20 Years of Street Struggle in One Book

The Political Sphere Institute, the journal “Arche” and the weekly “Nasha Niva” are preparing a book about mass street actions in the period from 1988 to 2009.

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The editor of “Arche”, Valer Bulhakau, said in an interview with “European Radio for Belarus” that this important topic had received little coverage.

Bulhakau: “The topic is important on the one hand and poorly covered on the other. The history of street actions and the activities of Belarusian democratic forces since the late 1980s remains, above all, in the memory and consciousness of its direct participants, as well as in scattered and unorganised archives. The point is that, quite naturally, there is no institution, archive, or, so to speak, library that would catalogue, carefully collect and preserve all the materials connected with the chronicle of the Belarusian democratic movement and its mass actions”.

According to Bulhakau, the initiators set themselves the task of making the stories of street struggle part of today’s cultural situation and political game.

However, the events of last year will not be included in the book. The publisher explains this by the fact that work on the book had begun long before.

Bulhakau: “One might get the mistaken impression that we were inspired by the events of 19 December 2010. But this is not the case at all: the idea had been maturing throughout the last decade, and the collection of materials for this book had already begun. The project itself started in 2009, when nothing foreshadowed the bloody dispersal of demonstrators on Independence Square on the night of 19-20 December 2010. The book is already finished; a very large number of analysts, more than a couple of dozen people, worked on it. And now I simply want to set the accents correctly: this is not about writing the book or creating it, but merely about clarifying the visual sequence. We have about five hundred different images, illustrations and similar materials”.

Work on the book has been completed and it has been prepared for publication. The edition is expected to appear at the end of spring.

Based on material from euroradio.fm.

Photo: GLEB GARANICH REUTERS // wyborcza.pl