Soviet music heritage as a discursive middle ground in Belarusian political conflict

ABSTRACT

Recent protests against the dictatorship in Belarus and the subsequent political conflict simultaneously polarised the Belarusian nation and unified various groups of protesters with the help of new national imagery. These opposing but connected processes instrumentalise the Belarusian Soviet past. Heritage as a way of past-in-present existence becomes a tool in this struggle. In this paper, I focus on the music band ‘Pesniary’ that represents the Soviet music heritage in Belarus. The manifoldness of Pesniary creativity and the peculiarities of the band’s cultural origins allows different agents to articulate its meaning as Soviet and national heritage at the same time. Using the critical heritage studies approach to heritage as a constantly antagonistic process of meaning-making of the past, I explain how popular music heritage functions in the field of political dissent as a means of assimilation of contested past.

KEYWORDS:

• Nationalism
• dissent
• popular music heritage

Disclosure statement

The author reports there are no competing interests to declare.

Notes

1. The commonly used abbreviation VIA stands for Russian ‘vocal’no-instrumental’ny ansambl’’, i.e. vocal-instrumental ensemble. More on the history of the term and the VIAs itself (Schäfer 2021).

2. Estrada (fr. ‘small stage’) was a Soviet term for popular or light entertainment, mainly state-sponsored leisure activities. It is ‘a wide-ranging term that includes pop music but also applies to modern dance, comedy, circus arts, and any other performance not on the “big,” classical stage’ (McFadyen 2002, 3). The closest analogue of this genre name in the English language is ‘variety’.

3. The biographical details are provided in the authorised biography of Muliavin: Krushinskaia 2004.

4. For more on account of nationalities in the USSR: Slezkine, 1994.

5. For more about the history of the Belarusian language in this context see: Zaprudski 2007.

6. At the 1997 Rock Coronation music awards ceremony in Belarus, Vladimir Muliavin and Anatolʹ Kashaparaŭ, together with the punk band Neuro Dubel, performed Pesniary’s hit ‘Vologda’, re-sung in punk style for the Pesniarok album.

7. Both Russian and Belarusian languages do not have two separate words for ‘heritage’ and ‘legacy’, and both meanings are conveyed by the word ‘nasledie’ (in Russian) / ‘spadčyna’ (in Belarusian).

8. https://pesnyary.by/. Accessed 7 April 2022.

9. https://www.kp.ru/daily/27225/4350920/. Accessed 7 April 2022.

10. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_MfnZXICTQ. Accessed 7 April 2022.

11. https://t.me/radio_peremen/60. Accessed 7 April 2022.

12. https://t.me/nashaniva/24486. Accessed 7 April 2022.

13. https://t.me/nashaniva/35824. Accessed 7 April 2022.

Additional information

Funding

The publication was prepared within the framework of the Academic Fund Program at HSE University in 2021 (grant No 20-04-035; National Research University Higher School of EconomicsNational Research University Higher School of Economics [20-04-035].

Notes on contributors

Lizaveta Lysenka

Lizaveta Lysenka is a PhD student at the Graduate School of History at the HSE University, Moscow, and a Research Assistant at Poletayev Institute for Theoretical and Historical Studies in the Humanities, HSE University, Moscow. ORCID: 0000-0001-9806-4624.