Ostensible Listening
Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s concept of “Stimmung” is useful for understanding how a voice can influence the mood of historical periods:
The word Stimmung is most often (and accurately) translated as ‘mood’; on a metaphorical register, the term can be rendered as ‘climate’ or ‘atmosphere’. What the metaphors ‘climate’ and ‘atmosphere’ share with the word Stimmung – whose etymological root is Stimme, German for ‘voice’ – is that they suggest the presence of a material touch, typically a very light one, on the body of the (ap)perceiving party. Weather, sounds, and music all have a material yet invisible impact on us. Stimmung involves a sensation we associate with certain ‘inner’ feelings. [...] Stimmungen form an objective part of historical situations and periods. (Gumbrecht 2013: 24)
If one wants to define a Stimmung of the current political era in Belarus, then Aliaksandr Lukashenka’s voice and emotions are among its defining factors. His ubiquitous voice is not a “slightest mode of touch” (Gumbrecht 2017) but a voice force-fed to Belarusians since 1994 and internalized by them involuntary. As the regime and the personality cult of Lukashenka solidified over the 2000s, the state sector employees were expected to demonstrate loyalty to the state more visibly. At first, this was required from state officials, heads of state-owned enterprises and institutions, but gradually the whole “work collectives” and often employees’ families became involved, even on weekends and people’s free time. Such displays of loyalty include participating in “voluntary-compulsory” events organized by the authorities: various state celebrations and anniversaries, wreath laying ceremonies, subbotniks and other forms of unpaid work, sports competitions, concerts, gatherings, etc.
Widely reported in local, regional, and state media, factory newspapers and on institutions' websites, all these activities are aimed to create an image of a unified society working and spending leisure time together, in unison and accord with the “Head of the State”.
One of the exemplary ways of demonstrating such unity with the leader is a practice of public collective listening to his speeches – what I call “ostensible listening”.[19] Regardless of the format and the topic – whether it's a press-conference, an address to students or to the All-Belarusian National Congress – these speeches are a one-way communication with passively listening and nodding audiences, occasionally addressing some (trembling) officials who are often publicly humiliated for their mistakes, which might be not their fault but the system’s own. These speeches last for many hours; in 2017 “A Big Conversation with the President” for about 50 journalists lasted for 7 hours and 21 minutes beating his 2015 record. Such “program speeches” immediately become the basis for metodichki (ideological guidelines) reiterating and spreading the key messages in work collectives, universities, army units, village communities, etc.
More and more often it is required from the state sector employees to listen to these speeches at their work places. While teaching at a state educational institution in 2005-2007, I have witnessed this practice for the first time. Walking through corridors, you could hear Lukashenka's voice from multiple cable radios, and through open doors you could see secretaries and the teaching staff quietly doing their paperwork in the offices. Heads of faculties and departments listened to the speeches in their offices – again with doors ajar – in picturesquely constructed postures, nodding thoughtfully and smiling in agreement. It reminded me of Socialist Realism paintings or photographs from the early USSR era.
Students were not yet forced to listen to these speeches then (now they are[20]), and some of them were still brave enough to complain that huge portraits of Lukashenka in large lecture halls distracted them from their studies. Speeches were also aired via speakers on the main city squares near administrative buildings; nowadays most cities have huge TV-screens at such locations. Wider internet access in the 2010s and 2020s allowed broadcasting speeches online too, which enabled organizing such “listening sessions” literally anywhere. Soldiers “in the field” also have access to the ideologically important information with the aid of special equipment: an army propagandist’s suitcase or a media-truck.
Photos and videos from such events show employees gathered in various spaces – from offices and company meeting rooms to libraries and training classes – listening attentively and looking at screens of various sizes. These spaces often resemble classrooms with pairs of employees sitting at school-type desks, and images of ostensible listening — demonstrating attention and loyalty — reveal the intended disciplining effect of such performances. People are listening to the father's voice like schoolkids — silent, obedient, not moving. Some of them even sit with their arms folded — a “disciplined pupil” posture they learned at school.
If we look at the various controlled situations of disciplinary listening to the “father's voice”, then on the one pole we can see the state sector employees: adults who, at least potentially, have a choice to be either passive receptacles of such fatiguing verbiage, to avoid it on some pretext or even to break the spell and become active critics. And on the other pole, there are schoolkids who experience increasing ideological pressure – including “information” on current political issues – and being forced to watch and listen to Lukashenka’s speeches. The regime is obsessed with school education and ideological indoctrination of students. Lukashenka is personally engaged in these processes, often commenting on this or that issue of education, demanding ever stricter discipline. Before each school year he proposes newer and newer – often contradictory – innovations in secondary and higher education, bringing permanent instability to the education system. But school is not enough: a loyal citizen’s upbringing starts at pre-school institutions.
