№11, 2008

The article studies tendencies in the development of regional elites in Belarus by analyzing composition of the Regional Local Councils based on the results of local elections in 1999, 2003 and 2007. It reviews political parties’ representation, age and gender composition and peculiarities of territorial representation.

This article is an attempt to answer how new communication technologies were used during the election to the local Councils on January 14, 2007, and what is common and different between readers of a printed local newspaper and participants of virtual communities.

The figures presented in this study show a low level of web campaigning among opposition and government-supported nominees alike during the 2008 Parliamentary election in Belarus. The research indicates low personal input from candidates into Internet campaigning and apathetic online activities on party websites.

The article reveals the phenomenon of spontaneous groups which arose during the protests caused by the 2006 Presidential elections. It defines the notion, classifies groups according to origin and internal structure, and outlines near-term perspectives of spontaneous groups.

The article analyzes territorial peculiarities of electoral behavior in Belarus on the basis of official ballots during the Presidential elections in 1994, 2001 and 2006. It argues that even imperfect official data still allows localization of relatively oppositional and anti-oppositional areas.

An analysis of the contemporary state of political and civil consciousness in Belarus reveals contradictions between high electoral participation and weak motivation to influence developments in the country. The author examines how inhabitants conceptualize the notion of a citizen.

Images on banknotes are one of the ways of visualizing and distributing knowledge about a certain historical period and of influencing national identity. The author analyses banknotes of Lithuania, Ukraine and Belarus and compares their historical-symbolic design.

The study investigates the basic ideas and practices of skinheads in Belarus as a local variety of worldwide youth counterculture. It examines the origin of the style, neo-Nazi orientation, the genesis of gangs in Belarus and their relation to right-wing radicalism.

The author reviews the main stages of the Crivitian idea evolution in the context of Belarusian political thought. The process is divided into four periods: fixation, conceptualization, interruption in representation, and the present state since the late 1980s.

The article is dedicated to an analysis of one case from election practice in Belarus in the late Stalin era. It reconstructs falsification mechanisms and the political environment around local voting in Sapotskina in 1948.