Claiming the Stolen Voices Back
In Belarusian and Russian languages the words for vote and voice are the same: hołas or golos. Listening and obeying (Belarusian: słuchać – słuchacca, Russian: slushat’– slushat’sya) also have the same etymology. By protesting against the falsified presidential elections and the police violence, people claimed their stolen votes and voices back and stopped obeying the “fatherly” voice of the state, liberating themselves from an oppressing silence and demanding the truth.[7] The idea of voicing one’s opinion was reflected in numerous posters and leaflets at the demonstrations, in the names of the alternative electronic voting platform Golos (Voice) and media initiatives targeted at international audiences: Voice of Belarus, Voices from Belarus (now defunct), Stimmen aus Belarus, Voices Across Borders. Many people literally discovered they have voices as citizens – for the first time in their life. They learned to express their indignation publicly, instead of silently swallowing it. They were learning to sing and to listen to each other. This emancipation of voices was the sign of the times. “Even mimes can’t be silent anymore” said a poster held by a mime artist during one of the demonstrations.
The Belarusian architect Dmitry Zadorin noted that huge squares and avenues of Minsk were built for marching masses (Mironova 2020). And during protests these vast spaces were used a lot. Every Sunday (and on other days too[8]) traffic on the main streets was blocked by the enforcers, and thousands of people with white-red-white flags and posters flooded the streets. Internet was almost always blocked during these Sunday marches and you had to navigate the city mostly with your eyes and ears.
In previous years, opposition protests usually took the form of a rally with several speakers addressing a crowd, and it was quite easy for the authorities to disrupt a gathering by detaining the speakers or by seizing the sound equipment. But in 2020 most of the opposition leaders were arrested before the main protests or had to leave the country.[9] So there were no stages and speeches at the post-election protests that started in August. Instead, tens or hundreds of thousand people walked through Minsk not only claiming their voices and freedom, but also claiming and rediscovering urban space. A widespread phenomenon during the protests was sounding of the space, speaking it aloud, pronouncing it during the demonstrations:
“We’re the power here”
“This is our city”
“This is our district”
“This is our yard”
These words were chanted while people walked through avenues, squares, and residential courtyards. At the end of 2020 and early 2021 demonstrations became smaller, rapid, and unpredictable – and moved from the main avenues to neighborhoods and their inner streets. Passing through yards of residential districts, people also chanted “Join us!”, “Look out your window, don’t watch the TV!”
Space was also claimed through practices called “shouting/singing windows,” when at 8 or 9 pm people opened their windows and shouted “Long Live Belarus!”. They also tuned to Radio Peremen (Radio of Changes) and aired protest music from their windows.[10] This practice started in the summer of 2020, during the first days after the elections. People used to put speakers on their windowsills playing protest songs. Later, they gathered in courtyards and kids playgrounds getting to know one another, discussing the faked elections’ results and how to disprove them. Sometimes people talked to their neighbors for the first time at these spontaneous gatherings. These discussions continued online in local Telegram chats. That is how the neighborhood communities were born. Organizing local gatherings – tea-drinking parties and DIY cultural events held right in the courtyards – was a logical step in this communication. Soon dozens of such yards emerged on city maps. In Minsk some of the courtyards and their events became so popular that people from other neighborhoods traveled there for concerts and theater performances. One yard inspired another and it turned into a competition for the most interesting musicians. The demand for local music was so high that people introduced a system ensuring that not only the most popular, but all the neighborhoods would have equal chances to invite an artist.
One can say that the 2020 was an age of great geographical and social discoveries in Minsk and other Belarusian cities. Political events even led to changes in urban toponymy: dozens of new place names emerged on the city maps. Small or big neighborhoods invented their own flags and symbols, based on the historical white-red-white Belarusian flag, and at demonstrations people could find their neighbors by looking for familiar flags. Merging of the protesters columns coming from various city districts was accompanied by a joyous roar, a situation very different from the “rehearsed enthusiasm” of the state mass celebrations.
A lot has been said about the role of digital communication technologies for the protest communities (Mateo 2022). Messengers, social media platforms, VPNs, and proxies helped people share information, ideas, and art. But I think that the “prehistoric” technologies of personal communication, cooperation, trust, and solidarity building are more important, especially when Internet is blocked, or when you don't know who is who in a Telegram chat. Among such traditional technologies are music, singing, and dancing that became important factors of social group formation and cohesion (Freeman 2000). People learned to trust and cooperate with neighbors, gradually expanding their trusted contact network. Of course, you can talk to random people you meet at a demonstration or when escaping and hiding from the enforcers. But the best places for communication, sharing information, and making friends were tea-evenings and concerts in courtyards, playgrounds or just empty and underused spaces between the apartment blocks – dilapidated non-places (Augé 1995) that people transformed into theater stages, open air festivals, and poetry clubs. By walking from one such yard to another and talking to people you never noticed or nodded to earlier, you got to know your neighborhood and its residents in a new way. During Soviet times and even up to the 2010s, brutal fights between youth from different city districts were very common; and now people were partying with each other.
