SUMMARY:

In his article, Serguei Oushakine argues that the condition of post-Soviet Belarusian society can be best and meaningfully captured if analyzed through the lens of postcolonial analytics. The author advances this argument in the context of the field dominated by studies of democratic transit and formation of post-communist civil society. Oushakine claims that an attempt to understand post-Soviet subjectivity has to be associated with attending to a post-Soviet discussion of the Soviet past, the search for national authenticity outside the structures of domination in the twentieth century, and estrangement as the discursive technique in dealing with narratives of the Soviet past. Explicitly locating this analysis in the broader field of postcolonial studies, Oushakine emphasizes the productivity of looking at post-Soviet historical narratives through the lens of postcolonial analytics as well as the difference in the postcolonial condition of post-communist societies, in which one finds a merger of the technique of estrangement from the past of alien hegemony with the romantic narratives of national history.
Oushakine bases his argument on his fieldwork in post-Soviet Belarus during the Lukashenko presidency and the analysis of debates about two key locations in the Belarus Soviet official and counterofficial memory: Khatyn and Kurapaty. In his empirical material the author finds his interlocutors using the rhetoric of postcolonial condition. The article traces the evolution of the Khatyn commemoration site from the official Soviet narrative of suffering of the peasant population at the hands of the Nazi invaders to the discovery of the role of collaborators in the atrocities of World War II. He proceeds with the post-Soviet strategies of evacuating altogether from the narratives of resistance and collaboration insofar as the heroic narratives of guerilla resistance of Belarusians in wartime became associated with the imposed domination of Soviet power and political myth. The second case treated in the article is Kurapaty, the place where the mass grave resulting from Soviet pre–World War II executions was found during the perestroika period. The debate and commemorative movement around Kurapaty became the symbolic reference of the Belarusian postcolonial condition defined as the luminal place between Hitler and Stalin. The initial attempt of Belarusian activists to elevate Kurapaty to a commemoration of Soviet genocide became marred by confusing evidence revealed concerning who actually perished on the site. Oushakine concludes that Kurapaty failed to demarcate the autonomous space of post-communist subjectivity that could have distanced the post-communist subject from structures of imposed hegemony. The article concludes that the processes of mapping post-Soviet and postcolonial subjectivity in Belarus are far from being completed and that it could take two different routes: the creative rethinking of history through the figure of nonpresence in the past or the conservative and nostalgic substitution of the imagined national past for structures of post-Soviet and postcolonial subjectivity that are available in the present.