Nationalities Papers, Vol. 34, No. 3, July 2006

Alexander Pershai

New Perspectives on the History of Belarus: A Series of Calendars, Women of
Belarus

http://gender-ehu.org/?98_2

Women of Belarus: Roads to Freedom. Calendar 2001 [Zhanchyny Belarusi:
shliakhi da svabody. Kaliandar 2001], Elena Gapova, ed. (Minsk: European
Humanities University, 2000), 26 pp.

Women of Belarus: Creators of Culture. Calendar 2002 [Zhenshchiny Belarusi:
tvortsy kul"tury. Kalendar' 2002], Elena Gapova, ed. (Minsk: European
Humanities University, 2001), 26 pp.

Women of Belarus: At the Personal Front. Calendar 2003 [Zhenshchiny
Belarusi: na lichnom fronte. Kalendar' 2003], Elena Gapova, ed. (Minsk:
European Humanities University, 2002), 24 pp.

Women of Belarus: Estates and Classes. Calendar 2004 [Zhenshchiny Belarusi:
statusy i klassy. Kalendar' 2004], Elena Gapova, ed. (Minsk: European
Humanities University, 2003), 24 pp.

Women at the Front Line: Calendar 2005 [Zhenshchiny na linii fronta:
kalendar' 2005], Elena Gapova, ed. (Minsk: European Humanities University,
2004), 13 pp.

Calendar 2006: Woman-weaving-thread-fate [Kalendar'-2006:
Zhenshchinatkachestvo-nit'-sud'ba], Elena Gapova, ed. (Vilnius: European
Humanities UniversityInternational, 2005), 24 pp.

After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, new independent states found
themselves
looking for their national histories. These processes, together with
political and economic
transformations, have taken place for more than ten years and are specific
to
different countries. In this respect reconstruction of the national history
of Belarus
is special because of the political situation and the diversity of
approaches to the
reconstruction of its national history. Belarus became an independent
national state
in 1991 together with other post-Soviet countries. Situated at the western
border of
the former Soviet Union, Belarus now neighbors the European Union; located
between West and East, it tries to find its place in European,
post-communist and postcolonial
discourses. Since 1994 Belarus has been governed by the authoritarian regime
of President Aliaksandr Lukashenka.

National histories have to be rewritten when one political system collapses
and is
replaced by a new one. Belarus has reconstructed its national history in
terms of
both national statehood and the demands of the present state ideology. One
way of
seeing its history and nationhood is the rejection of Soviet/pro-Russian
past and
going "back to Europe." The other way manifests Belarus as the "nation
inbetween"
that emerges in the space between West and East, Europe and Asia,
Poland and Russia. At the same time, the contemporary political regime in
Belarus
imposes ideas of "Slavic brotherhood" as another way of reconstructing
national
history and identity.1 This idea of "Slavic brotherhood" and re-unification
with
Russia (and possibly other post-Soviet states) chases the lost paradise of
the Soviet
Union with its state-ruled economic stability and clear ideological agenda.
At
present the process of reconstruction of the national history of Belarus is
a contradictory
constellation of ideas and cultural constructs that are used both by the
authoritarian
regime of Lukashenka and by his intellectual opposition.2 Belarusian society
rethinks
its past in order to find its present. This search for a new history is
complicated considering
the fact that only one "official" version of history existed before Belarus
gained
its independence. Rewriting the national history of Belarus asks questions
about
national identity and relationships between the country's territory, state
politics,
languages, and class, education and gender specificities.

Gender, among other issues, is recognized as an important factor in
rewriting the
national history of Belarus. The common discourse of women's history and
gender
studies in Belarus is problematic. Roughly speaking, there are two basic
problems.
First, it is hard to deny that the official Soviet and post-Soviet history
is mostly
androcentric. Second, there is a general awareness of the problem of getting
women
into Belarusian historiography. Women's issues have not been totally ignored
by
Belarusian historiography; rather they are inscribed into established
methodologies
that recognize only limited and canonical visions of women and femininity.
However, critical rethinking of gender as a social category has emerged
during the
last years.3 There is a tendency to analysze gender in connection to other
social
categories, such as ethnicity and class.

