#presidentspartingwords at a Critical Juncture: Reclaiming the Autonomous Subject in Social Media Discourse on Coronavirus in Belarus

Abstract

This study explores #presidentspartingwords, a viral hashtag that accompanied the eulogy-like posts that social media users created about themselves in spring 2020 by satirically emulating president Alexander Lukashenko’s patronizing remarks about the first coronavirus victims in Belarus, an authoritarian post-Soviet country. The study examines how the online public used these discursive sites to challenge the governmentally sanctioned subject positions, which construct Belarusians as inapt dependents of the state, by articulating themselves as efficacious,autonomous agents. The study argues the coronavirus pandemic served as a “permissive condition” for critical juncture by disrupting thelogic of the official discourse in which Lukashenko is assigned the role of the major, if not the only, rhetor imbued with the legitimacy to speak on behalf of the Belarusian people. I argue that approaching the coronavirus as a potential critical juncture offers critical mediascholars a useful analytical category for theorizing the discursive conditionality of political change.

Keywords

critical juncture coronavirus subject position hegemony national identity collective identity social media Belarus.

In spring 2020, as the coronavirus was making its way through Belarus, an authoritarian post-Soviet country, the government dismissed it as “psychosis,” refused to get a handle on the crisis and left citizens to battle the pandemic on their own (Shingaryov, 2020; “Interview,” 2020). This response didn’t change much after the pandemic claimed its first victims. Commenting on the first deaths, President Alexander Lukashenko blamed the victims and expressed hope the coronavirus would serve a good lesson to those who got sick (“Coronavirus in Belarus,” 2020)—all while not acknowledging the failure of the “socially oriented state,” which he’d touted as the key accomplishment of his 26 years in power, to deliver on its primary promise of care (“Lukashenko: We falsified,” 2006). He also disclosed the details of the victims’ medical history, commented on what he considered to be an unhealthy weight for one, and admonished another for working at an old age (Dadalka, 2020; Hushtyn, 2020).

The pushback that followed on social media indicated that this was hardly an adequate response. Using the hashtag #presidentspartingwords, people started sharing eulogy-like posts speculating what Lukashenko would say if they died. The posts, which blended intimate details from people's personal lives with tongue-in-cheek political references, have articulated them as mischievous—and willful—disruptors of the officially sanctioned subject positions that construct Belarusians as nonconfrontational, unsophisticated, and largely apolitical actors. Four months later, thousands of Belarusians brought their criticism to the streets, participating in protests that lasted months and manifested the most sustained challenge to Lukashenko's rule during his six presidential terms (Heintz, 2020).

The present study examines how this form of “ludic activism” (Benski et al., 2013) allowed the public to reclaim their right to define themselves as efficacious agents and to engage in the kind of personalized “politics of visibility” that has been argued to lie at the heart of contemporary social movements (Milan, 2015).

I make the case that in affording this counterhegemonic subjectivating discourse, the coronavirus effectively functioned as what has come to be known in historic institutionalism as a “permissible condition” for critical juncture—that is, an unanticipated exogenous shock that calls into question existing institutions, loosens up structural constraints and opens up an opportunity for challenging the status quo and effectuating political change (Capoccia, 2016; Collier & Collier, 1991; Hogan, 2019; Soifer, 2012; Zappettini & Krzyżanowski, 2019). I argue that the coronavirus functioned as a permissive condition by disrupting an implicit social contract between the state and Belarusian public that had taken up the form of “authoritarian bargain” and delivered a modest, but reliable welfare system in exchange for citizens’ loyalty and relinquishment of political rights (Kalēja, 2017; Pranevičiūtė-Neliupšienė & Maksimiuk, 2014). The state's failure to deliver its part of the bargain freed the public from the obligation to uphold their own, which prompted them to rearticulate the governmentally sanctioned subject positions.

As part of this study's theoretical contribution, I argue that approaching the coronavirus pandemic as a permissive—that is, necessary, but not sufficient—condition for critical juncture can provide media scholars with a useful analytical category to theorize the discursive conditionality of political change and to unpack the ideological labor that goes into challenging—and sustaining—the status quo through (re)articulating and (de)legitimizing discursive configurations of power as a historically and institutionally situated practice.

Theoretical Framework

Subjectivation Discourse

This study is premised upon the central assumption of discourse theory that treats discourse as a primary site for manifesting, sustaining, and disrupting relations of power (e.g., Fairclough & Wodak, 1997; Howarth et al., 2000; van Dijk, 1985). As my primary theoretical lens, I use the concept of a subject, which I approach, following Althusser (2014), as an inherently ideological construct. The ideological nature of subjectivation lies in cultivating a discursive terrain that organizes relations among social agents in ideologically serviceable arrangements (Laclau & Mouffe, 2001) and interpellates individuals into these subject positions as “obvious” (Althusser, 2014, p. 263) ways to experience social reality. If cultivated effectively, subject positions come to be internalized and acted out by individuals, thereby reproducing the configuration of power relations that performed them into existence.

Subjectivation operates by mobilizing two opposing logics: equivalence and difference (Laclau & Mouffe, 2001). The logic of difference articulates subject positions by way of distinction, whereas the logic of equivalence does so by emphasizing commonalities. This is not to say that the discursive space is organized through either recognition or negation of differences or that the two logics lead to a more or less antagonistic political field. In fact, the opposite may be the case. Articulating subject positions in differential terms may lead to recognizing the differences among social actors—be they ideological, religious, socioeconomic, or other—and embracing them as valid in the field of political claims, thus leading to a more inclusive political space. Instead, the logic of equivalence may effectuate an antagonistic sociopolitical dynamic. Rather than reconciling the differences among subject positions, it may lead to reorganizing them into larger “chains of equivalence” (Laclau & Mouffe, 2001, p. 127) placed in opposition to the strategically articulated “others,” while simultaneously reducing the number of positions that are offered to individuals to identify with and legitimate their political claims (Laclau, 1980).

