Property as a Problem: Responses to Dispossession among Repressed Belarusians

• In Event: Belarus IV: Dispossession and Disruption: Belarusian Professional, Religious, and Vulnerable Communities in Exile

Abstract

After the rigged presidential election of August 2020 and brutal suppression of the protests that followed, Belarus is facing arguably the most massive repressions in Europe since the breakup of the Soviet Union. Along with dozens thousands of imprisonments and mass exodus from the country – with more than 5% of population leaving within three years – the repressions redefine how Belarusians, both within Belarus and in exile, perceive and manage their possessions. In Belarusian reality, property appears as a burden that can bring along increased utility bills for political migrants (in case of real estate), police searches (with the following punishment for storing illregalized objects such as banned flags or books), or be arrested, confiscated, and sold by the state.
My ethnographic research focuses on the materiality of forced relocations, as a danger and a reality, in the intersecting contexts of domestic mass repressions and increasingly austere EU humanitarian policies – aggravated, in Belarusian case, by legal restrictions imposed on Belarus citizens as a consequence of Russian invasion into Ukraine. Asking Belarusians for lists and descriptions of the objects they retain, wander with, or leave behind, I analyze the implications of their forced mobility that extend beyond the debates on moral right of particular social groups for refuge. Also, my research explores the tactics that relocated people use in order to decrease their dependence on things, especially new things, in their homemaking efforts. Additionally, I am tracing how restrictions on circulation of objects across the borders of Belarus instigates the breakage of connections within (solidary) families and collectives. At the intersection of ethnography of mass repressions with anthropology of property, my research sheds light on social effects of conversion of heterogeneous possessions into money.

Author

• Andrei Vazyanau, European Humanities U (Lithuania)