future. The two-decade-old regime of Aliaksandr Lukashenka has from the outset gained its political legitimacy from recycling the Soviet myths of “fraternity” with Russia and collective heroism during World War II. National consciousness had been comparatively weak in Belarus when the Soviet project began, and in seventy years of communist rule, the Moscow-led authorities were rarely compelled to make concessions to Belarusian national aspirations. Thus, the central post-war myth of the “partisan republic” was largely successful in cultivating Soviet loyalty: in March 1991, 82.7 percent of Belarusians supported the preservation of the USSR (Marples 2003 : 21). In summer 1994, Lukashenka, previously an unknown figure in Belarusian politics, tapped widespread social anxiety, economic uncertainty and Soviet nostalgia to gain a resounding electoral victory and become the country’s first (and to this day [2017] only) president.

The memory politics of the so-called “last dictatorship in Europe” have involved a simultaneous narrowing and expansion of the cult of Victory: the semantic scope of the narrative has narrowed, but the symbolic arsenal of memory has been reinforced. If the Soviet myth of the “partisan republic” emphasized the Belarusian nation’s contribution to pan-Soviet glory, the version promoted by the Lukashenka regime has nationalized the myth in subtle but perceptible ways: the nation is now presented as the main actor and beneficiary of the heroic wartime resistance (Rudling 2008 ; Marples 2014 ). The Flower of Victory can be seen as the latest incarnation of this isolationist memorialization. Whilst in 2015 the Ukrainian authorities adopted the overtly Western symbol of the poppy and thereby sought to transplant the country from the Eurasian to the European civilizational model, Belarus chose an apple flower adorned with the colors of the national flag (Red and Green). The Lukashenka regime opted for a new, semantically empty symbol that both rejects the Russian memorial hegemony of the St George’s Ribbon and maintains a distance from the Western European victim-centered narrative. The Belarusian case is therefore a curious patchwork of reworked Soviet tropes that simultaneously assert Eurasian civilizational identity—rejecting Western victim-centered narratives and claiming descent from the pan-Soviet Victory—and carve out a separate, non-Russian space of national memory .

To help promote this vision of Belarus’s historical and mnemonic Sonderweg , the state has carried out costly refurbishments of Soviet-era monuments , such as the Khatyn Memorial Complex (opened 1969, renovated 2006; for further discussion see Rudling 2012 and Lewis 2015 ), and it has also added new sites of memory, such as the Stalin Line museum (opened 2005, discussed in Chap.  8 ; Marples 2012 ). July 2014 saw the grand reopening of the Museum of the Great Patriotic War in Minsk : this major Soviet-era institution was relocated to a new, purpose-built building and revamped with a significantly enlarged exhibition space, interactive expositions, and a highly charged social and political purpose. The opening ceremony was attended by both Lukashenka and Putin, a fact that bears witness to the museum’s transnational political significance. This costly and widely publicized project allows visitors to imagine themselves in reconstructed war scenes, combining a sanitized narrative of Belarusian–Soviet military victory with enjoyable, 3D performative affect (see Bratachkin 2015 ; Lastovskii et al. 2014 ). As a museum that modernizes the (official) memory of the war for generations that have no lived experience of this history, it leaves no doubt as to the continued centrality of the Great Patriotic War to the identity project of the Belarusian authorities.

Yet at the same time, the Lukashenka regime has gradually diversified its approach to war memory. The myth of the partisan republic is still paramount, but it is no longer a monolith. As both Ackermann and Rudling show in their chapters, complex forms of interaction between state and grassroots activists have led to the official sanctification of previously unheralded narratives, from the Soviet war in Afghanistan to the Battle of Orsha , fought between the armies of Poland –Lithuania and Muscovy in 1514. The Holocaust and Jewish heritage are also being incorporated into the accepted symbols of official commemoration, as demonstrated by Lukashenka’s participation in a 2014 memorial ceremony at the site of Trastianets, a former Nazi killing field where more than 200,000 individuals, mostly Jews , were murdered during the war (Waligórska 2016 ). Needless to say, the increasing number of memory symbols does not correspond to a change in the dominant memory regime: the mode of remembrance remains resolutely triumphant, framed in terms of heroism and martyrdom rather than victimhood and mourning.

This heterogeneous instrumentalization of memory and the general popularity of the Victory myth make it difficult for the political opposition to dispute the state’s central claims about the war. If in Ukraine, the wartime anti-Soviet (as well as anti-Polish and anti-Semitic) actions of the Bandera and Shukhevych militias are readily advanced as a counter-narrative to the Soviet interpretation of military victory, in Belarus the wartime nationalist–collaborationist movement does not easily lend itself to such lionization: it was comparatively weak and thoroughly discredited during the post-war decades. There have been attempts to raise historical figures such as Usevalad Rodz’ka , a potential Belarusian “equivalent” of Bandera, to the status of a national hero, but these have so far failed to gain traction (see Chaps.  3 and 13 ). Instead, the most prominent attempts to decouple Belarusian identity from Soviet metanarratives tend to focus on the crimes of Stalinism , considered independently of the war. The best known and politically “hottest” site of anti-Soviet memory is the Kurapaty Forest, a mass burial site for victims of NKVD executions during the Terror of the late 1930s (Marples 1994 ; Etkind et al. 2012 ). Nonetheless, as Chap.  13 discusses in more detail, the process of unmaking the myth of the partisan republic has unfolded in literature and culture, and continues to this day.