In my audio paper (Niakhayeu 2021) I used recordings from two such places – the Changes Square and the Chess Yard. These yards are about 300 meters apart and you could drift between them to catch a concert of this or that band. The Changes Square is a children’s playground and courtyard between several residential towers. Mostly young and active middle class people live in these houses built a few years ago by North Korean workers. The place was named Changes Square by its residents because of the incident near the Kijeŭ (Kiev) cinema, which is also a couple of minutes’ walk away.
On 6 August 2020 the plaza near the cinema was occupied by a gathering organized by the Minsk Palace of Children and Youth to stop Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, an alternative candidate, from meeting her supporters. At some point, two sound guys, who were selecting music tracks, suddenly played the most popular protest song, “Khochu peremen” by the Kino band, which immediately turned a dull state event into an opposition rally. The DJs were arrested soon afterwards. After spending ten days in prison where they were beaten, they managed to escape to Lithuania. Soon, a mural with two triumphant DJs appeared on a ventilation booth in a courtyard a few blocks away. The residents put a street name plaque on the booth: Changes Square. The rest was history (Attsetski and Pesenka 2022; Topol 2022). This yard became a locus of protests and a model for many other neighborhood communities in Minsk and beyond (Kyky 2020). In an attempt to maintain the spontaneous communitas (Turner 1969) of the protests and to provide a space for the Belarusian diaspora cultural events, a symbolic representation of the Changes Square was opened in Warsaw in October 2020.
These neighborhood cultural events had a very different format than regular concerts and festivals organized at “proper” music venues. In the protest yards, the audience was mixed and the space was structured differently: people surrounded musicians and actors who were on the same level with the audience and not on elevated stages. One could come and go, move around however one liked. And the biggest difference was that musicians, actors, and poets came to people to share their art, not vice versa. Interest and demand for local, relevant music was constantly growing; people were finally discovering the local musicians and poets who found a wider audience and a renewed sense of purpose for their art. Several hundred protest songs and music videos were created since August 2020.[11]
In the “straight-jacketed” Belarusian culture, it is not too common for ordinary people to sing; this is reserved for professional singers, amateur collectives, and street musicians – or drunkards. Raising one’s voice in public is scoffed as indecency. In 2020 many people discovered the power and joy of singing, especially of group singing in choirs, and learned a lot of new music. The Volny Chor (The Free Choir, previously also called the Flying Choir) inspired many Belarusians to sing, perhaps for the first time since their school choir years. Its members kept anonymity and used to appear from nowhere to sing folk songs, religious, and patriotic anthems in shopping malls, The Opera or at metro stations, “sacralizing" these everyday public spaces, and then disappearing into thin air. These performances showed that resistance was everywhere and like-minded people were always near you.
Amateur singing gatherings like Śpieŭny Schod (Singing Gathering) established in 2014 or regular folk-dance meetings at Muzyčny Zavułak used to be a very niche activity of Belarusian folk music enthusiasts, but in 2020 they became more popular. During such impromptu choir performances, brochures with a song collection Hodnyja Piesni (“Worthy Songs” or “Songs of Dignity”) were shared among people. This collection was compiled by the people behind the Śpieŭny Schod initiative who explained the necessity to print the songs on paper: “In a situation of permanent internet shutdown in Belarus, a simple paper-format Śpieŭnik (songbook) is needed, that is not sold in bookstores. We had an idea to help Belarusians to sound more powerful and we created such a collection" (Hodnyja piesni 2020). Later Volny Chor recorded an album with the same title, Hodnyja Piesni. A rhizomatic, shapeshifting, and seemingly ubiquitous entity – Volny Chor planted seeds among many neighborhood communities in Belarus.[12]
If you ask Belarusians what art supported them last summer, almost all would remember performances by Volny Chor. It was a hugely powerful therapeutic practice. The knowledge that any crowd can suddenly turn into a synchronized choir, that sings the most important lines, rhymes with the very structure of the self-organizing Belarusian protests – whose center is everywhere and nowhere. (Zamirovskaia 2021).
As most of its participants had to emigrate, Volny Chor now performs in the EU; you can hear them at the Belarusian diaspora events, Ukraine solidarity concerts, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya official visits or at an anniversary of the Berlin wall fall. The choir’s conductor explains the reason to continue singing: “When some people are in prisons, somebody has to shout for them. So we shout, as hard as we can” (Radyjo Svaboda 2022c).
“Even mime artists can’t be silent anymore”; “Silence means death”, Minsk, August-September 2020. Photo: P. Niakhayeu.
A milicyja car with a loudspeaker and protesters with megaphones at a rally dedicated to the 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Kastryčnickaja Square, Minsk, 1998. The speaker was Aleś Bialacki (Bialiatski), who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in October 2022 while being in prison. The screenshots are from a video by Siarhiej Chyryk, a democratic activist and camera-man who died in December 2023; since then his online video-archive disappeared.
