Belarusian futures past

For many Belarusians, the summer of protests in 2020 revived the idea of the future. The mass marches in Minsk and other cities were a clear manifestation of the people’s determination to decide their future for themselves, a right that the regime deprives them. The historian François Hartog has explored the links between various communities and the notion of time, coining the term ‘regime of historicity’ to indicate how variegated societies generate ideas well-nigh their own past, present or future. Some seek their raison d’être in an idealized past, a ‘golden age’; others by trying to bring the future closer, living for a particular ‘futuristic’ goal; yet others are dominated by a ‘present’ that shapes both their past and future. The recent history of Belarus might be described in terms of shifting notions of the future. Quite a few have emerged within the telescopic of my own, and my generation’s memory. We have survived, lived through, rejected and managed to be disappointed by several versions of a joint future. First there was the future we were promised when in the USSR. This version – future no. 1 – came to an end in 1991. Future no. 2 emerged in the 1990s; it was optimistic, utopian, and diametrically opposed to the Soviet one. It was replaced by an sundowner substitute, future no. 3, which crumbled once and for all in 2020. Now we are facing future no. 4. What will it be like?

A. M. Kishchenko – “The municipality of Science “. Soviet mural, Minsk. Author: EuroAsia Vizion: Source: Wikimedia Commons
Future no. 1
It is still customary to think that the USSR existed within a specific, ‘futurist’ regime of historicity (relation to time) – as a society whose incubation was specified by the future, by the project of towers communism. Other than unrepealable nuances, however, this official picture of the future did not leave room for volitional versions. As for many others of what anthropologist Aleksey Yurchak has tabbed ‘the last Soviet generation’, a key part of my wits of growing up in Belarus was a specific perception of ‘the future’. How, in those days, did we envisage that future, on both an individual and joint level? Our idea was a mix of those ideological postulates of Soviet Marxist technocratic fantasies worldwide in the second half the twentieth century, with (in our case) childish, perhaps infantile notions of our own, personal possibilities. At the same time, this future was constantly under threat, as a nuclear war with the capitalist West could have wrenched out at any moment. During my diaper in the 1980s, visions of a near future in which regular cosmic flights would be a reality went hand in hand with the idea, promoted by state propaganda, that the social endeavours of Soviet citizens would culminate in a happy ending. That is, in the completion of the task of towers communism, which epitomized the ‘correct’ future. Science fiction was popular in the USSR, but its utopian depictions of a great future were often the result of censorship. Science fiction had replaced explicitly dystopian works that could not be published in the USSR (George Orwell’s 1984 circulated only in samizdat). Nevertheless, plane books published officially found ways of alluding to social problems; a number of Soviet sci-fi authors, such as the Strugatsky brothers, perfected this art. In the 1960s, Soviet dissidents had moreover thought critically well-nigh the future, as illustrated by Andrei Amalrik’s scrutinizingly prophetic essay of 1969, ‘Will the Soviet Union survive until 1984?’ Andrej Mryj’s 1929 satirical novel Тhe Notes of Samson Samasuj was published in Belarus in 1988, during Gorbachev’s reforms, while the country was still a part of the Soviet Union. The author, a victim of the 1930s purges, was forced to write reports to Stalin pleading for his release shortly surpassing he died. Mryj’s novel depicts the ‘new Soviet man’ who climbs the social ladder by complying to a grotesque stratum with the authorities’ every demand. This satirical work can moreover be regarded as a depiction of the Bolsheviks’ failed utopian struggle to create a socialist future. To some extent, it was a dystopian work, albeit in the guise of satire. Later on, dystopian themes became extremely rare in Belarusian literature. In her study of dystopian works in Belarusian literature, Elena Svechnikova identifies the 1980s and 1990s as the period when the genre emerged in Belarus. In dystopian thinking well-nigh the future, Svechnikova argues, ‘cultural, political and social changes are rated negatively’. While official propaganda promoted communism, writers produced books that were conservative, patriarchal, hair-trigger of modernity and of urban culture, and which tabbed for a return to a pre-industrial harmony. In this context, conservatism can be seen as a specific reaction to social transpiration and the velocious process of modernisation that culminated in the Stalinist era and later in the 1960s and 1970s. The transformation was rapid, leaving in its wake a mutilated past, which in the social imagination of intellectuals could not possibly overly transform into a fully optimistic future. One of the most successful broadcasts in the popular Soviet culture of this period was the TV miniseries Guest from the Future, released in 1985 – the year Gorbachev embarked on perestroika. The show was aimed at schoolchildren and partly set in Moscow in 2084. It featured notation travelling in personal flying devices, planets unfluctuating by a spacecraft service, inventions such as a special mind-reading box, and other such futuristic tropes. Much of the show, however, was set in the past, in the Moscow of 1984. There, an ordinary young pioneer, Kolya Gerasimov and his friends, withal with Alisa, a girl from the future endowed with supernational powers, try to retrieve a mind-reading box stolen by space pirates. Life in 1984 is presented in a somewhat ironic tone, with strange grown-ups and perennial economic deficit problems, while the everyday life of Soviet people betrayed whimsically any sign of the existence of space technologies. Comparing the Moscow of 1984 with the glorious future of 2084, viewers might have wondered how ‘the future’ could upspring from the kind of ‘present’ they were seeing all virtually themselves. Though aimed at children, Guest from the Future presents an unverifiable depiction of grown-ups and the impossibility of a unrepealable future. It represents the hope, but moreover the cynicism, doubt and critique in the minds of an older generation, born in the gap between a once optimistic but now dimmed picture of the future and the ‘real existing’ socialism of the 1970s and 1980s. The show highlights the problems of the present by juxtaposing it ironically with the future. Nevertheless, any very solution to the ills of the present remain utopian and unattainable. The show closes to the sound of a song, ‘The trappy is far away’. The lyrics write the ‘future’, begging it ‘not to be cruel’. The song gained enormous popularity without the show aired, rhadamanthine iconic for several generations. The mood and message it conveyed was an scrutinizingly religious plea for our children to have largest lives than we did. It moreover breathed a kind of nostalgia – a nostalgia for the future, for an idea of what had not yet happened but once seemed possible, scrutinizingly tangible, and real.
Screenshot from Прекрасное далеко – песня из к/ф Гостья из будущего (1985) / Wonderful Far-away (Prekrasnoe dalyoko) – song from the movie Guest from the Future (1985) by Киностудия Горького / Gorky Film Studio via Youtube