Given Belarus’s self-imposed relative isolation from Eastern European memory wars and its uneasy neutrality in the ongoing Russia–Ukraine conflict, it is not surprising that the mnemonic dimension of the war in Eastern Ukraine has had comparatively few effects on war memory in Belarus. There has been no need for the Kremlin to rebrand a section of Belarusians as “fascists,” and official Minsk has not been moved to designate a new day on which to mark Victory Day in order to snub Moscow. Instead, Belarus has quietly distanced itself from the Russian memory frame, for example in Lukashenka’s decision not to attend the 9 May celebrations in Moscow in 2015. Against the background of events in Ukraine, Lukashenka’s snub and the Flower of Victory are minor changes that suggest an apprehensiveness against Russian influence, but hardly a desire to antagonize. Regional politics may yet have a profound effect on Belarusian war memory, but for now the memory war is mostly confined within the boundaries of the state.

Outline of the Book

The volume is divided into five parts, each comprising three chapters.

Part I: Memories of World War II and Nation Building begins at the national level with an introduction to each of our three national cases. With the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus embarked on a difficult process of building new states and consolidating their populations as national communities. While the myth of the October Revolution and the Soviet ideology was relatively easy to give up, the so-called “Great Patriotic War” was deeply rooted in collective memory , mass culture, and public discourse. Post-Soviet political elites, which in all three countries largely originated from the Soviet nomenklatura , have been seeking a difficult balance. On the one hand, new national symbols and narratives referring to the pre-Soviet era were initially met with skepticism by significant parts of the population; on the other, the Soviet myth of the Great Patriotic War served as a familiar and comforting symbol of continuity in the uncertain times of transition. The state has traditionally played an especially prominent role in memory politics in all three post-Soviet countries, and so these chapters share a particular focus on official memory politics and the role of political actors and institutions such as president and parliament in shaping their agenda. This section addresses similarities and specificities of the three national cases, helping to set the scene for the remaining chapters.

Olga Malinova begins with a survey of post-Soviet-Russian memory politics on the war, tracing the evolution of official attempts to use the war memory for identity-building purposes through from the early 1990s to the present day. She tracks these changes through a detailed frame analysis of presidential speeches and commemorative ceremonies.

Next, Per Anders Rudling guides us through both the official and the oppositional use of historical myths and narratives. Like Malinova’s chapter, Rudling’s highlights the ways in which the state authorities have sought sources of legitimacy in the past, taking over and adapting Soviet and other narratives for nation-building purposes. Rudling also shows that alternative historical cultures are also present in Belarus, for example in the form of online videos and cartoons presenting nationalist narratives of Belarusian history in pop culture form. Both these first two chapters conclude that the Soviet cult of the war remains a key identity marker, in part because of the limited success that governments and elites have had in finding suitable alternatives.

Finally in Part I, Yuliya Yurchuk traces the history of successive attempts to challenge the Soviet master narrative of the Great Patriotic War in Ukraine from 1991 through to 2016. She focuses on the nationalist narrative of the OUN and UPA as fighters for Ukraine’s independence during World War II, and demonstrates the impressive career of this narrative from a local “counter-memory” rooted in some regions of Western Ukraine to a new national myth legitimized by the Ukrainian state. Her account takes us through to the post-Euromaidan period, which has resulted in a bid to monopolize official memory by the Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance .

The essays comprising Part II: In Stalin’s Shadow explore the figure of Joseph Stalin and the paradox of his growing popularity in the post-Soviet era. His role in World War II remains the single most divisive aspect of the Victory cult in Russia. More than any other historical personage or symbol, Stalin —the commander-in-chief who presided over the Red Army’s Victory, and the architect of mass atrocities against his own and other peoples—embodies the inseparability of the triumphalist and traumatic elements of Soviet history, as well as the ambiguities and tensions at the core of (post-)Soviet war memory . Joseph Stalin is far more than just a Russian lieu de mémoire —–for example, Stalin as a symbol of the Great Victory has been smuggled into the public sphere in Belarus where his figure contributes to legitimizing Lukashenka’s authoritarian regime (cf. Chaps.  3 and 8 ). The three chapters in Part II deal with the post-Soviet afterlife of Stalin’s cult in Russia and in Ukraine.

Markku Kangaspuro and Jussi Lassila begin with a study of the symbolic politics around the renaming of Stalingrad /Volgograd. They use this case to demonstrate the difficulties faced by various actors in Russian politics and society in handling the relationship between the closely interconnected triumphalist and traumatic associations linked to the figure of Stalin . They provide a detailed analysis of the Putin-era debates over whether the name “Stalingrad ” should be reinstated. Their account highlights the limits of the Russian state’s power to impose hegemonic control over narratives of the national past, and links this to the “hybrid” nature of state memory politics in Russia, combining both authoritarian and democratic features.

Serhii Plokhy’s chapter examines the role that the cult of Stalin plays in articulating conflicting approaches to the history of the war in Ukraine, through a close reading of a 2010 incident in which Ukrainian nationalists ritually beheaded a statue of Stalin that had been erected by the local Communists in the city of Zaporizhzhia earlier that year. This case study demonstrates how the Soviet war myth functions as a force for division in Ukrainian society. It also sheds retrospective light on later developments in Eastern Ukraine known as the “Russian Spring,” as well as helping to illuminate the driving forces behind the current Ukrainian “decommunization” campaign.