This review essay introduces one of the projects that suggests new
perspectives on
the history of Belarus. It analyses the contents of the five issues of the
series of calendars
Women of Belarus (Zhenshchiny Belarusi: istoria v povsednevnosti), edited by
Elena Gapova. It focuses on the form of the calendars in terms of the
representation
of women's positions and images in the history of Belarus. Within this
framework,
this review essay addresses the question of what was (and still is) left
outside of the
official historical discourse of post-Soviet Belarus. The essay aims to
provide new
insights into the complex relationship of gender issues, state ideology and
national
diversity in Belarus.

The series of calendars Women of Belarus was first published in 2000 and now
comprises
six issues of the one-year wall calendars.4 The first issue of the series is
in Belarusian;
the following issues are in Russian; issues two, three, four and six include
English abstracts. The calendars are the outcome of an ongoing intellectual
interdisciplinary
project that combines studies in anthropology, history, literary and social
studies, linguistics, art history, nationalism studies and Slavic and gender
studies.
The series of calendars incorporates archival and field work, oral history
and
ethnography.

Every issue of the series of calendars Women of Belarus is dedicated to a
special
theme, or rather sociocultural layer and/or area of social activity of women
of
Belarus in different times. The first issue of the series, Women of Belarus:
Roads to
Freedom (Zhanchyny Belarusi: shliakhi da svabody), includes 12 life stories
of
women who actively participated in the revolutionary activities on the
territory of contemporary
Belarus during the 1860s-1940s. Women featured in the calendar were
actively involved in revolutionary and nationalist movements in Belarus and
were
persecuted for their activities. Most of the women mentioned in the issue
came
from educated and well-to-do families of different nationalities living in
Belarus.
The issue Roads to Freedom points out an important detail of public life of
the
second part of the nineteenth and first part of the twentieth century:
public life was
not limited to political activities; it also engaged literary (writing
poetry, prose and
journalism) and educational activities. All the women were aware of and
fought for
the nationalist enlightenment and liberation of Belarus in their time. It is
important
to notice that not all the women presented in the calendar are mentioned in
the
history textbooks in Belarus.

The second issue of the series, Women of Belarus: Creators of Culture
(Zhenshchiny
Belarusi: tvortsy kul'tury), gathers 12 female artists of Belarus and gives
overviews of their lives and analyzes their artistic activities. The
conceptual framework
of this issue departs from Linda Nochlin's classic notion that there are so
few
female artists because we expect them to be muses who please and exist only
for
masculine creativity, as noted by Elena Gapova, the editor of the series, in
the introduction
to the issue (2001, p. 2). Twelve names and twelve works of a wide range of
styles and materials prove the opposite. Every female artist presented in
the calendar is
represented not just by the analysis of her work but also by her life,
public activities
and views.

The third issue, Women of Belarus: At the Personal Front (Zhenshchiny
Belarusi:
na lichnom fronte"), rediscovers the early Soviet state and its politics of
gender
equality and a "new woman." At the Personal Front combines posters of the
early
Soviet times (1920s) with extracts from magazines and personal letters of
the time.
This issue suggests a redefinition of the early Soviet propaganda from a
"gender"
perspective. The issue presents 12 posters that represent women and their
narratives
of "the new life." Contrary to well-promoted male propaganda images, At the
Personal
Front addresses aspects that were not considered to be important and
therefore
have not been represented in museums and history books, for example, the
education of women during their work at the factories, or the organization
and promotion
of public kindergartens that were meant to liberate women from the "chains
of domestic labor" and let them become engaged in the public life of the
young
Soviet state.

Women of Belarus: Estates and Classes (Zhenshchiny Belarusi: Statusy i
klassy),
the fourth issue, discusses professional activities and the social status
and classes of
women of Belarus at the turn of the twentieth century. The calendar is
conceptually
organized through the representation of old photographs from the end of the
period,
collected from museums and state and private archives. This issue discusses
"women who work" in contrast to the cultural myth that women were not widely
engaged in professional activities at the turn of the twentieth century.
Second, most
of the featured professions are represented in relation to the ethnicities
of the
people living on the territory of Belarus. For example, Jewish women of
Belarus
were mostly urban and at the turn of the century became more visible in the
public
space and worked in factories. Tatar women were also urban but not so much
engaged in public life. Romany women in their turn did not or were not
allowed to
settle. This issue illustrates the complexity of the class formation in
Belarus at the
turn of the twentieth century involving not only women's social background,
rural
or urban environment, and nationality: for example, social positions of
"working"
women in Estates and Classes differ from the occupations of the educated and
noble women in Roads to Freedom. This issue of the calendar brings together
gender, professional occupations and nationalities of the women of Belarus
for the
first time in the region.

