Introduction
When the crushing of the post-election protests started in August 2020, I stopped making music. Instead I began recording sounds of the protests in Minsk. The explosions of flash bang grenades rumbling through the city and muffling the endless drone of honking cars were shocking, and my first impulse was just to capture what we were hearing, to manage this shock by recording and to provide evidences of the enforcers’ unlawfulness.[1]
In mid-August 2020 I created a Soundcloud account to share recordings made at opposition demonstrations and pro-Lukashenka rallies, DIY concerts, poetry readings, theater performances, and other forms of sonic resistance. I named it “Political Soundwalks” because the protests almost always entailed walking long distances through wide streets, squares, central or dormitory districts of Minsk. But the recordings were not quite like Hildegard Westerkamp’s idea of a soundwalk and many of these walks were outright dangerous. In countries that introduced anti-Covid lockdowns, venturing out of your house could lead to a fine. There were no lockdowns in Belarus, but simply going out in the street could lead to arrest, fine, beating, and even death. You wouldn't have to be an activist for this – the snatch squads could detain any people at random – on the streets, at bus stops or at people's homes.
In the next months I took my recorder (or, perhaps, it took me?) to capture the soundscape of protests, to record the joyous roar of the peaceful demonstrators claiming and re-animating urban space with their voices, to collect evidence of police violence, and to document the state propaganda. This archive documenting the acoustic dimension of the protests, the war of sounds, and clash of ideologies was not a planned research or an art project. No one knew how the events would unwrap and I did not have any particular plans for these recordings. But as the material accumulated, it demanded reflection and analysis. As I was walking, talking to people, and thinking about it all, making short notes about the events and sounds, certain insights came. When the protests were crushed and the streets went quiet again, these recordings and notes provided a basis for further reflections on the role of sound, music, voices, noises – and silence – in the Belarusian political soundscape.
Belarusian social scientists, anthropologists, philosophers, and historians discussed the near impossibility of “objective” academic writing about political events when researchers were taking part in them (Vozyanov 2021). It is difficult to remain an impartial observer when friends and colleagues get arrested and tortured for expressing their political views or simply for walking in the streets “at the wrong time, in the wrong place.” When you are both a researcher and a citizen protesting against the injustice, it may enrich your “scholarly” understanding of the events, but also adds personal biases and sets limitations. And it makes you refuse to discuss certain issues or mention some facts (Zahara 2016). One needs to find a way to tell some things and to be silent about other things despite the temptation – or necessity – to provide a comprehensive report and scholarly analysis of the events. Even hinting at something can draw unnecessary attention, and this runs counter to the attention logic of media and academia.
Choosing to stay in Belarus you acknowledge risks posed to yourself and to others and take responsibility for this.[2] At any moment you can turn from a social researcher (working independently, without an assignment and institutional support) into a witness in a criminal case or an accused person, regardless of whether you have breached the law or not. Considering the interrogation techniques used by the enforcers, you can endanger your sources and other people whose safety you might compromise by the accumulated data, produced knowledge and published texts. Essentially, it is conducting research on a territory occupied by the enemy. And when you leave this territory, you lose access to its soundscape and you cannot reconstruct it on the basis of news and personal communication alone.
Despite several attempts to write a “strictly academic” analysis on the events, I failed. Partly, this failure was due to the difficulty of integrating recordings, photographs, and field notes — short spontaneous impressionist commentaries — into academic writing. I wanted to render the immediacy and corporeality of the sonic and music experiences that couldn’t be captured on video or audio file (Niakhayeu 2022). But the perspective of (sound)walking allowed me to focus on a relatively narrow aspect: how the very act of coming out of your house was a political act leading to dramatic consequences. And the audio paper format became the ideal way to present this unplanned research organically, directly commenting on the sounds narrating their story.[3]
In this article I use a number of concepts from sound, voice, and popular music studies. The most important one is “soundscape” introduced by Michael Frank Southworth (1967, 1969) and later popularized by R. Murray Schafer (1977). I specifically refer to “political soundscape,” by which I mean not just an overtly politically charged soundscape – like a city during protests or state celebrations – but any soundscape perceived with a “politically attuned” ear, mind, and body. If we modify the ISO definition of a soundscape (ISO 2014), we can understand a political soundscape as an acoustic environment as perceived or experienced and/or understood by a person or people, in a political context (addition and emphasize mine). This notion can also be compared to LaBelle’s concept of acoustic territories aimed to “supply the notion of the soundscape with an overt form of tension and political charge” (LaBelle 2019: vi).
In the part on the forced internalizing of the “voice of the state” I employ the concept of “Stimmung” (Gumbrecht 2013, 2017) that refers to voices, atmospheres, and moods defining political eras. I introduce the “ostensible listening” concept to analyze public collective sessions of (presumably attentive but often faked) listening to political propaganda aimed to create an impression of loyalty to the state. For the analysis of systematic sound, music, and silence (ab)use within the context of politically motivated violence, I use the concept of “sonic violence continuum” developed elsewhere (Niakhayeu 2024). I argue that the diversity and intensity of the political soundscape of Belarus has peaked in 2020 when new acoustic territories and sites of memory appeared. Then the political soundscape became even more imbalanced and subdued inside the country (while retaining richness and variety in emigration), as the state voices became even more prominent in a society silenced by repressions and permeated with acoustic paranoia, and practices of sonic violence and coercion shifted towards more extreme regions of the sonic violence continuum.