Finally in Part II, Philipp Chapkovski’s chapter investigates the phenomenal popularity of neo-Stalinist literature in Russia. He views this partly as an outcome of the state’s reliance on the Victory myth, which makes an unequivocal renunciation of Stalin impossible. Chapkovski sets out to discover who is writing and consuming this literature, and why. His chapter provides an introduction to the key themes and features of this genre, and places its emergence in the broader context of the historical development of neo-Stalinism in the late-Soviet period. He also compares neo-Stalinist literature to Holocaust denial literature, finding both commonalities and important differences. Moreover, he tracks the fates of the leading neo-Stalinist authors in the post-Crimean period, finding that some of them swapped their pens for guns and went to fight in the Donbas ; others still have fallen from grace and now face charges of extremism, while the general trend is towards the emergence of a new “right-wing” version of Stalinism in the new political context. 13

One of this book’s contributions to memory studies concerns the proliferation of new groups, agents, narratives and symbols, reflecting the volatility, fluidity, and heterogeneity of the memory landscapes in the region. The essays in Part III: New Agents and Communities of Memory identify and discuss a selection of new memory actors and communities. We approach memory politics in post-Soviet transitional societies not only as a matter of a top-down policy of nation building and state-led identity construction, but also as a bottom-up process in which new groups, communities of memory, and commemorative agents enter public politics claiming recognition of their particular narratives, and sometimes even representation of their group interests in politics and various forms of compensation. In post-Soviet societies, these grassroots initiatives can be captured, or partially captured, by the state (see Chap.  11 ). At the same time, pluralization has set certain limits on the state’s capacity to impose a single narrative of the past (see Chap.  5 ). In fact, it would be misleading to draw neat divisions between these top-down and bottom-up processes. As several of the chapters show, private, state, and social processes of remembering are deeply intertwined. In this sense our volume responds to Mischa Gabowitsch’s call for post-Soviet memory studies to move beyond the binaries that have tended to structure the field to date (Gabowitsch 2015 ).

The chapters in Part III address three different communities of memory constituted in the post-Soviet decades: the Soviet Afghan War veterans in Belarus (Chap.  8 ); the “children of war ” in Russia (Chap.  9 ); and former Ostarbeiters (forced labor workers) in Ukraine (Chap.  10 ). All three communities of memory are essentially transnational—associations of Afghan war veterans, “children of war,” and former forced labor workers exist in Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus alike. However, we can also observe significant differences in their political strategies and forms of interaction with the state, depending on the specificities of the political regimes and nation-building processes in these three countries.

Felix Ackermann approaches the role of the Afghan war veterans in renegotiating Belarusian war memory from a special angle, via a study of two post-Soviet war memorials erected on the veterans’ initiative and connecting the memories of the two wars. While the Island of Tears memorial created in the mid-1990s in central Minsk reframed the recent Soviet past as national trauma and introduced Christian symbolic language into urban space, the “Stalin Line ” memorial, opened on the western outskirts of the city ten years later, reintroduced the figure of Stalin and the narrative of the Great Victory, claiming such values as patriotism and heroism for the public education of Belarusian citizens. The two memorials illustrate the evolution of the national commemorative culture in line with the Belarusian political regime’s sliding towards authoritarianism, and the virtual continuity between the Great Victory of 1945 and the Soviet war in Afghanistan .

Tatiana Zhurzhenko’s chapter explores another community of memory which constitutes itself in terms of a generation: the “children of war ” in Russia. While the last Soviet war veterans are passing away, those who experienced World War II as children and adolescents now feature as the only living bearers of the memory of this epochal event. At the same time, the “children of war” generation is the most truly Soviet generation as far as their mentality is concerned. Moreover, having entered their “twilight years” in the new capitalist Russia they represent the troubled link between Soviet and post-Soviet history in a society where traditional values of respect for the elderly are in decay. By bringing together issues of generational memory , social justice and Russia’s welfare state, the chapter analyzes grassroots social initiatives and strategies of the political elites in Russia aimed at the institutionalization of a special status for the “children of war .”

Finally in Part III, Gelinada Grinchenko recounts the history of the emergence of another “community of memory,” this time in Ukraine: the Ostarbeiters or “Eastern workers,” civilians mobilized for labor purposes in the Third Reich during the war. She shows how the stories of the Ostarbeiters, which were largely silenced during the Soviet period for their dissonance with the Soviet war myth, were recovered with the arrival of Ukrainian state independence in 1991 and incorporated into new national narratives of Ukrainian victimhood. In a parallel move, Grinchenko demonstrates how Ostarbeiters as a social group were reconstituted through post-Cold War restitution politics when the German government finally acknowledged moral responsibility for forced labor as a crime of the Nazi regime and started issuing moral compensation for its victims.

Part IV: Old/New Narratives and Myths focuses on two elements that are fundamental to the creation of meaning: the narratives that shape identities, and the myths spun around these narratives. In this section, we explore different incarnations of narratives and myths of the war, past, present, and emerging, and trace their development over time.

Julie Fedor’s chapter examines new Russian authoritarian kinship narratives in which the Red Army soldier is reframed as a mythical progenitor and a shared forefather for all the peoples of post-Soviet space. This reframing is used to connect the official cult of the Great Victory and private family memories of loss and suffering, and also to construct the “Russian world” as a space that is saturated and sanctified by the Red Army’s blood.

