Soldiers On The Invisible Front

We don't know them, but they are shaping the future of Belarus.

There are several websites on the Russian internet where registered users post their chord charts. Once, some friends told me that chord charts for Belarusian songs keep appearing on the most popular Russian-language site. And they’re posted by a 19-year-old Belarusian.

Out of curiosity, I visited that site and found the young man’s account. It turned out he had posted chord progressions for 89 songs. And all of them were Belarusian. From Volsky to Voityushkevich, from Kasia Kamotska to Sveta Ben, from “Neuro Dubel” to “Petlya Pristrastiya.”

He posted his first song with his own chord progressions on the site back in the summer of 2022, when he was fifteen years old. It was “Nebespechnyya Gulni” by Lyavon Volsky. And since then, chords for Belarusian songs have been appearing there regularly. The same friends who drew attention to this said that last December they were in Warsaw at a concert by Lyavon, where he sang his stunning cover of Kasi Kamotska’s song “Chakanne Kalyadov.” And just a couple of days later, this young man posted the chords for that very song on the website. Perhaps he was also at that concert. Perhaps he saw a video from the concert on social media. That’s not really important.

What’s important is this: since the age of 15, this young man—whose identity is unknown to us—has been finding chords for Belarusian songs and posting them online. And those who visit the site looking for “Splin” or “DDT” can discover Belarusian music. To realize just how diverse it is. To start listening to and falling in love with this music and this language. In other words, there’s a young Belarusian, hiding behind a username, who isn’t looking for money or fame, but is simply doing important work for society, quietly and unnoticed. And there are a great many people like this—who quietly, without drawing attention to themselves, promote Belarusian culture, language, and history. We just don’t know about them. And they are the very fighters on the invisible front who quietly create and distribute national content for a future free Belarus.

The creators and editors of the Belarusian Wikipedia fall into this same category. True, Wikipedia, unlike chord-sharing websites, is known to everyone, so there is nothing surprising about the repression against volunteer editors. Last year, there were mass detentions of them. The legendary editor Kazimierz Lyakhnovich (whose real name—Ilya Boriskevich—only became known after his release by John Cole) was sentenced to actual prison time after creating nearly 7,000 articles for the Belarusian Wikipedia over the course of 17 years. Others, one might say, were lucky: they got off with “house arrest,” which is almost a luxury these days.

And there are also many channels on Telegram where similar enthusiasts post movies, TV series, cartoons, and anime translated into Belarusian. Other enthusiasts translate books that we’ve all long since read in Russian. It might seem pointless to translate Remarque or Bradbury, whose works have been read to tatters in Russian. We know their books almost by heart and could quote them for hours. But these unknown folks sit up all night translating. They have a small audience on their Telegram channels. It’s not millions of Belarusians—it’s still just thousands. And, for example, anime is a niche genre that doesn’t interest everyone in the first place. We’d get by just fine without anime in Belarusian.

That’s what many people think. And as of today, they’re probably right. But our fellow countrymen who volunteer aren’t thinking about today—they’re thinking about tomorrow. Or even about a more distant future that perhaps not all of us will live to see. And they’re filling the global space with national content so that future generations of Belarusians, speaking their native language, won’t face a situation where they can’t read, watch, sing, or access encyclopedic information in it. It is precisely these young people of today who are creating for them that very huge cushion onto which Belarusians will one day fall, no longer afraid of crashing.

Irina Khalip, exclusively for Charter97.org

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