Lukamol’s Theatre of Absurd in central Minsk (Photo, video)
89- 25.09.2009, 9:09
On Thursday a rally of the pro-regime Belarusian Republican Youth Union (BRSM), dedicated to the 89th anniversary of Komsomol (The Communist Union of Youth) took place on Thursday in Minsk.
The BRSM (also called “Lukamol”) has demonstrated that they venerate traditions of Komsomol’s past. Representatives of the BRSM called their rally “a flash mob”, and found the most appropriate place for it, a mini-park of Felix Dzerzhinsky, right in front of the head office of the Belarusian KGB.
In keeping with the “best” Soviet traditions, Dzerzhinsky’s park was full of red flags and official symbols of the pro-regime organisation. Organisers of “Komsomol’s flash mob” dressed BRSM members in clothes of Soviet soldiers, workers, revolutionary teachers and top students.
BRSM members in disguise froze like living statues. Near the bust monument to “Iron Felix” riot policemen stood. Not far from them, three BRSM members froze over a chess board on a bench.
A young man in a uniform of a Soviet officer posed against the background of a plate “District committee is closed. Everybody has gone to the front”. A few students dressed as shock workers of Communist labour, stood under a banner “For Komsomol’s shock-work construction!” Three BRSM members in the uniform of Soviet soldiers next to them held a red streamer “Have You Volunteered for the Red Army?”
Among the “sculptures” of the BRSM were also: a girl in kimono and in boxing gloves, young people with a jumping rope, “"The Motherland is Calling!”, a revolutionary teacher, a student with a volume of Karl Marx under his arm, and certainly Mukhina’s “, Worker and Kolkhoz Woman”.
High-ranking BRSM functionaries were walking around in the epicentre of flickering red flags. They were smiling, giving orders to their mentees to speak to state mass media and not to smoke in front of the cameras.
“The flash mob of the Leninist Young Communist League” has left mixed feelings. Silent red monuments have come alive again in the centre of Minsk, under the wing of the KGB. While oppositional activists are sent to prison or punished by huge fines for their political flash mobs, flash mobs by “Lukamol” pass without dispersals or arrests.