The fifth issue, Women at the Front Line (Zhenshchiny na linii fronta),
presents
wartime posters, photographs, letters from the front, and pictures of
material objects,
combined with interviews of women who survived the Second World War. This
issue brings back and reconstructs memories of women's participation in the
Second
World War both at the fronts and elsewhere. Women at the Front Line offers
another vision of war that is not concerned with battles, or heroic deeds;
instead it
addresses women's private experiences of the time. This issue does this in
the
format of a palimpsest. It presents the text of women's history literally
written over
wartime military orders-the text of the "big" traditional history of the
war. This calendar
replaces the serialized and depersonalized war orders or instructions with
prosaic
and very personal objects, such as the spoon that served one of the female
partisans
throughout the war, a manicure set or a baby cradle. Such routines,
experiences and
memories stand for another type of social structure that configures its own
forms of
hierarchy, power and exclusion-the structures that are not included in the
schoolbooks
and official canon of the history ofWorld War II. The calendar gives an
alternative
vision of the war that makes one rethink the ways we remember the war and
the
things we are taught to remember about it.

Woman-weaving-thread-fate, the sixth issue, presents the history of the
twentieth
century through the memories of peasant women who made linen textiles. This
issue combines two narratives: the traditional agricultural calendar of
wome's activities
and rituals related to cultivating linen, spinning, weaving and production
of
textiles; and social transformations of Belarusian villages over the
twentieth
century, including the collectivization of the pre-war times, World War II,
post-war
urbanization, etc. This calendar features pictures of hand-made fabric,
photographs of
rural female weavers born between the 1900s and 1930s, and fragments of
interviews
with these women. The interviews reveal unique and usually overlooked life
experiences
and practices of this group of the Belarusian population. The importance of
peasantry
is acknowledged in Belarusian history; however, peasant people mostly appear
as a somewhat depersonalized historical force. This issue gives the voice to
peasant
women who produced hand-made textiles and whose life-stories were and still
are
marginalized in terms of their representation of official historiography. It
is ironic
in the context of Belarus, a country that, according to some national
narratives,
claims to be a peasant nation, that the voices or rural people (particularly
women)
are rarely heard.

The authors of the series of calendars give their goals and scholarly agenda
as the
reconstruction of women's history as part of the "big history" of Belarus.
Here I refer
to the "authors of the calendar" as plural and generic because each issue is
a separate
study done by different specialists within the general framework of the
project. Among
the invited specialists on this project are Oleg Gordienko, a historian and
journalist
from Minsk, for Roads to Freedom (2000); Olga Bazhenova, an art historian
from
Minsk, and Tatyana Bembel, an artist and gallery curator from Minsk, for
Creators
of Culture (2002); Ilya Kourkov, an archivist from the Belarusian State
Archive,
Minsk, for At the Personal Front (2003); Oksana Yaschenko, a historian from
Gomel, Belarus, and Olga Bazhenova, an art historian from Minsk, for Estates
and
Classes (2004); Elena Khloptseva and Natalya Shcherbina, scholars of gender
from
Minsk, for Women at the Front Line (2005); and anthropologist Olga
Lobachevskaya,
for Woman weaving-thread-fate (2006).

Every calendar emerges from a research project that starts with the "theme,"
or
an idea, followed by searching in archives, museums, family albums and
private
collections by historians, archival workers or activists of ethnic cultural
societies.
No single institution-no museum, no archive and no private
collection-exhibits
these materials and documents as a complete collection. Accompanied by
explanations,
citations from documents and interviews in the calendars, many artifacts
become recognized as "historical facts" for the first time. The designer
looks for the
visual concept that best renders the idea of the issue. The series of
calendars creates
a special kind of intellectual space. First of all, it exposes the history
of Belarus of
the last 250 years in terms of gender, ethnicity and class. Second, the
calendars
exhibit women's private lives through photographs of women and their
personal
belongings and create different, non-iconic narratives of life, war,
professional
occupations, and roles that were traditionally prescribed to women.