For hegemonic projects, articulations of subject positions present both a potent tool for establishing their legitimacy and a source of vulnerability because those articulations continue to be “at least potentially precarious” (see also Laclau & Mouffe, 2001; Smith, 2003, p. 88). Much in line with hegemony itself being “always contested, always trying to secure itself, always ‘in process’” (Hall, 1988, p. 7), subject positions remain open to the possibility of rearranging into alternative configurations.

Critical Juncture

The concept of critical juncture traces its origins to historical institutionalism and has been increasingly relied on in theorizing structural change. Defined as periods of “sudden punctuations” (Hogan, 2019, p. 3) to the existing equilibrium in the political and social systems that lead to a relatively rare, drastic social, political, and institutional change (Collier & Collier, 1991), critical junctures act as turning points in developmental trajectories of social and political systems. Once a new equilibrium has settled and the system is reoriented on a new path, the juncture “locks in,” and a newly established institutional structure begins to reproduce itself (Capoccia & Kelemen, 2007; Soifer, 2012).

Not all crises lead to structural changes, but they are all preceded by “permissive conditions,” which generally come in the form of unanticipated external shocks to the system (Soifer, 2012). These shocks, which serve as necessary but insufficient conditions for critical junctures, come with the “threat[] to discredit existing institutions and policies due to their association with, or inability to right, the emergent situation” and thus can set a critical juncture in motion (Hogan, 2019, p. 180). Wars, economic crises, natural disasters, and drastic demographic changes all have the potential to condition critical junctures (Capoccia, 2016; Hogan, 2019).

The analytical value of critical junctures for media scholars is twofold. First, they expose and bring into sharper focus the foundational, and often mediated, elements of existing institutions and can therefore provide insights into the hegemonic workings of the status quo. Second, by “chang[ing] the underlying context” in which the old system has been operating (Soifer, 2012, p. 1574), they loosen the structural constraints it has on political action, making the status quo open to contestation and providing a window of opportunity for counterhegemonic actors (Hogan, 2019, p. 180). This leads to the “acceleration of discursive articulations of various visions of social reality” and, potentially, “the (re)articulation of social, political and cultural narratives” (Zappettini & Krzyżanowski, 2019, pp. 382–383).

In this sense, the effect that the critical juncture may have on the discursive field echoes Laclau's (1990) concept of dislocation. Understood as a process that exposes the contingency of existing subject positions, it renders visible the attempts to “suture the dislocated space” (Howarth et al., 2000, p. 15) by rearticulating signifying elements into new subject positions and thus provide a rich entry point for capturing the discursive workings of the subjectivation process.

Governmentally Sanctioned Belarusian Subject: Apolitical, Subservient, Unsophisticated, and Disciplined

A post-Soviet republic, after the demise of the USSR Belarus has progressed from a nation with democratic aspirations to one with the status of “the last dictatorship in Europe” (Kessler, 2005), a country that “has brought the policy of preempti[ng democracy] to perfection” (Silitski, 2005, p. 84). Governed by Alexander Lukashenko, one of the world's longest-reigning autocrats who came to power in 1994 in the first, and only, free post-Soviet elections (Freedom House, 2019), the country has relapsed into a highly personalized, “super-presidential” rule in which the president exercises nearly unconstrained executive powers (McAllister & White, 2016).

With presidential decrees having the authority to overrule any law and the parliament effectively reduced to a rubberstamping body (Bedford, 2017), Lukashenko remains the only politician with the actionable power—and, simultaneously, the only actor who has the resources to claim the status of a rhetor speaking on behalf of the Belarusian people. In fact, the only two actors who are imbued with legitimacy in the governmentally sanctioned political discourse are the president himself and “the people,” a carefully constructed subject position articulated as encompassing the majority of Belarusian voters who support Lukashenko (Bedford, 2017). Those who do not subscribe to his vision are relegated to the fringes of political discourse and portrayed as treasonous members of the “fifth column,” instigated by external forces to sabotage the harmonious relationship between the president and “his people” (Radnitz, 2018).

A self-proclaimed “bats’ka,” or “father”—a label that, along with the “president of the ordinary people,” appears in the opening paragraph of his official biography (“Biography,” 2021)—Lukashenko anchors his rhetoric in the image of a guardian taking care of politically and economically immature children. The way he unpacks its meaning is reflective of this asymmetric dynamic, in which he is given the role of the ultimate judge of the citizens’ performance: “A good father in a family is like a stick, but he can also pat on the head if a child behaves well” (“Transcript,” 2006).

By constructing Lukashenko's rule as modeled after a parent's concern due to a child's inability to take care of herself, this discourse imposes a sense of inferiority on the latter and serves to naturalize the authoritarian status quo. As has been argued in previous research, “paternalism always comprises the communication of benevolence,” which, in turn, “demands gratefulness and, therewith, the acknowledgment of the [state's] superiority as legitimate, a social situation of indebtedness that can never be balanced” (Weidenstedt, 2016, p. 7). Notably, an alternative subject position that could expose the constructed nature of this arrangement and offer a competing articulation of the public as an equal partner in the social contract with the state—the taxpayer subject—is either backgrounded in the governmentally sanctioned discourse or reproduces the Belarusian taxpayer as subservient, nonconfrontational, acted-upon subject in the hierarchical relationship with the state, with no interest in leveraging her government-sponsoring status for a louder voice in political matters (Kananovich, 2015). The same goes for another social group with the potential to validate the alternative articulation of Belarusians as self-sufficient agents—entrepreneurs—who are assigned the role of passive spectators in the governmentally dominated field of political action (Miazhevich, 2007).