On 19 March 2006, the evening of yet another “elegant victory” of Lukashenka in the elections, the chief state ideologist Aliaksandr Zimouski claimed euphorically that the state should start nurturing the citizens from the kindergarten age on. According to him, working with pre-school kids is already too late, so the state must start with the kindergarten teachers who must have “ideologically correct” views. In 2022, when the militarization and “patriotic upbringing” in the state education system in Belarus reached unprecedented levels and the private school system was destroyed, the chief ideologist of the Belarusian Armed Forces suggested that the state anthem should be played not only in schools but in kindergartens as well (Zerkalo 2022c). Natallia Kachanava, the speaker of the upper house of the Belarusian parliament, reminded that school and pre-school teachers should not only be pedagogues but ideologists too (Zerkalo 2022e). This is particularly curious, considering Lukashenka’s confession to the Russian ideologist Alexander Dugin, that no coherent ideology was produced in Belarus so far. He also regretted that “no better ideology than Marxism-Leninism was ever invented” (BelTA 2022c).
In the absence of its own coherent ideology, the regime reproduced Soviet symbols and vocabulary and repeated Russian propaganda. An illustrative example of diving into the abyss of the Soviet totalitarian vocabulary and the Stimmung of the Stalinist terror is the idea for an audio installation to be created in the Mahiloŭ Institute of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. According to the concept, after picking up the receiver of a vintage phone under Stalin’s bust, a visitor would hear his voice: “We have internal enemies. We have external enemies. We shouldn’t forget about this, comrades, not for a minute” (Naša Niva 2022b).
The regime hopes that, as long as it holds pompous parades with red banners, scolds “the collective West”, evokes memories of the grandfathers’ heroic deeds, and creates straw mock-ups of T-34 tanks, and as long as it plays Soviet songs indoctrinating schoolkids, appropriates the city soundscape, and sanitizes the sacred locations aurally “contaminated” by protesters (Markevich 2020), the illusory stability of the “crystal vessel” will stay undisturbed and Russian cargo will continue being dropped uninterrupted, while Russian bombs are being dropped elsewhere.
Tanks rumble at the Victory parade rehearsal, 8.05.2020.
Many people try to shield themselves from the state media in general and from Lukashenka's speeches in particular. But the propagandist “media-fallout” still reaches them when opposition media publish the most controversial, outrageous or laughable quotes from Lukashenka and other officials’ speeches. Satirical media and memes make sure that even those who try to protect their minds from a barrage of propaganda, will know all the latest “pearls of wisdom”. “And now I will show you where the attack on Belarus was prepared from” — Lukashenka’s phrase uttered in the first days of the full-scale Russian invasion of the Belarusian territory – has generated an endless flow of memes and comic sketches. A lot of such content was made by Ukrainians. Hearing them imitating Lukashenka’s voice while telling jokes and quotes like “And now I will show you...” is an unsettling experience that made me realize that I don’t want to hear this voice even in parodies, and that his voice infects not only Belarusians, but also Russian language speakers in other countries.
The peculiar texture of Lukashenka's voice, his husky timbre, his manner of speech, and the blunt, absurdist metaphors make it quite easy – and tempting – to imitate and parody him, and many people, including those who despise him, would imitate Lukashenka’s voice with a guilty pleasure, retelling the newest quotes or jokes. In 2023 his voice presence was further augmented thanks to AI tools that translate speech into other languages while retaining the key voice parameters. (By the way, I haven’t heard translations of his speeches into Belarusian, the language that he almost never uses.)
A psychologist might say that playing with Lukashenka’s words in this way or parodying his speech is a coping mechanism.[21] There are other coping mechanisms too. Irritation by the permanent ubiquity of the hated political figure, involuntary internalization of his voice, ingraining of his manner of speech and thought patterns in peoples’ minds has even led to such unsettling phenomena as dreams about Lukashenka. Taciana Zamirouskaya, a journalist and novelist, has collected hundreds of such dreams, nightmarish or funny. She suggests that “a lack of communication with the government reflects itself in dozens of ‘confession’ dreams: When Belarusians meet Lukashenko in their dreams, they tell him literally everything they think. Maybe it’s a dream therapy as well – to finally speak out, unafraid” (Zamirouskaya 2020).
I asked voice coach Maryna “Rusia” Šukiurava to describe the “technical characteristics” of Lukashenka’s voice and to analyze his effects on listeners. Besides a thorough analysis of his voice apparatus, breath and speech patterns, prosody, phonetics, diction, and a description of his “sonic persona”, she mentioned that his voice instills anxiety, fear, and doubt: “[t]oday, when I listened to him for an hour, I was enveloped by fear that ‘not everything is so univocal’,[22] until I stopped myself. That’s his ‘toxic charm’.” [23] She added that Lukashenka’s voice, his aggressive, belittling attitude, and messages he conveys, might be most effective for infantile people seeking a tough and abusive father figure who doubts one’s mental capacity. Ilya Demyanov, a Russian voice coach who analyzed Lukashenka’s voice, notes that he “speaks from an archetype of father who reprimands and bullies his children” (Demʹi͡anov 2020).
In October 2022, Lukashenka even yelled at the Armenian prime-minister, Nikol Pashinyan, as if he was his child too. In Armenia “some people thought that, in reality, [it is] the Russian president speaks through the Belarusian president’s mouth, that Lukashenka has become the inner (sic!) voice of Vladimir Putin” (Zerkalo 2022d). Vital Cyhankoŭ, a journalist, who analyzed how Lukashenka became a mouthpiece for Russian propaganda, noted ironically: “Lately, Lukashenka is serving the function of Vladimir Putin’s press-secretary better than Dmitry Peskov” (Cyhankoŭ 2022b).