Andrii Portnov reflects on the rivalry and interplay between two prominent narratives of the war in Ukraine: the (post-)Soviet and the nationalist narratives. While these narratives are in most respects diametrically opposed, they resemble each other in one particular aspect: both of them marginalize the memory of the Holocaust and the tragic fate of the Jewish population in Ukraine. Portnov’s chapter, which traces developments from the early 1990s through to the present, can serve as an introduction for all those interested in the issue of the Holocaust in Ukraine. It offers a survey of public narratives at various levels, from the official political discourse and school history books to museums and memorials. The author shows not only where Jewish and Ukrainian narratives of World War II clash, but also where reconciliation is possible.

Simon Lewis’s chapter brings together trauma theory and post-colonial theory in his study of the Soviet myth of Belarus as the “Partisan Republic,” which he reads as both displaced trauma and colonial discourse. He explores a diverse range of Soviet and post-Soviet Belarusian narratives of the war in fiction, film, art, and popular culture. He shows that post-Soviet cultural production in Belarus consists of diverse narratives of Belarusian partisanhood that compete with each other to rewrite the Soviet narrative, as well as with the Lukashenka regime’s resurrection of Soviet myths about the war.

Finally, Part V: Local Cases zooms in on three examples that bring together the local, national, and transnational dimensions: Sevastopol , Narva , and Karelia .

Ewa Ochman’s work ( 2009 ) has highlighted the special potential that commemorative practices have at the local level when it comes to challenging top-down nationalizing narratives of the past. In addition, they can also serve as a laboratory for new grassroots initiatives which later become appropriated at the national level (as Chap.  11 on the Immortal Regiment initiative born in Tomsk also shows). The three chapters in this section explore the complex interactions between top-down memory projects, both national and supranational, and local memory actors. Adding to the complexity of multi-scalar memory politics, all three cases share a border location. Even if not openly contested by neighboring states as is Sevastopol , both Estonian Narva and Karelia bordering with Finland are marginal geographic locations where the core of the new Russian identity has been renegotiated in contestation with various “others.”

Judy Brown’s chapter explores the war mythologies linked to the city of Sevastopol , and the ways that these have been used in the disputes over the city’s ownership in the post-Soviet period. Based on the author’s fieldwork in the city, the chapter shows how the city’s local commemorative infrastructure, relying on grassroots enthusiasm, has served to promote a Russian imperial identity for Sevastopol’s inhabitants, drawing heavily on the Soviet myth of the “hero-city.” A snapshot of the city indulged in neurotic obsession with its “glorious past” just a couple of years before the Russian annexation helps us to better understand the dramatic events of 2014.

Elena Nikiforova presents another urban memoryscape : that of Narva , which lies on the border dividing Russia and the European Union (Estonia), and the Russian and Estonian national memory cultures. While Narva is part of Estonia and thus in geographic terms falls outside our region, we have included this chapter because it deals with the Russian war memory which overlaps national and even geopolitical borders, as this chapter emphatically shows.

Finally, Aleksandr Antoshchenko, Valentina V. Volokhova, and Irina S. Shtykova explore the distinctive memorial landscape of Karelia and the way that the history of the Finnish past and war memories are negotiated here. This region experienced the so-called “Winter War,” which began with the Soviet offensive on Finland on 30 November 1939. The brutal fighting ended with the annexation of Finnish territories on the Karelian isthmus and in Northern Ladoga region in 1940. The authors show how the official memory of the Great Patriotic War influenced the remembering (or rather, the forgetting) of the Winter War and its victims. They also demonstrate how the end of the Cold War and the break with the Soviet past in the early 1990s affected the monumental memorialization of World War II in this border region.

Coda: From Communicative to Cultural Memory

We opened this introductory essay with a story about the resurrection of a World War II tank in East Ukraine. In concluding, let us return briefly to the tank-turned-monument—that quintessentially Soviet memorial that illustrates the ubiquity of this particular war memory in everyday life.

The memorial tank was one of the key symbols of the Soviet Victory myth. Soviet tanks, taken from where they stood once the fighting was over, and then mounted on plinths, were among the first improvised celebratory war memorials to spring up over Eastern Europe. In the early post-war years, one such tank even stood in the center of Vienna as part of the Soviet war memorial at Schwarzenbergplatz. The tank-turned-monument carried multiple messages. It served as a material reminder of sacrifice, but also of power; as a memorial to the dead of the past, but also a warning for the future to the populations living in the landscapes dotted by these tanks. The standard issue tank was an ideal symbol for the new Soviet Victory myth. An empire that had terrorized its own citizens in the 1930s and then suffered catastrophic loss during World War II needed a single, monolithic legitimizing narrative, and it manufactured one in the myth of the collective heroic Victory.

After the communist bloc collapsed, these memorial tanks were generally removed or desacralized in Central Eastern Europe. 14 But in our region, these monuments , like the myth of the Great Patriotic War more broadly, retain residual symbolic power. The communist authorities’ symbolic investment in the cult of the Great Patriotic War is still reflected today in the problem of the past’s perceived “emptiness” without the comfort of the Victory myth—a problem that is specific to post-Soviet space.

