Acoustic Paranoia
The period after the summer of 2020 saw not only a rise in political activities and their brutal crushing, but also “acoustic paranoia” spreading in the Belarusian society. It affected not only opposition activists, but almost the whole population. People got more and more careful in their conversations, not just in public places and over the phone, but in private as well. Nasta Kudasava, a poet from Rahačou, mentions that
[T]here’s such an atmosphere in the country, that people avoid meeting and talking to each other. During my last months in Rahačou, there was practically no one I could talk with. People became very scared. We stopped calling each other, because no one can speak over the phone openly now. Meeting in the streets we were afraid to talk sincerely. It has led to people quitting seeing each other. Even if I had a couple of friends, then gradually everyone has somehow isolated, each on their own. (Naša Niva 2022d)
The special services increasingly engaged in wiretapping the ordinary citizens’ phones, even those not personally involved in political activism like the family members of killed activists (e.g. Raman Bandarenka) or relatives and friends of people under criminal investigations. In the atmosphere of unlawfulness, encouraged by Lukashenka’s phrase “Sometimes there’s no place for the law” (BelTA 2020), such intrusion into citizens’ privacy was often not sanctioned in a formal way.
Feelings of acoustic transparency and paranoia became near total. The numerous leaks of the enforcers’ phone calls, recordings of their official meetings and private conversations with colleagues showed that nobody's privacy could be taken for granted. Even the highest officers of KGB, Ministry of Internal Affairs, and state functionaries could not feel safe. The “CyberPartisans”, a hacker group behind many such leaks, commented on this:
Not everyone is listened to — it’s impossible to record the whole population at once, there are no capacities. At any single moment, about a hundred people can be recorded, maximum a thousand. Rather, the key figures, who work for the regime, are constantly recorded, the others — [are recorded] on demand. But it doesn’t mean that one can relax — a person can be subjected to wiretapping. They record regular mobile phone calls, so it’s better to use messengers (Signal, Telegram). (Zerkalo 2022b)
Clandestine listening to conversations in prisons was widespread and agents were “embedded” in cells to provoke frank conversations and confessions (Radyjo Svaboda 2021). CyberPartisans shared fragments of such clandestine recordings, and a recording of people singing in their cell.
This atmosphere of total surveillance and wiretapping was often mocked in memes and performances. The “Mike & Nick incident” in September 2020 generated a flurry of jokes. During one of the protest demonstrations, a trio of protesters came dressed as clownish-looking agents of KGB, the Internal Affairs, and the Foreign Affairs Ministries prowling with microphones, antennae, and a tape-machine. A few kilometers later they were detained.
The situation in the country was aggravated by the widespread phenomena of denouncing activists by pro-regime citizens. Milicyja was proud of such people and even shared recordings of their calls. The Internal Affairs Ministry official YouTube channel has several compilations of such calls. Some people in these recordings demand that protesters must be punished brutally. One man suggested using rubber bullets, flash bang grenades, and even Kalashnikov live ammunition: “A couple of shots in the head and that’s all!”
A “Black Map” of denouncers was published by the CyberPartisans in September 2021 (and later updated twice), revealing the scale of this phenomenon. Based on the hacked data about calls informing the milicyja of various “protest incidents”, it showed about nine-thousand cases where people reported not only about protesters, “suspicious” groups or individuals, but also denounced their neighbors and even family members, whose activities or words were openly or allegedly aimed against the regime.[17] On this map I found out that my neighbor informed milicyja about a DIY concert held in a nearby residential courtyard. Indeed, a significant part of such complaints, registered by the milicyja call-operators, were about “protest music”, “car signals” or people chanting opposition slogans and having “anti-state” conversations:
27% of a thousand calls that we have analyzed referred to noise: car signals, music, explosions, applause, neighbors, and people in the streets. And the people calling have often emphasized that the loud sounds were disturbing their rest. And 15% of the studied statements mentioned people who expressed themselves orally: ‘Around 500 people have gathered, they shout slogans’, ‘A group of people makes noise near the sauna, they shout antipolitical (sic!) slogans’, ‘[People are] shouting “Long Live Belarus!” from windows and in the courtyard and disturb [our] rest’, ‘More than fifty people on the road are shouting slogans against the authorities’ or that someone has ‘uttered unflattering comments addressing the acting president’. (Zerkalo 2021a)
Outside of the “protest context”, a complaint about noisy neighbors often wouldn't lead to any consequences, as such cases are within the jurisdiction of house managing state enterprises, not milicyja. But if a complaint was about people playing protest music or speaking about something suspicious, the “offenders of the quiet” would most likely be detained immediately. One such call reported that there was a poster near one of the Minsk schools that read “Here our voices (votes) are buried” (Zerkalo 2021a). The voting stations were mostly located in schools, and teachers and school administration were a key part of the election falsification mechanism, helping to steal and “bury” people’s votes/voices.
As I have already mentioned, in Russian and Belarusian languages the words for listening and obeying have the same root. Also the words for paying attention and heeding have the same origin: prysłuchvacca (Belarusian) or prishlushivat’sya (Russian). An undisciplined kid or adult who doesn’t obey is called niepasłuchmiany, niesłuch (Belarusian) and nieposlushnyj (Russian) – one who doesn’t listen. This trope of listening to an authority figure – literally, to the father[18] – was best epitomized in Anatol Yarmolenka's song “Slushay Bat’ku!” (“Listen to the Father!”), premiered before the 2006 elections.
Listen to the Father! In the morning, night and day
Listen to the Father! If you feel bad
Listen to the Father! If everything is fine.
Yarmolenka, one of the artists most honored by the state, claimed that this song wasn’t a form of flattery: “Our president doesn’t need sycophants” (Naša Niva 2009). But, apparently, Lukashenka greatly enjoys being listened to for hours on end.
