“Most Europeans know Belarus for two things,” says Pavel Barkouski when we speak on Zoom – “Chornobyl and Lukashenko. So, a technological catastrophe and a public life catastrophe.”
It’s hard to disagree with Barkouski’s assessment that for the vast majority in Europe, Belarus remains something of a “terra incognita,” or “a black hole on the map.”
“It’s the only country that has no membership in the Council of Europe and the only one with capital punishment in its legal system,” he tells me. “But for us Belarusians, of course, the situation is quite different. We understand that Belarus has a rich European and cultural heritage.”
And, as acting representative for the Belarusian national revival, a big part of Barkouski’s task is to try to make more people aware of the truth about his country. One of the biggest challenges he faces is, like Tsikhanouskaya pointed out in Tallinn, the tendency to just conflate Belarus with neighboring Russia.
“The main purpose of my activity now is resistance and opposition to this process of Russification and propaganda,” Barkouski says, adding that the Lukashenko regime has long worked to “diminish the role of [Belarusian] national identity and culture.”
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When it comes to changing narratives about Belarus, Barkouski is well aware of the importance of artists and those working in other creative spheres.
“This is a main part of our strategy to promote Belarusian culture in the world and differentiate it from Russia,” he says. However, he admits there is still a need to “shout more loudly” about works of art and masterpieces from Belarus.
One Belarusian artist whose work definitely shouts loudly about just that is Pan ZmiThor. His exhibition “Belarus = Europe” was opened in Tallinn’s Tammsaare Park by Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya during her official visit to Estonia last November.
Through a series of deceptively simple meme-like graphics, “Belarus = Europe” aimed to debunk the most common misperceptions about Belarus, ZmiThor tells me. Many of which, have long been perpetuated by both the Lukashenko regime and Russia.
Most autocratic regimes “would never sacrifice things like their national identity while imposing a dictatorship,” the artist says. But when it comes to Lukashenko, the opposite is true.
“Lukashenko is acting in the interests of Russia – imposing the Russian language and deliberately destroying Belarusian national culture and identity,” ZmiThor explains.
To even begin this myth-busting quest, ZmiThor continues, you have to start from the very basics. A Google search for “Belarus” for instance, immediately brings up images of “the official symbols that derive from Soviet communist flag,” he explains. “So, people just assume this is the right flag. But since Belarus gained independence, our flag was white-red-white.”
“When we speak about Belarus, we can see that in other countries people don’t really know the difference,” he says – between the two flags and the two versions being presented of Belarus. They don’t know anything about Belarus’ history and presume the flag doesn’t matter,” he says.
But flags and other national symbols do matter, especially when you’re fighting to assert your identity.
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In the summer of 2020, the white-red-white flag was everywhere in Belarus as thousands rose up in protest against falsified presidential election results, in which Aleksandr Lukashenko proclaimed himself the victor.
The flag’s prominence on the streets as a unifying opposition symbol meant that even the two simple colors it contains – red and white – no matter where they appeared, were soon seen as an existential threat to Lukashenko regime.
Walking through Minsk wearing white and red socks or carrying a red and white striped shopping bag was enough for the authorities to impose fines, hand out jail sentences and much worse, as they brutally cracked down on all perceived forms of dissent. In one of the many absurd examples, a snowman in someone’s yard decorated with a red scarf resulted in a court case being brought against the owner of the property.
Ridiculous as that may sound, for those subjected to suppression for even the most minor displays of opposition, the consequences were no laughing matter. At the end of 2024, an estimated 1,275 prisoners were still behind bars on politically motivated charges, with many believed to have been subjected to ill-treatment and torture.
According to Pan ZmiThor, the revival of the historic white-red-white flag at that time also provided some cause for optimism. Before 2020, overt displays of national belonging were rare among Belarusians, he explains.
“But in 2020, we could see that the majority of Belarusians live with the hope that one day the white-red-white flag will be the national flag, and that the Belarusian language will be our national language,” he tells me.
“Those things helped Belarusians to start to be proud of their identity again. To be Belarusian and do something about it. For many, that was a big change.”
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Language, too, plays a key role in that change.
Officially, both Belarusian and Russian are state languages in Belarus. However, it is only the latter that enjoys a privileged status, with Lukashenko once describing Belarusian as a “poor” language, through which “nothing great can be expressed.”
After the events of 2020, however, more people began speaking Belarusian in their day-to-day lives. “It was their personal choice,” explains Pavel Barkouski, adding that doing so in public was a clear “sign of the importance given to this process of developing our national culture and identity.”
In contrast, “Russian-speaking culture and Russian-speaking products have mostly served as tools for promoting Putin’s ideology and narratives in Belarus,” he says.