By denying autonomy to the Belarusian public, such discourse serves to normalize the authoritarian status quo and to legitimize Lukashenko's understanding of democracy as “the power of the state authorities in deciding what is the best for the people” rather than the power of the people to decide for themselves (Klymenko, 2016, p. 738). By equating the interests of individual people with those of the state, the regime seeks to “maintain the image of a monolithic people supporting its leader” (Kazharski, 2021, p. 74; see also Karaliova, 2016). Those who do not display political loyalty or do not subscribe to the subject positions prescribed to them by the state are deprived of the right to be considered “true citizens” (Burkhardt, 2016, p. 151).

Previous research has identified a number of attributes assigned to the Belarusian subject in government discourse.

First, the Belarusian subject is constructed as finding joy, and taking pride, in living a modest life devoid of luxurious consumption and fancy distractions. The idea of Belarusians striving to remain grounded is articulated by having them stay close to the ground in the most literal sense, through constructing Belarus as “a country of peasants” (Zadora, 2018). The persuasive appeal of this discourse draws on several sources. First, it's underpinned by the historical context. Belarus enjoyed a relatively late urbanization in the 1970s, leading many current city dwellers to maintain strong links with the countryside while simultaneously feeding into their “complex of provinciality” (Astapova, 2015, p. 18), which was cultivated among Belarusians by the Russian Empire and, later, USSR as a way to delegitimize the nation's sovereignty claims. The current government fosters this “peasant ethos” (Bekus, 2013, p. 87) through a variety of institutional and ritualistic practices, ranging from the government-funded program “Rural Renaissance” to annual rural festivals to grain-harvesting competitions (Zadora, 2019).

Taken together, these efforts construct the countryside as an authentic repository of the “soul of the nation” and, by extension, a source of legitimacy for Lukashenko. “[W]e all come from the countryside. Our Belarus is a country of peasants,” he says (Zadora, 2018, p. 487), portraying himself as a “diligent peasant son ‘of the common people’” (Astapova, 2015, p. 52), a label that leaves no space for those who do not identify themselves as part of this peasant majority. By doing so, Lukashenko articulates himself not only as a legitimate speaker on behalf of the Belarusian people but as one whose patronizing leadership is necessary and justified: The unsophisticated, immature peasant subject is “socially vulnerable” (White et al., 2005, pp. 68–69) and therefore needs the guardianship of the collective father.

Just like any other hegemonic project, this subject position is firmly rooted in the “humus of popular culture” (Gramsci, 1985, p. 102)—namely, the nation's self-given nickname “bulbashy” (“бульбашы”), or “potato eaters.” A simple root vegetable widely cultivated in Belarus, the potato is celebrated in the Belarusian folklore as a staple of the national cuisine, which transforms it from the means of survival in “a poor land [by] a poor people” (Zadora, 2019, p. 178) into a symbolical badge of honor, elevating the resourcefulness of Belarusians in coping with hardships to a culturally and historically grounded national identity marker. This serves an additional ideologically useful function of normalizing the nation's volatile economic conditions that haven’t improved during the decades of Lukashenko's rule.

An “extremely simple rustic” vegetable, the potato also offers a convenient counterpoint to “unhealthy foreign food and a dissolute way of life” (Zadora, 2019, p. 178, 183) and, by extension, serves to provide the Belarusian subject with “cultural immunity” to Western values (Miazhevich, 2007, p. 1338), another constant target of Lukashenko's rhetoric evoked to legitimize his supposedly authentic rule.

The peasant ethos underlining the government's subjectivating practices serves to normalize another feature in the articulation of the Belarusian subject: her mobility not as an inalienable right but as a privilege that rests with the state. Historically, the Belarusian peasant has been tied to the land legally. Under the Russian Empire, the dominant form of relation between peasants and nobility was serfdom, which tied the former to the land and allowed for nobility to sell peasants with the land to which they were “attached.” Selfdom was abolished in Russia in 1861, but the limited mobility rights for agricultural laborers were preserved even after the 1917 revolution, reinforcing the subservient status of a substantial share of Belarusian people. Despite being positioned in the Soviet discourse as a social class in the vanguard of the communist movement, peasants did not hold passports and had to apply to local authorities for permission to move outside of their district. Much like in tsarist times, those requests were left at the officials’ discretion and were not always granted (Hervouet, 2013).

In Lukashenko's Belarus, the idea of strong ties binding one to the place of birth and work is maintained both legally (e.g., in 2012, a presidential decree effectively forbade workers in the state-dominated wood processing industry to resign; Petrowskaja, 2013) and symbolically, by tapping into the ideologically congruent cultural resources. “The place you were born is the place you are to be of service” (“Дзе нарадзіўся, там і прыгадзіўся”), goes a Belarusian proverb, which maintains a salient presence in public discourse by appearing in stories published by state-sponsored newspapers (Nadde, 2016), press releases of local authorities (Karpechanka, 2016), titles of local talent competitions (Pozniak, 2018), and guidelines for civic education modules at schools (Guidelines, 2020).