While the Soviet Victory myth aimed to homogenize and dichotomize, a closer look uncovers a kaleidoscopic view on the fragments of this myth as they are transformed in their local contexts. If we zoom in on the Estonian border town of Narva today, as Elena Nikiforova does in Chap.  15 , we see young couples visiting the local Soviet tank-monument for wedding photos and children decorating the tank with flowers. Here, the tank memorial has been normalized, perhaps perversely, as a symbol of peace.

Meanwhile, in the midst of a new war in Ukraine, new tank memorials have appeared. In the grounds of the national World War II museum in Kyiv , a T-64BV tank, seized by Ukrainian forces in the Donbas in June 2014 and repainted in the colors of the Ukrainian flag, is now displayed as material evidence of the Russian military presence in Ukraine.

And yet if we had to choose a tank-monument that best exemplifies the current moment, we might instead offer up the suggestive example of the tank-monument that was erected in 2010 in Belgorod , in front of the new Museum of Military Glory at the Prokhorovka battlefield. This sculptural composition is a life-size rendering of five tanks—two Soviet T-34s and three German “Tigers.” Titled “The Ramming”, the monument presents the tanks suspended in time, piled up at the moment of the Soviet tanks’ deliberate suicide charge. 15 With its depiction of the suicidal podvig , the monument reproduces a traditional Soviet motif of heroic self-sacrifice. But what is especially interesting about this new memorial is the departure it represents. Unlike the conventional Soviet tank-monument, this is not a real tank but its monumental sculpture; not a military artifact, but a meta-monument—a pure symbol. In this sense, it illustrates the transition from communicative to cultural memory : the re-codification, the re-mythologization of World War II, as the participants of that war—be they live veterans, or real tanks that participated in real battles—depart. In a way, the monument is an allegory of this transition, as we move into the uncertain future of memory in the absence of witnesses.

On the rush to collect and archive the memories of the last veterans, see also Lassila ( 2013 ).

The book is one of several collective publications in East European Memory Studies produced by the Memory at War project: Remembering Katyn (Polity 2012); Memory, Conflict and New Media: Web Wars in Post - Socialist States (Routledge 2013); Memory and Theory in Eastern Europe (Palgrave 2013); Martyrdom and Memory (a special issue of the Journal of Soviet and Post - Soviet Politics and Society ) (2015); and Contested Interpretations of the Past in Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian Film: Screen as Battlefield (Brill 2016). Memory at War has also resulted in numerous journal articles, and several single-author books, including: Alexander Etkind , Warped Mourning: Stories of the Dead in the Land of the Unburied (Stanford University Press 2013); Tanya Zaharchenko, Where Currents Meet: Frontiers in Post - Soviet Fiction of Kharkiv , Ukraine (Central European University Press 2016); Uilleam Blacker, Memory, Forgetting and the Legacy of Post-1945 Displacement in Russia and Eastern Europe (forthcoming Routledge 2017)—with several more in the pipeline.

This is why we saw fit to include a chapter on Russian memory narratives operating in the Estonian city of Narva . The memory project of the “Russian world” is one that is self-consciously aimed at spreading across current national borders, and the case of Narva offers a vivid example of the enduring hold that the Russian/Soviet narrative of the war has in the imagination of the Russian diaspora in post-Soviet space.

In April 2016 school children taking part in the Memorial Society’s history essay contest were attacked by nationalists, some of whom were dressed in World War II soldiers’ uniforms and playing accordions, and called “fascists”; the police stood by and did not intervene; see Pavlova ( 2016 ).

See for example the statement by the recently appointed Russian human rights ombudsman Tat’iana Moskal’kova that “human rights” has now become a façade for fascism (cited Obukhov 2016 ).

Etkind commented that:

[Historical] re-enactors must, they are simply obligated to understand the difference between past and present. They’re playing at a strange past now. One must understand the difference between play and reality. Between dream and reality. Let them dream and play at their kindergarten. Let reconstruction stay in its place. When all this starts to get confused and mixed up and to become interchangeable, then this is really dangerous. The refusal to see the difference between [past and] present is a frightening thing. A healthy memory must recognize these differences, [it must] mourn for the past but understand that one can’t return to the past. The refusal to recognize this difference, the belief that the past is now returning—this is a pathology. Reconstruction which swallows up the present can bring nothing positive. (cited in Zemtsov 2014 )

The 2016 Night Wolves show was titled “Ark of Salvation,” and featured pyrotechnics, motorbike stunts, and long turgid monologues on historical themes. Prokhanov commented on the show: “There’s a lot of fire here, light, music, power, dance. Everything that happens in church is here. In the church that the ‘Surgeon’ [the head of the Night Wolves ] has built, a new reality is being created. Because this ‘Fifth Empire’ is our Russia today. Our ancient imperial consciousness is being awakened in the young people who watch this show. In this sense the ‘Surgeon’ is a magician, a wizard, a magus!” (cited Meduza 2016 ).

This is how it was generally reported in the media; Putin’s exact words (responding to a question from Night Wolves ’ head “The Surgeon” as to whether Victory would have been possible had Ukraine and Russia been divided at the time) were:

Now with regard to our relations with Ukraine. I’ll permit myself not to agree with what you said just now, that had we not been divided, we would have lost the war. We would have won anyhow, because we are a country of winners. And more than that, there’s a definite basis for what I’ve just said. If we look at the statistics from the World War II period, then it becomes clear that … the greatest losses in the Great Patriotic War were sustained precisely by the RSFSR—over 70% of losses. This means that the war was won—I don’t want to offend anybody, but on the whole, at the expense of resources, human and industrial, resources of the Russian Federation. These are historical facts. This is all in the documents. This by no means detracts from the significance that was played [sic] in the shared victory by the republics of the former Soviet Union . But definitely, when we were together, we represented a much more powerful force.