Barkouski compares that situation in his country to that of all other countries in the former Soviet Union, where Russian was imposed on the local population at the expense of other native languages. In this respect, the Belarusian National Revival has been learning Ukraine’s experience as it fights to defend itself from Russian aggression, he tells me.
At a forum to promote the Belarusian language, they invited Ukrainian representatives to share the strategies they employed “to support their national language and increase its use in public life and culture,” Barkouski says. Ukraine’s “positive and negative experiences were both very good to engage with,” he adds.
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The war in Ukraine has, in many ways, amplified the ambiguity of Belarus’ position in the broader European consciousness. Russia has launched attacks on Ukraine from Belarusian territory and Lukashenko remains Vladimir Putin’s staunchest ally.
For Pan ZmiThor, that makes it even more important to distinguish between the Belarusian regime and the Tsikhanouskaya-fronted opposition.
“[This] has demonstrated that [Belarus] is not an independent country – it is in fact a dominion or a colony of Russia,” ZmiThor argues. “Russian troops [have been able to] do whatever they want on this territory, including attacking other countries.”
He acknowledges that understandably “many Ukrainians started to reject Belarus completely” even those who supported the uprising in 2020. On a political level, too, Ukraine has remained cautious in its relations with the Belarusian opposition.
“We also see that Belarusian fighters are among the biggest group of foreigners fighting in the Ukrainian Army,” ZmiThor points out. According to a report by the Kyiv Independent in December 2024, as many as 1,300 have been killed fighting on the Ukrainian side since 2014.
“Overall, solidarity with Ukraine among the people of Belarus is very high,” he says. “But yeah, it’s complicated.”
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The life of an artist can be precarious at the best of times. But in Belarus, against the backdrop of Lukashenko’s repressions and the war in Ukraine, it’s outright dangerous.
“Many artists in Belarus have created works about the protests of 2020 and the war in Ukraine,” Pan ZmiThor says. Naturally, some are more explicit in their political intent than others, he adds.
He tells me about one Belarusian artist, who produced a work portraying a well-konwon anti-Soviet partisan. “He was jailed for five years for that,” ZmiThor says – and the authorities did not stop there. “After a short time in jail, they had tortured him to death.”
“It is really tough to be an artist in this situation in Belarus.”
Cases like this are not only shocking. They also highlight that the authorities are “afraid of art,” ZmiThor says. “Because it’s a way to spread ideas, bypass their propaganda and open the eyes of a lot of people in Belarus. But on the other hand, we know that artists inside Belarus are very unsafe if they touch on political topics.”
Acting Representative for the Belarusian National Revival Pavel Barkouski agrees. “The Lukashenko officials and the authoritarian power recognize all our artists as the main threat for them,” Barkouski says. “For their ability to control the minds of people and to provide effective propaganda against their enemies.”
The regime’s regular crackdowns on cultural life are a concerted “strategy to repress all political opponents and all pro-national, pro-democratic forces in Belarus,” Barkouski tells me. “We also see that the great amount of our artists and creative elites are forced into emigration because of the repressive politics of the state.”
Inside Belarus, “you can be arrested for showing the colors of the national flag or even for a Facebook like,” Pan ZmiThor, who himself is also now based outside the country, explains. “So, we do not see many likes on our Facebook posts or social media.
“But,” he smiles, “we can see a lot of views. And that gives us hope that this can also change something.”
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For Pan ZmiThor and Pavel Barkouski, there is no doubt about the importance of art and culture in the Belarusian resistance and national revival.
“It connects people who are abroad and people who are inside the country,” ZmiThor says. “It’s also extremely important to show our European heritage – not just to say that we can travel from Belarus to Europe, but that Belarus is an essential part of Europe.”
Even the ability to host an exhibition in Tallinn called “Belarus = Europe” highlights the direction Barkouski and ZmiThor want their country to go in. Estonia’s “efforts to support its national identity, language and national interests are a great example to us all,” Barkouski says.
Estonia too is “part of these circumstances,” Pavel Barkouski says. “There is a fear of Russian influence, not Russian liberation.”
Both remain optimistic that things will change. But even outside Belarus, there are still plenty of obstacles to overcome. “Actually,” ZmiThor tells me, “our exhibition in Estonia was vandalized.” Someone wrote a phrase on the posters with a marker, declaring their support for Moscow, he explains.
“It means that there is a reaction from the other side,” he says. “There are a lot of agents everywhere, who act in the interests of Russia and Lukashenko. They can also be active in European Union. We’ve seen what they write in the media – calling us extremists. And the many things they do to persuade Belarusians they are not Europeans.”
“But that just means we are doing the right thing,” ZmiThor says. “We cannot just sit and wait while artists in Belarus are being killed.”
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