For women, the field of action prescribed by government discourse is even narrower, limited to the apolitical issues of running a household. In 2010, in the aftermath of presidential elections that were followed by protests and police detentions, Belarusian electoral official Lidzia Yarmoshyna referred to female protesters as “hav[ing] nothing to do,” before offering a recommendation that went to become the “biggest meme” of that year's election: “They’d better stay at home and cook borshch than wander around the squares” (“Yarmoshyna,” 2011). Ten years later, in the lead-up to the 2020 presidential election—in which stay-at-home mom Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, who stepped in to replace on the ballot her imprisoned husband Sergei, went on to become Lukashenko's major contender, campaigning alongside a female campaign manager of another jailed would-be candidate and a wife of a third, forced in exile—this message was echoed by the president himself, who rejected the notion of a potential female winner because she would be a priori unable to cope with the rigors of the job: “Our constitution is not for women. Our society has not matured enough to vote for a woman. This is because by constitution the president handles a lot of power” (Petkova, 2020). These statements both reflect and reinforce the broader government discourse that constructs the female Belarusian subject in patriarchal terms, ascribing to her the stereotypically feminine features of weakness, beauty, dependence of men, and lack of agency to act on her own (Koulinka, 2006)—the attributes that were explicitly challenged in the aftermath of the 2020 election, as women became a strong presence in anti-government protests, shielding male protesters from riot police, linking arms in “solidarity chains,” and organizing all-women “white marches” to protest the brutal crackdown of peaceful demonstrations (Navumau & Matveieva, 2021; Nechepurenko, 2020; Talmazan, 2020).

Importantly, the state discourse constructs Belarusian men and women as accepting the governmentally sanctioned positions without pushback, by foregrounding tolerance as another distinguishing attribute of the Belarusian subject. A “useful and ancient myth actively promoted by the current authorities” (Zadora, 2018, pp. 490–491), it is articulated not as respectful acceptance of a variety of views but as “getting used to anything” (Astapova, 2015, p. 18), which leaves no space for disagreement with the state as the monopolist of public discourse. In the words of one respondent in a recent study, “To be Belarusian is to let other people trample on your rights and never claim what you deserve” (Zadora, 2019, p. 184). The articulation of the Belarusian subject as a nonconfrontational receiver of the government action serves to create the appearance of consent and to thereby shield the regime from potential popular pressures.

By articulating Belarusian subjects as being incapable, and unwilling, to act outside of the governmentally sanctioned positions, such discourse dispossesses them from any qualities that might take the locus of control out of the government's hands: “initiative, individuality, diversity, creativity and choice” (Astapova, 2017, p. 65) and positions Belarusians as apolitical actors whose civic engagement is reduced to participation in carefully orchestrated rituals of state celebrations aimed to create “a reproducible image of public support for the authoritarian leadership” (Rohava, 2020, p. 898).

If recast in Laclau and Mouffe's (2001) terms, this discourse locks the Belarusian citizen in a “chain of equivalence” with the state (p. 127), which imposes an ideologically useful congruity between the two, reduces the number of positions from which Belarusians can articulate their political demands, and marginalizes anyone who questions the government action as an illegitimate claimant to the right to speak on behalf of the Belarusian people.

Coronavirus as a Permissible Condition for Critical Juncture: Disrupting the State Citizens Authoritarian Bargain

To reiterate, critical junctures are understood as periods of relatively rare, sudden turning points in developmental trajectories of social and political systems. Critical junctures are preceded by “permissible conditions” that are prompted by external shocks to the system and create an opening for structural change. Permissible conditions make it possible for the “interlocked networks of relation that preserve [the] stability” of the system to come “unglued” (Abbott, 2001, p. 259), throwing the extant equilibrium off-balance and opening “a window of opportunity for divergence” (Soifer, 2012, p. 1574).

What are, then, the arrangements that were “unglued” by the coronavirus—which, I argue, created permissible conditions for a critical juncture in Belarus?

The concept of social contract provides here a useful conceptual lens. Having originated in the works of Hobbes (1985 [1651]), Locke (2004 [1690]) and Rousseau (1968 [1762]), it is understood as an agreement between citizens and the state that establishes their rights and obligations to one another. Under Lukashenko, the social contract has taken the form of an “authoritarian bargain” that guarantees citizens a moderate, but relatively stable, well-being in return for their “acquiescence to the existing regime and its ideological tenets” (Kalēja, 2017, p. 270; see also Pranevičiūtė-Neliupšienė & Maksimiuk, 2014).

Importantly, this acquiescence doesn’t have to be active. Even during state celebrations, the most visible ritual of pledging allegiance to the state, the responsibilities for the majority of Belarusians do not go beyond mere presence (Rohava, 2020). What is required of citizens is not to alter their beliefs but to “act as if” (Wedeen, 1998), by enacting the prescribed subject positions for public presentation. In this sense, these subject positions effectively function as what Scott (1990, p. 2) refers to as “public transcripts,” “shorthand way[s] of describing” the relations between citizens (i.e., “subordinates”) and the state (i.e., “those who dominate”) that are sanctioned by institutions of power and are offered to—and taken up by—citizens to play out in public settings.

In return, the Belarusian government commits to shouldering the costs of a comprehensive social welfare system that includes education, child care, social security, paid parental leave, subsidized utility costs, public transportation, retirement benefits, and affordable housing for certain groups, much of which has been retained from the Soviet period (Chulitskaya & Matonyte, 2019).