One of the most important aspects of this research project is its form: the
calendar is
the specific means of information. It is "functionally" valid for only one
year; each
page standing for a single month. Nonetheless, the "actual" page (or two
pages-
top and bottom) of the calendar constantly presents the information/subject
of the
calendar for about 30 days.

Since calendars may legitimately be hung on the wall and be visible, the
information
that they articulate is not taken as ideologically and politically engaged.
If
the very same information were to be represented in a museum, it would be
taken differently
because the museum is a social institution that has well-defined cultural
expectations about how its contents will be perceived. Additionally, it is
hard to
imagine somebody looking at the same piece in a museum exhibition every day
for
30 days. The calendars camouflage the political content of the series by the
applied
format of a one-year wall calendar that allows representing women of Belarus
to be
the subject of the series of calendars. One-year wall calendars enter one's
informational
environment as neutral and acceptable. However, this point is problematic:
it
is legitimate for calendars to be visible, but not women. Traditional
historiography
in Belarus and in the former Soviet states still pays too little attention
to women's
issues and their role in history. As a rule, women, their experiences and
memories
of their lives are defragmented in artifacts that are kept separately in
archives and
museum storage away from public access.

Another capacity within the format of calendars should be mentioned.
Calendars are
objects of visual consumption and of "usable" value. The artistic design of
the calendars
makes them desirable for consumption. Beautifully designed and presented
texts,
pictures, posters and photographs, nonetheless, articulate the historical
data that come
from the lives and experiences of women, i.e. calendars are always something
more
than just stylized pictures. Still, the fact that forgotten aspects and
personalities of
women's history in Belarus are at least visually present in someone's
interior slowly
changes traditional perceptions of (a) the history and culture of Belarus in
general,
and (b) the understanding of woman's place in historical and cultural
discourse.
Wall calendars are available at almost every bookstore. There one can find
calendars
with puppets, forests, urban skylines, and rock and movie stars.
Representatives
of women in calendars are generally limited to sexualized images of nudes is
classical
paintings and art photography. Rephrasing a well-known slogan of the group
of anonymous
feminist artists Guerilla Girls, my question here is: Do women have to be
naked
to be on a calendar?5 Do women have to be naked to be remembered?

Of course not, and the Women of Belarus series serves as a good example to
argue
these questions. Each issue of the Women of Belarus calendar confronts its
reader with
the "fact of presence" of women in the history of Belarus, but at the same
time outlines
that women's experiences and routines are "other" than the historiographic
canon. I
mean that traditional society accepts the visibility of women only as a part
of the masculine
"generic he" (i.e. when women are invisible) or within strictly limited
"public"
roles as "wives," "mothers" and "lovers." The series of calendars juxtaposes
the
"newly found" (if not to say previously excluded) data of what women of
Belarus
were with what women of Belarus are expected to be.

For example, the first two issues of the series Roads to Freedom and
Creators of
Culture present activities and tell life stories of real women. The devotion
to public
or artistic activities of 24 women who lived from the 1850s up to the
present day,
their education, progressive pro-Belarusian nationalist views, and tragic
fates can
hardly fit any historical canon where women have been by definition excluded
from
public life. In its turn, Estates and Classes takes the opposite approach
and represents
anonymous women, turning forgotten individual "small" lives into social
symbols of
what women really were regardless of sociocultural expectations. On the
pages of the
calendar one finds a nurse, a telegraphist (this is a good point of
reference to the
"women and technology" debate), a gymnasium teacher, a professional dancer,
a
factory worker, a peasant, a nun and a woman in the army.