The video of this exchange is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1yiaQ-Z-84 .

On the Flowers of the Great Victory project see further the Molodezh’ Belarusi website: http://brsm.by/projects/tsvety-velikoj-pobedy/ . The description here explains that the colors of the apple flower “embody the unbroken bond between generations and sincere gratitude for the hero-warriors who gave their children and grandchildren the Great Victory, the opportunity to live, toil, and raise children in peace, and also, as in the unforgettable May of 1945, to rejoice sincerely in the blossoming gardens that have been a symbol of the new peaceful victories of sovereign Belarus.”

On the history of the deliberate creation of the notion of an “East Slavic” language branch and its political uses, see Kamusella ( 2008 ). See also Kulyk’s discussion of the East Slavic/Soviet narrative which posits that Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus comprise a single entity (Kulyk 2013 ).

This is a trend that has been in place for some years now. Militant pro-Kremlin youth organizations such as Nashi rooted their legitimacy in historical issues, using a sacralized version of the history of World War II to justify threats of street violence in the wake of the 2004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine, for example (see Horvath 2013 ). The state-manufactured NGO World without Nazism movement was created in 2010, and in 2013 the Russian state identified neo-Nazism as “the major challenge of the 21st century,” to cite the title of an international conference organized on this theme in Washington under Russian leadership (“Zasedanie” 2013 ).

Blogger Denis Luzgin was charged for reposting an article that included the statement that “the communists and Germany jointly attacked Poland , unleashing World War II, that is communism and Nazism were honest collaborators.” The Russian Supreme Court upheld the ruling that this phrase contradicted “the facts established by the Nuremberg tribunal.” See further “Zaiavlenie” ( 2016 ).

On the post-Soviet fates of Stalin as symbol in the Belarusian context, see Chapter. 8, which explores the new “Stalin Line ” outdoor museum near Minsk with its drive to link Stalin to leisure and entertainment, and the Belarusian debates over the figure of Stalin .

In Prague, it has now become a tradition for the local Soviet tank to be painted pink and used to make political and artistic statements of various kinds; in Nowa Huta in Poland , the local tank has come to be accepted by residents as an intrinsic element of the urban landscape (Pozniak 2014 ).

The five-meter high monument is designed to enable the visitor to step inside it so as to view another component of the composition, a human figure: the “despairing [ obezumevshii ] German soldier,” based on a famous 1943 photograph, but “deliberately aged so as to fit in with the general idea of the sculptural composition”; see “Muzei boevoi slavy” ( 2015 ) and Gubina ( 2010 ). In a comment on another monument erected at the site in 2015 by the same sculptors, the Sogoian brothers, one of them described their aim as “showing how in battle, people and hardware became a united whole and strove for a shared aim”—an observation that perhaps also helps to explain the curiously “alive” nature of the Soviet tank (cited in Knorre-Dmitrieva 2015 ). The tanks in a recent cinematic depiction of the Prokhorovka tank battle, Shakhnazarov’s White Tiger (2012), also resemble living beings, incidentally.

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Fedor, J., Lewis, S., Zhurzhenko, T. (2017). Introduction: War and Memory in Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus. In: Fedor, J., Kangaspuro, M., Lassila, J., Zhurzhenko, T. (eds) War and Memory in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus . Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66523-8_1

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Belarus: ‘There is no sustainable development without human rights’ - A UN Resident Coordinator blog

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Belarus has been rocked by mass demonstrations, and violent state crackdowns, since the disputed August presidential election that saw Alexander Lukashenko returned to power. In this blog, Joanna Kazana-Wisniowiecki , the UN Resident Coordinator in Belarus, explains what the unrest means for the Organization.

For the UN, as for all international partners of Belarus, the scale of protests and the level of repressions were a big surprise.  This is the first time that the country, which has been very stable and where people are generally quite reserved in terms of expressing their political views, is seeing an election contested to this degree. 

What is also unprecedented is the intensity of repressions against demonstrators and journalists.  About 13,000 people were arrested over the last eight weeks, most of the detentions taking place in the first week after elections.  This will go down in the history books as something that never happened before in Belarus.

Another unexpected phenomenon was the social mobilization and the use of technology that allows people to communicate and coordinate their protests in real time.  Social media and mobile internet are changing the way political activism happens. More and more people are expressing themselves and organizing online.

Promoting human rights

The role of the UN is to promote international norms and standards, and advocate for the respect of universal human rights.  The UN reacted immediately, to remind the state authorities of their international obligations: torture and other cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment are absolutely prohibited and can never be justified.

From the beginning of the crisis, the UN Secretary General , the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights , and myself as the UN representative in the country, have issued a number of official statements and urged the authorities of Belarus to respect the right to peaceful assembly and expression. 

Facing the mass detentions of over 7,000 people in the week following elections, and allegations of torture in prisons, the UN urged the authorities to release everyone who had been detained for exercising their human rights, to stop torture and other forms of ill-treatment of detainees, investigate all cases of human rights violations, and clarify the fate and whereabouts of any individuals reported as missing.