The cornerstone of this social contract is health care. Access to health care is guaranteed to Belarusians as a constitutional right, which includes free treatment at state-owned health care facilities and the government's commitment to “creating conditions for making medical treatment available to all citizens” (Constitution, 1994, art. 45). Just like other elements of the government system in Belarus, health care services are delivered to Belarusians in a highly centralized, bureaucratized, and paternalistic manner. The system is dominated by state-owned facilities, which get funding from the national or local government budgets and follow the guidance of the Ministry of Health in both the strategic and operational aspects of their work, from establishing salary levels for the staff to the types of services offered (Richardson et al., 2013).

Both primary care and inpatient care are organized on a territorial basis, with every Belarusian assigned to a particular medical facility based on their place of residence. While the law does entitle patients to choose an attending physician or partake in the decision-making process surrounding their treatment options—which are determined by the protocols established and closely monitored by the Ministry of Health—many Belarusians are not aware of this possibility (Shukhatovich, 2010). Those who do face barriers in exercising this right, often having to get permission from the head of a health department to approve their choice (Richardson et al., 2013, p. 29). Neither voluntary health insurance nor the few existing private facilities play a significant role in the health care system (Richardson et al., 2013).

Yet, despite the fact that Belarusians contribute to covering the costs of the government-administered public services as taxpayers—the fact backgrounded in the government discourse, albeit increasingly recognized by Belarusians (Ivanova, 2017; Kananovich, 2015)—and have been increasingly paying for medical services from their pockets (Dimitrova et al., 2018), the formally free-of-charge, universal health care had been touted as the major element in Lukashenko's “socially oriented state” (“Lukashenko: We falsified,” 2006) and, with direct out-of-pocket payments remaining the lowest among the members of the Commonwealth of Independent States, a loose grouping of former Soviet states (Chebanova et al., 2018, p. 25), had offered Belarusians a way to rationalize their acquiescence to the regime.

The coronavirus disrupted this arrangement. In spring 2020, as the pandemic was making its way through the country, saturating social media feeds and personal networks of Belarusians with alarming news about people getting sick with a novel, apparently deadly, disease, Lukashenko downplayed its severity and referred to it as “coronapsychosis” (“Interview,” 2020). As European countries were locking down borders, shutting down transportation, banning mass gatherings to get a handle on the crisis, Lukashenko described those efforts as “utter, outrageous stupidity” (“Lukashenko on Russia,” 2020) and justified his refusal to follow their lead by saying, “It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees” (“Lukashenko: Hockey,” 2020).

In contrast to other foreign political leaders who pleaded with their constituencies to stay indoors and kept them updated on the numbers of hospitalizations and deaths, Lukashenko's administration withheld the coronavirus statistics, censored those who were sharing it, and left citizens with no actionable guidance on protecting themselves (“How Belarusian,” 2020). What Lukashenko offered instead was a mixture of questionable solutions and inaccurate claims. The list of the cures he recommended included visiting the sauna, drinking vodka “to poison the virus” (Bennetts, 2020), playing ice hockey (“Lukashenko: Hockey,” 2020), working in the countryside, and spending time with baby goats (“Lukashenko's,” 2020).

Faced with an unprecedented health care crisis in his presidency, Lukashenko fell back on his conventional rhetoric appealing to the imaginary peasant subject as the quintessential Belarusian citizen. In March 2020, amid the escalating outbreak, he praised state-owned TV for showing pastoral pictures of people working on tractors, with “no one talk[ing] about the virus,” and encouraged Belarusians to lean into their ties to the countryside: “The tractor will heal everyone. The fields are healing everyone” (Kriat, 2020). As for those who were left unpersuaded, he instructed his local government appointees to treat them in a way that a large-hearted father would, much in line with the paternalizing ethos of his presidency:

We shouldn’t be thinking the people we have are bad and so on. The people are like us—or we are like our people. We won’t have other people. They are who they are, and we need to be working with them. I’ll tell you they are not the worst.

(Kriat, 2020)

What undermined this message of care was the lack of systematic response that could be expected from the state which had been touting its robust health care system as the key deliverable of the social contract. In contrast to other governments that framed their response in terms of “flattening the curve” (Routley, 2020), Lukashenko's administration largely ignored the increasing load on the health care system, leaving medical workers with a shortage of personal protective equipment and leading them to issue frantic pleads on social media for help from the public, offering evidence of the collapsing health care system. These pleads were answered with self-imposed “people's quarantines,” grassroots campaigns to create DIY protective gear for medical workers, and crowdfunding drives to assist health care facilities in battling the coronavirus (Shingaryov, 2020). Taken together, these efforts exposed the systematic failure of the regime to meet the moment—and thus presented the kind of a “threat[] to discredit existing institutions…due to…inability to right…the emergent situation” (Hogan, 2019, p. 180) that has been posited in previous research to set a critical juncture in motion.

Lukashenko's response to the first coronavirus deaths encapsulated his refusal to take responsibility for the systemic failures of his administration by instead placing the blame on the victims. Commenting on the death of 75-year-old actor Viktor Dashkevich (“Coronavirus death,” 2020), Lukashenko admonished him for working after retirement (a choice forced on many Belarusians due to low state pensions), all while not offering condolences to the family or evoking Dashkevich's name but instead referring to him as “that actor,” before switching to the pronoun “you,” reserved in Russian for people with whom the speaker is on informal, casual terms, and misquoting Dashkevich's age:

He's turning 80 tomorrow. Why are you wandering around the streets, let alone working?… Listen, he's been retired for over 10 years now and yet went back to work. I’m not blaming him; maybe he was just a courageous man, but one needs to be careful. But if people don’t get it, we won’t be able to do anything about it.

