Abstract
In August 2020, presidential elections were held in Belarus, followed by waves of mass protests and a period of harsh repression by the Lukashenko regime. In this period of myriad political conflicts and polarized society, there have been numerous cases of re-appropriation of language and symbols associ- ated with World War II.
In this paper, I explore the ways in which the Belarusian protest movement of the 2020s shaped memories of past conflicts, which it subsequently transferred into these struggles for memory. This paper attempts to capture what kind of memories and historical associations were used by the protesters to convey messages about their identity, values, and ideas.
Stopping at several examples, I reflect on the activists' repertoire of actions in which the movement sought to disrupt and reformulate the dominant practice of the official narrative of the Great Patriotic War, which is central to the legacy in the symbolic canon of the contemporary Belarusian regime. The memory of the Great Patriotic War and the founding myth of the partisan republic, which for many years were the exclusive domain of the neo-Soviet identity, were transformed during the protests into a potent symbolic and rhetorical arsenal for mobilizing opponents of the regime.