With time, we have been receiving troubling reports and of torture and other ill-treatment. It is important to ensure that these are well documented, also to allow investigation of and future accountability for such acts. Timely medical examinations are crucial in this regard, alongside the important work of human rights organizations gathering information on these cases.

In my capacity as the UN Resident Coordinator and together with the Senior Human rights advisor in my office, Omer Fisher, we conveyed these messages directly to our national counterparts, first and foremost through the Minister of Foreign Affairs in Belarus and to the Ministry of Interior and other state institutions responding to the crisis.  We have also raised these issues in writing, especially the question of missing persons.  I am encouraged by the fact that the MoI has responded to our letter and that we are gradually receiving more information from the state authorities. 

In addition to dialogue with the State, we continue to discuss the current situation with civil society partners.  Both human rights NGOs and the leaders of SDG Partnership Group have expressed concern about the violence of the security forces, the lack of action, and delays in the investigation of alleged violations, including torture and other ill-treatment).. 

At the UN, we are also receiving complaints directly from the victims and their lawyers: the majority of them do not feel confident that submitting complaints to the authorities will result in proper investigation. 

For several years now, the UN in Belarus has been supporting organizations which offer psychological and legal support to victims of violence.  The demand for this kind of assistance has increased dramatically and we will continue to provide capacity support to the national partners and non-governmental organizations involved in addressing these problems. 

Coping with COVID

Like everywhere in Europe, new cases of COVID-19 in Belarus are on the rise.  And of course, mass protests and especially detention of demonstrators in overcrowded institutions without proper physical distancing and other prevention measures can lead to further spread of infection. 

In the first half of 2020 we adjusted our priorities and the actual content of our work has changed. All together, we provided some $7.5 million to the national response, including supporting the health system, and addressing the socioeconomic impact, namely, helping SMEs to strengthen their entrepreneurial skills.

The UN never closed offices, although many of our staff have been working from home. While the focus has been and remains on COVID-19 response, we continue working on long-term development issues.  For example, we provided policy advice and concrete suggestions on what should be included in Belarus’ long-term development strategy up until 2035, which is being developed this year. 

‘The only path forward is one of dialogue’

From the UN’s perspective, Belarus should set more ambitious development plans, by prioritizing the needs of young people and the ageing population; strengthening the position of women in the economy; and embracing new technologies and opportunities that will support sustainable economic growth that benefits the poorer and most marginalized segments of the society.  This is the vision of cooperation in the next five years of our presence in Belarus.

Amid COVID-19, climate change and political upheaval, Belarus finds itself in an extremely competitive global and regional environment. The only path forward for the country is one of dialogue, ambitious reform and an innovative development agenda, underpinned by true respect for human rights.

There is no sustainable development without human rights.  The UN in Belarus will continue to work on addressing these needs even though it is a challenging and stressful time, especially for the Belarusian members of our team. We are often asked “could the UN do more?”. I would say that we are trying to do our utmost in this complex situation for Belarus, with the tools that are at our disposal.  With good will, new energy, a willingness to engage in dialogue, and professional effort on all sides, I am sure Belarus will continue to grow and develop.   

The UN Resident Coordinator

The UN Resident Coordinator, sometimes called the RC, is the highest-ranking representative of the UN development system at the country level. In this occasional series, UN News is inviting RCs to blog on issues important to the United Nations and the country where they serve.

• UN Resident Coordinator

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The Last European Dictatorship

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by Andrew Wilson

384 Pages , 5.00 x 7.75 in , 16 b-w illus.

• 9780300259216
• Published: Tuesday, 4 May 2021
• 9780300260878

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Andrew Wilson is professor in Ukrainian studies at University College London and a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations. He is the author of The Ukrainians: Unexpected Nation and Ukraine Crisis: What It Means for the West .

'Andrew Wilson's incisive and accurate judgment and the depth of his research make him a true expert. His ability to convey the complexities of the region's murky politics and tortured history is unparalleled.' - Edward Lucas, Central and Eastern Europe correspondent for The Economist 'Andrew Wilson has done all students of European politics a great service by making the history of Belarus comprehensible, and by showing how the future of Belarus might be different than its present.' - Timothy Snyder, author of Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin

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In limbo: the refugees left on the Belarusian-Polish border – a photo essay

Offered a route into Europe by the Lukashenko regime in Belarus, thousands of asylum seekers are now stranded on the EU’s frontier

O n 13 August last year, a villager in Ostrówka, in the east of central Poland , posted two pictures on Facebook featuring groups of men, women and children walking through the cornfields with bags on their backs.

They were families from Syria, Afghanistan and Iraqi Kurdistan, and they were among the first asylum seekers to enter the country from Belarus . The post was accompanied by the following short text: “In the heat of day through wheat, at night through corn, they sneak through, they wander, just to get to the west. Great politics and slight refugees leave their print on the fields near Ostrówka.”

Few could have imagined that those people were the prelude to a border crisis that would result in dozens of deaths.

The makeshift shelter of a Syrian family with small children in the forest near Narewka, Poland

The Belarusian president, Alexander Lukashenko, had just started to organise the movement of asylum seekers with the promise of a safe passage to Europe, apparently in reprisal for sanctions that Brussels had imposed on his regime. A new migration route to the EU had opened.