(Dadalka, 2020)

Several days later, as the number of publicly reported coronavirus casualties had reached four, Lukashenko condemned what he referred to as “making fuss out of four deaths” and said the following about another victim, 70-year-old navy veteran Vladimir Sidorov (Hushtyn, 2020)—without, again, referring to the person by name or offering sympathies:

I asked [the local government official], “Why did this one die?” He said: “Alexander Grigorievich [Lukashenko's patronymic], how could one live if their weight is 135 kg (298 lbs)? The heart barely works; it aches here and there, and there's a whole bunch of diseases.” The virus attacks the weak, who have no immunity. Well, and he [the victim] was over 70 years old.

(“Coronavirus in Belarus,” 2020)

By engaging in this kind of tone-deaf rhetoric and refusing to take responsibility for the systemic failures of the regime to deliver on its promise of care, Lukashenko not only undermined his image as “the guardian of the common people,” but effectively abdicated his obligations under the “authoritarian bargain” that he had struck with the Belarusian people. Given the reciprocal logic of this arrangement, this freed the public from their side of the bargain—namely, paying lip service to the subject positions prescribed to them by the state.

As soon as the next day—much in line with the conceptualization of critical junctures as periods of “acceleration of discursive articulations of various visions of social reality” (Zappettini & Krzyżanowski, 2019, p. 382)—the viral hashtag #presidentspartingwords challenged governmentally sanctioned subject positions and sought to rearrange them into alternative configurations. In dozens of posts that were commented on by hundreds and featured in news articles that reached thousands (“36 years old,” 2020; “Had no kids,” 2020), social media users wrote satirical eulogies about themselves that emulated Lukashenko's remarks and articulated them as disruptors of the government subjectivation discourse. In what follows below, I analyze the discursive logic of these alternative articulations.

Method

To explore the construction of the Belarusian subject in the #presidentspartingwords discourse, I retrieved all posts with the hashtag on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Because the posts were written in trasianka, a dialect spoken by Lukashenko that represents a loosely codified mixture of Russian and Belarusian, I searched for various spellings of the hashtag (e.g., #прашчальнаесловапрэзидзента, #прашчальнаесловапрэзидэнта). The search produced 413 posts, all published in April 2020 and analyzed in the original language. Although the number of the posts would hardly meet the definition of a viral post in countries with more vibrant social media scenes, in Belarus, which hasn’t seen a lot of politically oriented memes with a national reach, the hashtag became a media phenomenon, making its way to independent news publications, with some of the articles getting dozens of thousands of views (“36 years old,” 2020; “Had no kids,” 2020).

I began the analysis with “a long preliminary soak,” (Hall, 1975, p. 15), by reading through all the posts to get a broad sense of the #presidentspartingwords discourse and to attune myself to recurring patterns in the narrative structure and discursive elements used by the posters, in order to achieve what was described by Hall (1975) as “learn[ing] to ‘hear’ the same underlying appeals, the same ‘notes,’ being sounded again and again in different passages” (p. 15).

Following the preliminary examination, I conducted repeated close readings of the posts in two stages. At the first stage, I reread the posts line by line, marking sections of texts that suggested a pattern in the articulation of the “eulogized” subject (e.g., repeated references to their gourmet gastronomical preferences, the international scope of places lived in, self-deprecating remarks about looks and age among female posters). I made detailed notes on copies of the posts and revisited them as the analysis was written.

At the second stage, these immediate discursive patterns in the articulations of the “eulogized” subject were interpreted in relation to the articulations in the government discourse, taken both as “pointers to latent meanings from which inferences…can be drawn” (Hall, 1975, p. 15) and as intertextual references to Lukashenko's statements as a master text. At this stage, the posts were interpreted in terms of the two logics suggested by the subjectivation research: equivalence and difference (Laclau & Mouffe, 2001). For example, the gourmet gastronomical choices of the “eulogized” subject were interpreted as challenging the articulation of the Belarusian subject as preferring a modest life devoid of luxurious consumption in line with the peasant ethos underlying the government discourse; the international geography of the “eulogized” subject's life was put in contrast with the government-sanctioned articulation of mobility as a privilege that rests with the state and as a rhetorical attempt to reclaim one's autonomy as unalienable right; the self-deprecating, tongue-in-cheek references to looks and age among female posters were taken as engaging with the patriarchal notions of women's worth.

In what follows below, I offer an analysis of these and other discursive patterns that emerged in the text and discuss the ways in which they offer insight into a particular kind of discursive resistance to the status quo in the authoritarian context.

The Alternative Belarusian Subject: Autonomous, Creative, Civic-Minded, and Mischievous Disruptor of Government Discourse

The analysis of the posts revealed their commonality in stylistic and narrative structures. All the posters purported to provide a verbatim transcript of Lukashenko's remarks in the event of their deaths. The blame for the latter was uniformly placed on the “deceased” and was framed as a logical—albeit occasionally acknowledged as regretful—outcome of their transgressions against the course of action prescribed to them by the state, as captured in the following post:

Well, that's because you should have had kids instead of wandering around Europe. If you had three kids, you wouldn’t have time to get sick, especially with this coronapsychosis! That's because they get all these ideas into their heads and then come back home. But why would the country need you if you can’t even milk a cow? It's still a pity, of course. After all, she was a woman, a young one, and kind of good-looking.

In a way typical for the other #presidentspartingwords posts, this text blended details from the poster's personal life—thereby mirroring the personalized nature of Lukashenko's remarks about the coronavirus victims—with tongue-in-cheek political references: the president's anti-Western sentiment, the number of kids—three—that provides Belarusian families with state benefits aimed at improving the country's dire demographic situation (with Lukashenko once saying that he considers a third child in a family to be “his own”; Buevich, 2011), the “coronapsychosis” descriptor, the peasant ethos, and the patriarchal definition of women's worthiness that dominate the government discourse. What has emerged from the posts is an alternative Belarusian subject who explicitly—and knowingly—rejects the officially sanctioned positions.