The Women of Belarus calendars visually reconstruct the history of Belarus
through
(anonymous) old photographs, posters, quotations from interviews and
letters-
through memories. The calendars could also be seen as photo albums.
Photographs
are known to represent reality directly, giving the "real," "true" picture.
That is,
when we see an old photograph we assume that person existed and looked like
this,
and we can even reconstruct someone's life. Therefore, photographs of women
presented
in calendars are taken as direct references of what women, people and life
in
general really were. The old photographs of women who worked and created on
the
lands of Belarus are recontextualized in the calendars and create another
image of
the history of Belarus. We recollect our memories of the past, which have
been
hidden away in archives and museum storage. In this case, perception of the
"new
information" and "the history" of Belarus and its culture gains an
additional nostalgic
feeling that finally one is getting the past from which one has been
separated.
The series of calendars questions the relationship between public
representations of
the past and private memories about it. Maggie Humm outlines this kind of
relationship
as a juxtaposition and dissonance of male/official/public history and
memories
and female/private experiences.6 The calendars evoke a similar kind of
dissonance;
for example, the issue Women at the Front Line (2005) juxtaposes the
official Great
Patriotic War discourse in Belarus and women's personal subjective
experiences
and memories. This positioning of the calendar's agenda gains a specific
meaning
in the year 2005, the year of the 60th Anniversary Great Victory in the
Great Patriotic
War. Starting from 1995, the national history of the post-Soviet Belarus has
been
reconstructed with constantly reinforced references to the Great Patriotic
War, the
heroism of the "Belarusian nation," the cult of war veterans and
commemoration of
war dates and memorials. "Remember the War" social advertisements on the
first
national Belarusian TV channel serve as a good example of this. The Great
Patriotic
War is used for the construction of the "new history" of Belarus in the same
way it was
used in the USSR; the exception is that the Belarusian nation-not the Soviet
Union,
Red Army, etc. -is represented both as a winner of the war and as a heroic
survivor.
Rewriting national histories produces a vision of the war and national
history that is
acceptable and demanded by the present ideology of Belarus. In this context,
the original
war propaganda posters in the calendar express messages that happen to be
similar
to the visions of women and their roles that are constructed at present.
However,
extracts from the interviews with women who survived the war deliver
completely
different narratives; they tackle the issues that tend to get forgotten,
such as life in the
occupied territories, or migration and work as an ostarbeiter (a
forced-labor worker
taken to Germany from the occupied Eastern European territories during World
War II). Women at the Front Line brings up women's subjectivities from every
side
of the frontline which, in a way, remain too shameful and "non-heroic" for
the
newly rewritten heroic national history of Belarus. Application of this
unorthodox
approach in Women at the Front Line provides a place for women's
subjectivities
to emerge and subverts the canonized view of the war.

The Women of Belarus series of calendars together form one macro-text that
is open,
lacks a linear structure and has many cross-references. The series combines
diachronic
and synchronic principles: it presents women's history in Belarus in a
diachronic perspective
where "history" is organized along one conceptual line throughout the
centuries,
such as female freedom fighters in Roads to Freedom, female artists in
Creatures of
Culture and peasant weavers in woman-weaving-thread-fate. The other three
issues
present women's history in synchronic perspective, standing for a particular
slice of
time, including the 1920s, the early Soviet years, in At the Personal Front,
the 1890s-
1900s in Estates and Classes, and 1941-1945, the time of the Great Patriotic
War in
Women at the Front Line. Of course, talking about all calendars together is
in a way a
simplification because, as mentioned above, every issue of the calendar is a
separate
project with its own specific conception, research, and method of
representation.
However, despite these differences, it is possible to talk about the series
as one
project. The diversity of topics and approaches used for collection,
analysis and representation
of the material in the calendars does not mean a lack ofmethodological
homogeneity:
it is rather a way of dealing with unconventional material. There is one
methodology that covers women's personalities, data and
artifacts-knowledge-as a
whole. Using some particular method will restrain and limit the contents of
the
project to merely filling the gaps about females in traditional
historiography. At the
same time, the issues of the series that discuss different social and
cultural phenomena
do not fall apart because of a network of cross-references that (a)
manifests gender as a
complex sociocultural construct that is interconnected with other social
categories, such
as class, education, etc., and (b) addresses the ethnic complexity of
Belarus. Both dimensions
are crucial for the humanities in Belarus and the post-communist region in
general.
Women of Belarus addresses gender not as an isolated category, but as part
of a
more complex social structure. Information presented in the calendars
presents
women of Belarus in relation to class, ethnicity, educational and
professional background,
domicile (urban/rural), etc. This point is important because such an
understanding
of gender is peculiar to the post-Soviet context. In many cases in the
humanities of the region, gender is studied separately and detached from
social networks
and power relations. That is, one's gender, i.e. being a woman, is by itself
explanatory
for the analysis. Such an approach to gender is accepted in post-Soviet
cultural
and social studies.7 The series of calendars, nonetheless, always addresses
gender
through its interconnections with other social categories. For example, in
Estates
and Classes it is manifest that women's professions in Belarus at the turn
of the
twentieth century depended not only on gender, but also equally on
nationalities
and education and the places where the women lived. The peasant women of
Belarus were, as a rule, not educated but urban women had better chances of
getting (specific) training and a job. Here nationalities come into play:
Jewish and
Tatar women who lived in towns were mostly literate but Tatar women who were
more involved in running a household were less likely to be employed.
The series of calendars eviscerates the ethnic diversity of Belarus by
questioning
"Belarusian history," "Belarusian nation," and "Belarusian mentality." How
"Belarusian"
is "Belarusian culture"? The calendars form a network of cross-references
about
the Jewish, Tatar, Romany, Polish, Belarusian and Russian women of Belarus.
These
women of different nationalities participated equally in the revolutionary
movement
of the nineteenth century, in fine arts, in the industrialization at the
turn of the twentieth
century, in building the new Soviet state and surviving World War II. What
is
spelled out here is the question of the extent to which the national
heterogeneity of
Belarus, and particularly of the women of Belarus, gets ignored. Official
sources
declare Belarus to be a multinational state, in some cases including up to
80 nationalities.
However, the multinationalism of Belarus vanishes in generic the
"Belarusian,"
i.e. the ethnic majority of Belarus, when it comes to cultural concepts and
analysis,
leaving other nationalities silent.

