Official celebrations of Victory Day in Belarus: the organizers and the obedient

Abstract

On May 9, 2015 Belarus was celebrating the 70th anniversary of Victory Day. The victory in the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945 is probably the main pillar of official ideology of the current political regime in Belarus. That year the importance of the date was emphasized by the geopolitical context of continuous military conflict in Ukraine. The same year the international research project “Victory, Liberation, Occupation: Military Monuments and Commemorative Events for the 70th Anniversary of the End of the War in the Post-Soviet Space” was launched in several Eastern European countries. A team of researchers conducted an observation of official public celebrations of the Victory Day in Minsk, Grodno and Vitebsk. The aim was to understand the internal logic and structure of official commemorative events and to discern how historical events are instrumentalized in favor of the current political agenda. Another important observation task stemming from the goals of the entire international project was to examine the role of Belarusian Victory monuments in structuring of the celebrations. The main thesis of the paper is that the official Belarusian Victory Day is directed for the mass audience as a spectacular show with simplified meanings employing popular culture techniques. Nevertheless, Victory Day consists of two parts - official events and non-directed acts of popular commemoration. Being certainly interconnected, on this particular day they practically do not intersect. The article is an adapted Russian version of the recent publication: Kasataja, T., Sturejka, S. (2017). Der Tag des Sieges als belarussischer Staatsfeiertag. Administrative Steuerung und ihre Ergebnisse.