As opposed to Lukashenko's peasant subject whose circle of action is limited to the confines of his local community, the alternative subject thinks, and acts, wider, “packing her stuff and leaving the country” to “gad around” Paris, Prague, and Milano, “wander across” America, India, China, and various parts of “Gayropa”—a disparaging name for Europe used to ridicule policies aimed at protecting the rights of LGBTQ + people—to then either “blather from outside the country” or come back and “bring all those maladies” with her. Importantly, this cosmopolitanism doesn’t come with attempts to shed one's provincial upbringings. With many posters explicitly tracing back their trajectories to home towns and villages, they embrace their roots and articulate them not as a constraint but as a marker of the mobility rights reclaimed from the state.

The divergence between the alternative Belarusian subject and the officially sanctioned one is mirrored in their gastronomical choices. Lukashenko's rhetorical alter ego is taken aback by the fanciness of the alternative subject's favorite dishes. Noticing in one “eulogy” that a poster “didn’t even have a single potato at home” but instead enjoyed “foreign bulgur, and—God, forgive me…olive oil,” Lukashenko-the-eulogizer keeps bringing up foods that are supposedly antithetical to the Belarusian lifestyle: Italian pasta, Parmesan, hummus and Roquefort, as well as Belgian ale, rakia, Armagnac, and Chardonnay, which he puts in contrast to “our good, honest vodka,” a signifier of authentic, modest life that is supposed to be enjoyed by the Belarusian subject.

The “eulogized” subject is articulated as possessing the very qualities denied to the official Belarusian subject as a passive receiver of the government action: initiative, adventurousness, and creativity. This subject doesn’t wait for a nudge from the government to act and is willing to correct the perceived wrongs both as a lone warrior and an organizer of collective action: She leads adult literacy classes, sues ministers in Lukashenko's administration, volunteers in an animal shelter, preserves architectural heritage, works with families with terminated parental rights—all while highlighting those civic-minded deeds as defining milestones of her life. The occupations of the alternative Belarusian subject have no use in peasant Belarus, as indicated by the derogatory comments of Lukashenko-the-eulogizer: she writes books and theatrical plays (“thinks too much”), brings people on hiking tours (“Do we even have mountains? Why not take them to the wetlands?”), makes music (“blows into a flute” and “strums a violin that's twice her height”), plays competitive pool, directs animation movies, and opens new businesses as “sort of a business woman” and a “so-called entrepreneur.”

Gender adds another layer to this dynamic while carrying the same anti-hegemonic message. The texts of female posters are saturated with references to their age and looks, but those portrayals reject the notions of femininity and women's worthiness as defined in Lukashenko's discourse. Some illustrative self-deprecating modifiers describe female posters as “not good-looking,” “not that young,” and “shaggy and looking for trouble.” The “eulogized” Belarusian woman is criticized equally harshly for not having kids (e.g., “She's 35 and hasn’t started family yet”; “She's 33 and got dogs instead of children”; “What kind of woman is that? [She] left no children, although we asked”), for having not enough (“Why not six? We’d have give her an apartment for free”; “She's 34 and had only four”; “Two! But we needed three!”), and for having too many (“What did she expect, having adopted and given birth to so many?”; “Who told her to get as many as seven?”), in addition to falling short on other patriarchal expectations: for “stressing out” her husband, “not knowing how to cook borshch,” and “not wanting to get married to a normal man and wait for him to get back home after spending a day on a tractor.”

This departure from normalcy becomes another common theme that runs through the posts. The term “norm” and its derivatives remain a salient presence in the posts: The “eulogized” subject “doesn’t want to work like normal people,” quits a “normal job” and refuses to “secure a neat position like everyone else”; doesn’t like listening to “normal music” or playing “a normal musical instrument”; “has always been a bit abnormal” and “strange,” and overall—in the words of Lukashenko-the-eulogizer—“doesn’t want to live normally, as we asked.” The employment of the “norm” serves two purposes. First, it signals that the posters are aware of the expectations placed on them by the state, and second, it organizes the field of action available to Belarusians as a dichotomous space, in which the departure from the norm cannot be interpreted as anything other than the unequivocal negation of the subject positions into which they are interpellated by the state—the repudiation the alternative subject embraces and takes ownership of.

Importantly, while the alternative Belarusian subject is symbolically ostracized by Lukashenko-the-eulogizer, this outcome is construed not as the subject's unintentional failure but as a deliberate choice. The posters narrate in detail the lives they rejected but could have had if they had chosen to embrace the officially sanctioned positions: from working at a kolkhoz to joining the president's press pool to becoming a local public official to securing a sinecure at a puppet pro-government organization. The articulation of these alternative scenarios allows the posters to reclaim their agency and locus of control from the government's hands and to thereby challenge the key premise of official discourse that articulates Lukashenko as the only rhetor with actionable power to decide what is right for the Belarusian people.

Conclusion

This project set out to contribute to research on subjectivation discourse by exploring social media discourse on the coronavirus in Belarus, an authoritarian post-Soviet country. I argue the pandemic served as a “permissive condition” for critical juncture by exposing the system to an external shock that revealed its inability to cope with the crisis and to deliver on the promise of care under the existing “authoritarian bargain” between the government and the public. Given the contractual character of the bargain, this abdication of the government's commitments freed the public from the obligation to pay lip service to the governmentally sanctioned subject positions that construe them as inapt, unsophisticated, and obedient implementers of the government will.