How does the artificial homogenization of the women of Belarus into
"Belarusian
women" benefit the myths and canons of traditional history that by
definition exclude
representation of women? Homogenized entities are useful in operating and
creating
cultural images of particular social, gender and ethnic groups. The
generalized vision
excludes diversity and the possibility of finding one's way, whether
normative or not,
for women of different times, classes, professional occupations and
nationalities.
Women of Belarus deconstructs the myths of the history of Belarus by
addressing
the diversity and complexity of these issues. At the same time, it does not
offer any
standardized vision of women's place and representation and avoids creating
an
alternative canon. Each issue of the calendars visualizes women's
experiences and
allows these experiences to enter the public space of offices and apartments
via the
format of the calendar, and makes one question the traditional history that
still
prefers to see women either invisible or as "calendar girls."

NOTES

1. See, for example, Elena Gapova, "On Nation, Gender, and Class Formation
in Belarus . . .
and Elsewhere in the Post-Soviet World," Nationalities Papers, Vol. 30, No.
4, 2002,
pp. 639-662.
2. See Elena Gapova, "The Nation in Between, or Why Intellectuals Do Things
with Words,"
in Sibelian Forreser, Magdalena Zaborowska and Elena Gapova, eds, Over the
Wall/After
the Wall: Post-Communist Cultures through the East-West Gaze (Bloomington:
Indiana
University Press, 2004), pp. 65-87.
3. See, for example, Elena Gapova, Almira Usmanova and Andrea Peto, eds,
Gendernye
istorii vostochnoi Evropy (Minsk: Evropeiskii gumanitarnyi universitet,
2002),
esp. Elena Gapova and Almira Usmanova, "Razmyshlenia na temy istorii i
geografii,"
pp. 5-11. See also Elena Gapova, ed., Zhenshchiny na kariu Evropy (Minsk:
Evropeiskii
gumanitarnyi universitet, 2003).
4. For details see the Centre for Gender Studies, European Humanities
University in Minsk,
<http://www.gender-ehu.org/?98_2> (accessed 6 June 2006).
5. Here I refer to a project and a slogan from Guerrilla Girls: "Do women
have to be naked to
get into the Met.[ropolitan] Museum?" 1989,
<www.guerrillagirls.com/posters/getnaked.
shtml> (accessed 12 April 2006).
6. Maggie Humm, "Memory, Photography, and Modernism: The 'Dead Bodies and
Ruined
Houses' of Virginia Woolf's Three Guineas," Signs, Vol. 28, No. 2, 2003, pp.
646-647.
7. For the critical revision of the applications of the category of gender
in the post-Soviet
context, see, for example, Serguel Oushakine, "Chelovek roda on:
futliarymuzhestvennosti,"
Voprosy Filosofll, No. 7, 2005, pp. 34-56.