The humanitarian emergency reached its peak in November, when the Belarusian security forces escorted thousands of asylum seekers to the Polish border in an escalation of the crisis. Witnesses told the Guardian how Belarusian troops gathered groups of up to 50 people and cut the barbed wire to allow them to cross. Most of the asylum seekers were caught, and illegally and violently pushed back to Belarus by Poland’s border guards.

But hundreds managed to escape into the forests. Trapped between the violence of the Polish authorities and false promises from the Belarusians, families lived in small tents, trying to keep warm in damp sleeping bags as night-time temperatures fell below zero.

Polish border guards at a checkpoint near the border with Belarus and with a family who were hiding in the forest

In response to the Belarusian threats, Poland’s hard-right government quadrupled the presence of border guards and troops in the area and created a two-mile-deep militarised zone ringed with razor-wire.

It was a show of force not seen in the country since the end of the cold war. Dozens of checkpoints punctuate the perimeter of this so-called red zone, which is inaccessible to aid workers and journalists. The soldiers stop and search every car as police vehicles and helicopters monitor the area.

Top, a family from Duhok, Iraq, in Narewka, Poland, after crossing from Belarus. Above left, an Iraqi woman and her baby are taken to safety by aid workers before certain capture by Polish border guards

Every night in the forests, there is a race between border guards and aid workers to reach the asylum seekers hidden among the trees. If the Polish police arrive before the volunteers and doctors, they will probably send the migrants back to Belarus, with the risk that their health may deteriorate.

Many of those found in the woods can barely walk after travelling long distances on foot. Some have not eaten in days. The children often have signs of hypothermia.

The graves of asylum seekers in the Polish village of Bohoniki. Most of the people known to have died since the start of the border standoff were killed by the cold

At least 19 people have died since the beginning of the border standoff between Poland and Belarus. Most of them froze to death. Some were buried in the village of Bohoniki, near the Polish town of Sokółka, in the heart of the forest that claimed their lives. People told the Guardian they found the bodies of refugees torn apart by animals.

A family of asylum seekers said they had to bury their mother, covering her with leaves. “In the area of forest where migrants normally camp, you can smell an intense stench of decay,” says one resident.

Some Polish families have been hiding desperate asylum seekers in their homes. In the attics of the cottages scattered in the forests along the border, Iraqi Kurds and Syrians tremble with cold and fear, while border guards search for them outside. If found, the Polish families who have offered them shelter risk being charged with aiding illegal immigration.

Kamil Syller, a lawyer, top, and his wife, Maria Przyszychowska, with their daughter, above left. The green light in their home in Hajnówka, near the border, right, is a welcome sign for refugees

Kamil Syller and his wife, Maria Przyszychowska, started a network of residents and activists who put green lights in their windows to show that their home is a temporary safe space for refugees.

“We are trying to protect asylum seekers and now our activity has become a form of resistance,” says Kamil. “But we don’t want to be heroes and it’s becoming really frustrating.”

The green lights have also come to the attention of the Polish authorities. For weeks, Maria and Kamil’s home has been under surveillance. Border guards patrol the streets around their home and lie in wait for people to come out of the forest so they can capture them and push them back into Belarus.

A young Iraqi Kurd hides in a small attic. Border guards entered Syller’s house to take away two Syrians. The Polish lawyer filed papers with the European court of human rights in an effort to stop them being deported to Belarus

According to data from Grupa Granica , a Polish network of human rights organisations, about 10,000 asylum seekers reached Germany from Belarus via Poland by December. Many others were transferred to migrant camps near the Belarus border.

The Guardian spoke to dozens of asylum applicants in the Polish city of Białystok. All said they had arrived in Minsk by buying packages from travel agencies, which, according to the refugees, appeared to be closely connected to the Belarusian authorities. Despite promises from Turkish and Belarusian airlines to limit these flights, the crisis appears to be far from over. Thousands of asylum seekers remain in Belarus.

Inside a customs warehouse in Bruzgi, Belarus, which now houses about 1,000 asylum seekers

Asylum seekers washing outside in Bruzgi, where temperatures can fall to -12C, left. Alima Skandar, 40, right, from Iraqi Kurdistan, who was separated from her three children in November as they tried to cross the Polish border

As temperatures plummeted at the end of November, the Belarusian authorities began to move the asylum seekers to a customs warehouse in the village of Bruzgi, which has been turned into a dormitory for refugees. In this 10,000 sq metre space, patrolled by dozens of armed soldiers, about 1,000 asylum seekers are sleeping in makeshift cots made from planks and cardboard on shelving units once used for merchandise.

There are dozens of children and elderly people, many in need of medical help. Outside, people sit around and heat up food on a wood-burning stove. There are showers but no hot water. Winter temperatures in Bruzgi can fall to -12C.

Scraps of clothing hang from barbed wire at the checkpoint in Kuźnica as a reminder of those who tried to cross

Asylum seekers stranded in Bruzgi are clinging to the hope that Europe will rescue them, sooner or later. But their hopes were dealt a blow when Poland announced it had started building a €353m (£293m) wall along its frontier with Belarus aimed at preventing refugees from entering the country.

Little remains of the migrants who camped at the border for months – just a pile of rags and bottles. Scraps of clothing hang from the barbed wire, a bleak reminder of those who tried to make it to the other side.

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