Belarusian Generation Y logbook

Life of young people in Belarus is balancing between the past and the future, a desperate attempt to escape from the Soviet past and to catch up with the pace of the world’s development no matter what barriers the state or other countries create for that. The struggle has become something natural. At present it has stepped with a heavy foot also into the field of culture and music most of all. In Belarus you will not see street artists (except for very rare cases), police presence has become a norm during the performances of “Free theater” and banned rock groups have no other way to meet their public but arrange concerts outside the country.

The most famous festival of this kind is “Basovisca” which is also often called as “Young Belarus Music Festival” and is held on the territory of Poland. The tradition to hold Basovisca was established by Belarusian Association of Students (BAS – thus BASovisca) at the very beginning of 1990s. BAS is the organization which unites ethnic Belarusian students in Poland, most of whom live and study in Bialystok region where many people in villages still speak Belarusian and consider themselves Belarusians. Since its first time, Basovisca has been held annually and this year it celebrated its 18th anniversary. This is an open-air festival with camping life, beer and mainly Belarusian rock-music. At the moment this is the biggest Belarusian music festival. Geographically it is held very close to Belarusian boarder but still at the polish territory (photos from Basovishcha 2007).

However, the biggest amount of hits during the first week of September got the report from the last summer rock concert – Be2gether. The festival was held on the Lithuanian territory next to the Belarusian boarder.Even though the slogan of the event was “Music Opens Boarders” it was quite an adventure for Belarusians to come there. The biggest barriers were getting a visa and paying 35 euros for the ticket which is quite difficult for an average Belarusian young person. Those who managed to overcome the difficulties of arrival were a bit confused that organizers did not foresee making announcements and shields not only in Lithuanian but also in Belarusian or at least English. However, despite all the mentioned difficulties most of the participant had great time and enjoyed the performances of more than 30 groups from around the world: Lithuania, the USA, Poland, the UK, Norway, Estonia, Finland, Georgia, Iceland, Russia, Latvia and Belarus. In the Photo Blog of Generation.bY you can find 6 photo reports from the performance at Be2gether.

Organizers say that they plan another festival next summer as well, thus making Be2gether a second rock festival for Belarusian young people held on the territory of another country after “Basovishcha”.

And one more music festival of the same kind was held just last weekend in Ukraine. The event is called “Right to Be Free” and was promoted as a place where Belarusian bands can freely perform for their fans. However, the authorities reacted on the festival shockingly strict. Two buses with young people who were on their way to participate in the festival were stopped before they reached the boarders of Mensk region and where brought back to Mensk. The bus with musicians were held for more than 5 hours at the boarder control. It was also announced that on the way back customs workers together with boarder police copied the photos from all photo cameras of the festival participants. Some of Generation.bY community members managed to get to the festival venue. You can see some of the photos from the trip here.