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

Abstract

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.