Silencing the Protests
Not able to take part in mass demonstrations and other public gatherings, in winter 2020/2021 people continued to express their political views in such creative forms as flash mobs, choir singing, chants, and dance. Videos of such performances show people in matching clothes (white-red-white or black) and masks to avoid identification. Sometimes these recordings featured original songs in Belarusian and Russian with lyrics about newly found solidarity and identity of the city neighborhoods and their communities. Some neighborhoods created their own anthems telling stories of local resistance.
One of the most popular formats of performances in this period, was joining a global dance challenge “Jerusalema”. Dancing to “Jerusalema” turned into an informal competition between the protest neighborhoods. A video from the Novaja Baravaja district was one of the first; then the challenge was accepted by other hoods: Čyžoŭka, Sierabranka, Zialony Łuh, and others. By mid-January 2021 more than forty Minsk neighborhoods took part in this challenge, adding local colors of protest to this dance movement. A few days later there were already seventy teams from all over the country. While in December 2020 dancers were brave enough to perform in their own districts, right near their houses, already in January 2021 they chose other locations, where approaching milicyja vans could be noticed in advance. By then, wearing the white-read-white “color scheme” was a sure way to get detained for “unauthorized picketing.”
There were also solemn, non-dance performances, like a video by the Sierabranka district residents commemorating victims of the Holocaust. Wearing black clothes with yellow six-pointed Stars of David and eight-pointed Belarusian stars, they silently filed in a line on stairs, imitating a sculptural group in the Jama (the Pit) memorial where around 5000 Jews from the Minsk ghetto were killed in 1942. The text in the video reads “Sierabranka is not a ghetto. We’re not redundant people.” Performances like this reflected the discussions about the inhuman, sadistic nature of the Belarusian regime.[16] For the Belarusians raised with an anti-fascist mindset, it was very difficult to process the fact that members of their own society – law enforcement officers – were violent sadists like the stereotypical Nazis from books, films, and elderly relatives’ memories.
Even more risky endeavors were videos that documented or replaced demonstrations. Videos by feminist and queer groups that staged dancing and chanting performances to the global protest “standards” – “One Billion Rising” and “The Rapist is You” – were filmed in daytime in the center of Minsk, near the previously bubbling Kastryčnickaja (Oktyabrskaya) street with its hip bars and huge art spaces in former factory buildings. The lyrics and chants were translated into Belarusian and the videos contain photos of female political prisoners and the mothers of killed protesters.
Around that time I moved to another city district where I had no contacts, and hence was unable to join the local demonstrations. The public Telegram chats of neighborhoods were already “infested” with agents spying on people’s communications and provoking them. Many chats suspected that the neighboring chats were captured and controlled by menty (milicyja), so people moved their communication to tightly closed chats with systems for personal verification. Still, some users or bots (automated scripts) in these chats regularly reminded people about the “singing windows” actions in the evenings and other (relatively) safe acoustic activities like playing the Radio Peremen protest channel.
Soon the repressions and the suffocating atmosphere of police violence made many forms of symbolical acoustic resistance – singing, playing music, chanting and dancing, shouting windows, car signals – too dangerous. The expansion of surveillance, patrolling, and infiltration of undercover agents into activists groups and local chats made people easily identifiable. Since 1 March 2021 “violating the regulations of using car sound signals,” that is honking for political expression, led to a fine and/or annulling a driver license for a year. The licenses of drivers who signaled during Freedom Day on 25 March 2021 were revoked. Thus “solidarity honking” became too risky.
In recent years, fireworks were widely criticized by “progressive” urbanites. Fireworks were an integral, most visible – and loud – element of state celebrations irritating both regime critics and apolitical city dwellers who just didn’t like the noise, kitsch style, and pompousness of these festivities and the type of people who enjoyed such events. Others mentioned how fireworks harm the environment, wildlife, pets, people, and the city budget. Criticism intensified after a woman was accidentally killed by a shard of a malfunctioning firework launcher during the Independence Day Celebrations in 2019 (Euroradio 2019).
But such arguments became irrelevant when small fireworks, launched in neighborhoods at 23:34 (a reference to the Administrative Code Article 23.34 according to which thousands of Belarusians were sentenced), became one of the few sonic means that could signal that the resistance was not dead. Fireworks were relatively safe as they could be launched from anywhere allowing people to escape detection and detention. In May 2021, fireworks that concluded the official celebrations of Victory Day, were “appropriated” by people who shouted the banned slogan “Long live Belarus”, as the echo of fireworks dissipated into the night. But the 2022 New Year celebrations were the last case of widespread fireworks use. Several people were detained for this and faced not just administrative but also criminal charges.
Before 9 August 2022 people were wondering how many fireworks would mark the second anniversary of the post-election protests. I heard only one small salvo in my neighborhood, and it took a lot of courage to do this. There were only a few news pieces and videos about such fireworks posted in Telegram channels, not just because there were less fireworks, but also because people became more cautious about sending evidence of such acts to independent media, as on numerous occasions such communication led to arrest, especially when the largest opposition media were classified as “extremist”.