Belarusian Generation Y logbook

Since the Referendum in 1996, the 3rd of July is the official Independence Day of Belarus. Even though “independence day” by default should call on the patriotic feelings of all Belarusians and especially those representing the national democratic block, so many pro-democratic young people detest this date and the way the state organizes the “celebrations” to commemorate it. There are a number of reasons for that.

The first one is the idea how this date was introduced. The problem was mainly that moving the Independence Day to the 3rd of July was aimed at weakening the idea of state independence, no matter how illogical this may sound. The declaration of independence of Belarus was signed on July 27, 1990. This document declared Belarus as an independent state with “the independent and full power of its statehood within the borders of its territory and independence of the republic’s foreign policy”. This date – July 27th – was commemorated as the Independence Day since 1991 and was of big importance for Belarus, a new country which declared its independence after 70 years of the Soviet Union and its destructive activities towards the Belarusian nation. That was a building stone for a new country.

However, the political hurls of the 90-ies and the establishing of the current regime could not let the idea of national independence live even in the form of a holiday – Independence Day, since in his first election campaign, the first president of Belarus (Lukashenko) was actively against the break away from the USSR and signing the Declaration of Independence. As a result of the referendum in 1996, which was held with numerous falsifications, the Independence Day was moved to a much less “radically nationalistic” date of July 3rd – the day when the German troops left Minsk in 1944. A simple change of the date substituted also the meaning of the independence to a more convenient for the modern ideology of the Belarusian regime – it is not about the independence of the statehood of the Belarusian people any more, but about the independence from outside enemies, of which we are always reminded from the state TV channels and printed media.

However, even these facts are not that widely known or mentioned in Belarus any more. People are getting used to the holiday which gives them an additional free day from work and when the regime is organizing a huge fest in the capital with parades, fireworks, cheap alcohol and free pop-musicians performance. Less and less they care about the meaning of the day, also because the meaning of July 3rd has nothing to do with the independence of the modern Belarusian state. The holiday, when people are supposed to celebrate living in their own state and being free from outside foreign political will (as it was in the USSR), has turned into another reason to get drunk and forget about everything.

It is amazing how many of my friends are disgusted about the way the state is organizing holidays like that. Apart from the distinctive resemblance to the North Korean parades with thousands of people being particles of one huge picture (the most vivid reflection of the attitude of any dictator regime to a person as a piece of a big machine) and military parades showing off the muscles of the state like in the USSR, the “celebration” always turns into an ugly collective and simultaneous drunkenness of thousands of people around the country. People in blogs with resentment write about how unbearable it will be in Minsk during the “celebrations” days before July 3rd. Most of them try to get out of the city to the countryside or to camping places to escape the ugly picture of the proletariat, in the way the regime prefers them to be.

Photos by Yulia Darashkevich www.nn.by