Breaking the (Illusion of) Silence
Its roads and parks are perfectly manicured without a hint of trash or graffiti. There is no road rage, nor voracious car-honking. Traffic doesn’t clog the wide lanes, and people don’t raise their voices. Civilians are courteous, and most spend their Sundays at church, having sought a deeper spiritual meaning after the crash of communism almost three decades ago. (McKay 2020)
This ridiculously stereotypical and inaccurate description of Minsk was published in March 2020 in a Fox News article about a possible annexation of Belarus by Russia. Just three months earlier people in Minsk were loudly protesting against “deep integration” of both countries. And two months later, when the presidential elections campaign started, Minsk and other Belarusian cities became much louder.
Spring 2020 changed soundscapes around the world. During the “first wave” of the pandemic, researchers and journalists were discussing silence in cities and communal sonic performances aimed to keep communities tight-knit or to support health workers. Belarus didn’t go quiet that spring like many other European countries. Everyday life was just a bit subdued, but there were people at work, at malls, and in cafes. There were parties and raves, and a pompous Victory Day parade on 9 May. Lukashenka denied the pandemic danger, referring to it as a “psychosis”. He held a military display to prove the regime’s invincibility against the “collective West” and to show loyalty to his “big brother” Putin.
In late spring and early summer people gathered in the streets and raised their long suppressed voices. People discussing, disputing, and chanting, hands clapping, cars honking – that was the soundtrack of the presidential election campaign that saw many thousands standing in queues to sign up for the alternative candidates. Then there were officially allowed rallies and concerts in cities and towns around the country, where the candidates could meet their voters. And, since August 2020, instead of churches (or rather markets and malls), people were going to demonstrations demanding their stolen voices back.
Old protest songs like “Khochu Peremen”(“I want Changes”) by Viktor Tsoy and the Kino band were heard everywhere. But there were new hits as well: “Mury” (Walls), “My Biełarusy” (We are Belarusians), and dozens of others. People danced in the streets to Belarusian folk music, techno, anti-fascist classics like “Bella Ciao!”, anarchist drummers, and Samba percussion ensembles. Sirens of ambulances, law enforcers vans, fire brigades, and other special vehicles that usually signal emergencies, intensified and constantly reminded that the situation became a permanent emergency.
Many people say that the most iconic sound of 2020 was the sound of car horns. Cars, often hated by urban activists and city dwellers for being obstacles, sources of noise, pollution, and irritation, now became people's allies. They not only helped to block the streets during protests or to evacuate wounded protesters, but became instruments of acoustic expression of rage, indignation, support, and solidarity. Car honks were widely used at previous protest actions (e.g. in 2010, 2011, 2013) but in the summer and autumn of 2020 their sounds became ubiquitous and persistent. They merged into an endless drone interspersed with patterns repeating the rhythm of the main protest slogan, Žy-vie-Bie-ła-ruś! (Long live Belarus!). During the first, most brutal nights of the post-election protests, what you heard was a constant backdrop of car honking, often silenced by explosions of flash bang grenades, a sound that most people didn’t hear before.
Sound was used by all sides of the conflict and had several important uses beyond the most obvious functions of signaling and communication. It was used for navigation and confusion, agitation and intimidation, resisting and attacking, organizing and coordinating, synchronizing and solidarizing, reinterpreting and mocking, but also for soothing and healing. And one of the main functions was fighting for the space, claiming, demarcating, and appropriating the “acoustic territories.”
Instead of establishing a much discussed “dialogue” that people demanded, the authorities just wanted people to shut up, disperse, and go home. The state spoke with metallic recorded voices giving orders, and played long outdated, laughable songs. In rare occasions when a state representative condescended to speak to the people, it was usually a riot squad commander ordering protesters to disperse or surrender, persuading them to proceed to an autazak “on their own will”.[4]
Music had always been used by the state to silence critical voices and to create an illusion of unity – but not on such a scale as in 2020. During the 2019 pro-independence protests, Belarusian-language speeches were overpowered by mind-numbing New Year songs in Russian. It was, however, still possible for the speakers to address their supporters. In 2020, in order to deter protesters and to create psychological and acoustic pressure, the state widely used contemporary “patriotic” and Soviet military music broadcast through street-mounted speakers, explaining that they wanted “to create a positive and good mood for those city residents and guests who stand for peace, calmness, and order in the city” (TUT.BY 2020).