The analysis of the #presidentspartingwords discourse showed how the public sought to reclaim the right to define themselves in their own terms by offering an alternative subject position that articulated them as efficacious, autonomous, self-sufficient agents. If recast in Laclau and Mouffe's (2001) terms, the #presidentpartingwords discourse dislocated the equivalence logic of the government's subjectivation discourse and locked the Belarusian subject and the state in a confrontational space that is governed by the antagonistic logic of difference and “forecloses any possibility of a final reconciliation” (p. xvii) between the two.

The impossibility of implementing this “final reconciliation” became clear four months later, in August 2020, as hundreds of thousands of Belarusians came to the streets to participate in a monthslong series of protests that became the most sustained challenge yet to Lukashenko's 26 years in office (Heintz, 2020).

Although being just one of the many antecedents that preceded the protests, the #presidentpartingwords discourse, I argue, afforded and reinforced the emerging modes of popular mobilization in a way that has been found to be of central importance to enacting political change. By articulating themselves as mischievous, self-deprecating disruptors of “public transcripts” (Scott, 1990), the posters showed the very combination of “humor, irony and parody” that has been referred to in the literature on social movements as “ludic activism,” a new type of social mobilization capable of driving movements for political change (Benski et al., 2013, p. 546). Previous research has argued that social media can serve contemporary protest movements not only by performing the instrumental role of an “organizational backbone” (Treré, 2015, p. 901) through providing activists with tools to communicate and coordinate action, but by functioning as an elaborate ecosystem that can cultivate a new expressive “communicative resistance grammar” (p. 901). The #presidentspartingwords discourse, which provided online publics with a recognizable narrative structure allowing them to craft their own playful narratives pushing back against the government's subjectivating discourse, offers further evidence for the potency of social media to facilitate the development of new expressive forms of such nonviolent “ludic” resistance.

Further, by blending details from the posters’ personal lives, the posts set in motion “a politics of visibility [that] exacerbate[d] the centrality of the subjective and private experience of the individual” (Milan, 2015, p. 887) and merged these personalized experiences into relatable, polycentric assemblages of collective identity that have been argued to lie at the core of contemporary mobilizations (Bennett & Segerberg, 2013; Gerbaudo & Treré, 2015; Melucci, 1996; Milan, 2015; Yang, 2016).

Finally, the #presidentspartingwords case offers another insight into the process of formation of collective identity. The cultivation of collective identity, Flesher Fominaya (2007) argues, lies in developing both a sense of cohesion, or “who we are,” and a sense of otherness, or “who we are not” (p. 244). The #presidentsparting discourse, which drew its impetus from online publics challenging the subject positions offered to them by the Belarusian government, suggests that the “who we are not” part of the equation, or “identity reclamation” (Treré, 2015, p. 906), may play a decisive role not only in communicating collective identity to outside stakeholders but in launching the process of discovering it.

While the question about the political efficacy of the protests, which may have been facilitated by the #presidentspartingwords discourse, lies outside the focus of this study, a word of caution is warranted here to avoid the oversimplification of the political implications of social media activism. A robust, and growing, research has recognized the potential of humor, irony, and parody—that is, the defining characteristics of ludic activism—to challenge power relations and to expand the repertoire of subversive political action (for review, see Takovski, 2020). Some scholars argue that humor may prove to be particularly effective in authoritarian contexts because, while constituting a relatively low-stakes action on the part of the oppressed, it simultaneously “hijacks the regime's narrative” (Camps-Febrer, 2012, p. 32) and deprives it of the possibility to legitimize its use of force in response to humorous provocations. Others caution against overly optimistic views on the role of humor in driving structural change, by positing that humor might function as “a safety valve” discouraging mobilization into a more politically consequential action (see also Badarneh, 2011; Billig, 2005; Hart, 2007, p. 7).

The same nuanced approach would benefit the debate about the politics of visibility set in motion by viral posts. While such visibility does increase the relatability and persuasive power of the subversive narrative by highlighting the experiences of individual posters (Gerbaudo & Treré, 2015; Milan, 2015; Yang, 2016), some members of the online publics, as suggested by the present study, might not be ready to find themselves in the spotlight, which might diminish the participatory appeal of such practices in authoritarian regimes. The data analyzed in this project indicates the plausibility of this assumption. In one news article published by a Belarusian independent online outlet that featured the #presidentspartingwords posts as an example of an unprecedented grassroots campaign, six out of 23 posts that were originally embedded in the story have been, at the time of writing, either removed by posters or made private—in other words, no longer visible to a general reader (“Had no kids,” 2020). One plausible explanation is that the politics of visibility might increase the perceived costs of participation in ludic activism among online publics in authoritarian contexts—a possibility that warrants a systemic exploration in future research.

At the time of writing, the protests, met with a brutal crackdown and renewed attempts by the government to delegitimize political dissent with legal and discursive means, have dwindled markedly, putting the possibility of political change in Belarus under question. This underscores the importance of treating the coronavirus as a permissive—that is, necessary but insufficient—condition for critical juncture that can offer a useful analytical category for unpacking the ideological labor that goes into disrupting as well as sustaining the political status quo.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Volha Kananovich

Author Biography

Volha Kananovich (PhD, The University of Iowa; PhD, National Academy of Sciences of Belarus) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at Appalachian State University. Her research examines the role of political and media discourse in (de)legitimizing various forms of politically meaningful citizen engagement with the state across authoritarian and democratic contexts.

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