One of the peculiar cases of using sound to deter the protesters, was using armored vehicles with loudspeakers on their turrets. These “sound broadcasting stations”, based on old Soviet scout vehicles BRDM-2, can be classified as long range acoustic devices.[5] Luckily, they could not focus sound narrowly and, probably, they mostly annoyed the soldiers forced to listen to unbearably loud music.
These vehicles were deployed near the Victory Square and in front of the Great Patriotic War Museum. Both places feature war obelisks and have a “sacred” status due to the central role of the Great Patriotic War (WWII) in the current state ideological discourse. These locations defined the armored sound systems’ playlists, an eclectic mix of Soviet military songs, music by contemporary Belarusian and Russian military pop-bands (what I call paratrooper or commando pop), mellow folk-rock from the 1970s-1980s, and the newest patriotic hits by musicians loyal to the state. Sometimes the effect of the “singing tanks” (as the protesters called the machines) was rather comical; people laughed at songs, some couples even waltzed.
Listen to this example from the late August demonstration when more than 100,000 people gathered along the Pieramožcaŭ avenue and near the Minsk Hero City obelisk.
A huge bowl-like valley around the Śvisłač river was filled with many layers of sound. At some point a poignantly sad piano melody played and you could hear people guessing: was it a Debussy composition or Chopin’s “Marche funèbre”? Maybe the playlist curators wanted to instill sadness or to remind of heroic pages of the Soviet history, but the effect was contrary: soon people started laughing, recognizing a Mikael Tariverdiev soundtrack to a popular 1970s TV series about Stierlitz, a Soviet spy working undercover at the Gestapo HQ in Berlin. Protest drummers synced their rhythms to Tarieverdiev’s piano defusing its ideological charge. On that day the playlist ended with the song “Do Russians want war?”
Along with music, the “singing tanks” and the public announcement systems on the main avenues also aired propaganda about the white-red-white flag used by the protesters, but most of the time they urged people to disperse: “Respected citizens, please disperse, you're breaking the law!” One of the protesters, a young guy beaten so severely that he couldn't walk, mocked these announcements. Sitting in a wheelchair on the avenue sidewalk, he addressed the passers-by: “Respected citizens, please do not disperse! You are abiding by the law!”[6]
Parody, satire, humor, and elements of carnival were often present at the demonstrations (Lidski 2022), and many people criticized the Belarusian protests for being too peaceful, too creative, and too colorful – carnivalesque. I wouldn’t equate these subversive demonstrations to carnivals that often have a legitimate place in a social and political order. Carnivals are limited in time, are a part of the system, and can reinforce it by providing a temporary release of pressure that would otherwise threaten the system.
According to LaBelle, “[t]he riot, the street fight, and the demonstration may be understood as dynamic instances of conflict and debate, as well as an audible interaction between writing (the dictates of law) and noise (the suspension of law)” (LaBelle 2019: 77). Paradoxically, the loud and noisy protests of 2020 demanded the state and its "law enforcers" to follow the "dictates of law". People demanded that the Constitution and other legislative acts be respected, while the state was suspending and distorting the law. When a recording of a Ministry of Internal Affairs representative reciting the law on mass events was played, people laughed and whistled, not because they intended to break laws and to impend chaos, but because of the hypocrisy of the state and its servants who were violating the law themselves.
LaBelle also mentions how the sound of windows smashed by rioters “amplifies ideological conflict” (LaBelle 2019: 80). Broken glass was an important signifier for the Belarusian authorities: in September 2004 Lukashenka called Belarus a bright and vulnerable “crystal (glass) vessel” and this image became a part of the political and satirical discourse since then. During the December 2010 protests, a broken window in the House of Government provoked brutal detainment of hundreds of people, including the opposition leaders. Soon the state TV produced a propagandist film titled “Iron across glass.” But during the 2020 protests it were the “law enforcers” who smashed windows of cafes, cars, and people’s homes.
ZS-82 at the Victory Square (left) and near the Great Patriotic War Museum (right). August-September 2020. Photo: P. Niakhayeu.
