“It’s a celebration/With temples already gray/It’s joy/With tears in our eyes.” I heard these words perhaps fifty times in a week in Belarus. It’s a lyric from the ballad Victory Day, ubiquitous ahead of the May 9 commemorations of World War II. The song seemed to be played everywhere like a soundtrack: in buses, subways, cafés, a hockey game, the supermarket, museums, three franchises of a khinkali dumpling chain, in bathrooms and lobbies. I heard it chanted a cappella by clapping Russian tourists, piped into elevators, echoing from a teenager’s headphones. When I first unlocked my hotel room, it was already blaring from the TV, over a welcome message with a photo of the Soviet flag atop the Reichstag. It played on loop like a Christmas anthem, the theme tune for streets festooned in Belarusian red, green and white.

Tourist Attraction

I’d come to Belarus hoping to find out about the meaning of the so-called Great Patriotic War, eighty years on. Belarus has been ruled since 1994 by Alexander Lukashenka and is often called a Brezhnevite time-warp. The continued celebration of the Red Army, today unthinkable in neighboring Ukraine, Poland, or Lithuania, might be taken as evidence of this. If when Victory Day was written in 1975, Red Army veterans’ hair was already graying, the commemorations another half-century later refer to mostly dead generations. Yet, I was left unconvinced that this was all just a Soviet hangover. From the holograms in flashy new museums, to the military drones paraded on trucks, or the Chinese troops marching between steel-and-glass buildings, this commemoration had something of the future about it.

My visit also came at a moment when Russia looked ever closer to crushing Ukraine. Vladimir Putin’s May 9 parade in Moscow, attended by Lukashenka but also Xi Jinping and even Brazil’s president Lula, was widely reported as an attempt to display the Kremlin’s international standing. It seems obvious to paint Victory Day as an instrumental repurposing of the past for contemporary political ends. But heading to Minsk, I wondered what else remains of Belarusians’ lived experience of World War II —and how can we do justice to the millions of dead, without just seeing their history as the source material for authoritarian propaganda.

I live in Berlin, where authorities this year declared Belarusian officials unwelcome at Liberation Day commemorations. Making the opposite trip isn’t encouraged, either. In 2021, Minsk officials forced down a flight crossing Belarusian airspace, in order to arrest dissident Roman Protasevich; since then, European authorities have banned EU carriers from crossing its territory. I thus headed to Minsk by bus, from the Lithuanian capital Vilnius, notionally less than three hours’ drive away. I expected it to be far slower: I had scoured Reddit posts warning of entire days spent waiting for border agents to process ‘troublesome’ foreigners. Still, for us it was only a two-hour ordeal. When asked about my biznes in Belarus I waffled about being a historian, then cut myself short: I was here for turizm.

Visiting as a Westerner may seem forbidding: a road sign just past Vilnius airport warns “MINSK 187 KM (OCCUPIED BY KREMLIN).” Still, Victory Day is a major tourist focus in Minsk, and hotels were booked-up weeks in advance. The 75th anniversary in 2020 had been overshadowed by COVID-19, and ahead of this year’s parade in Moscow there was even speculation about Ukrainian drone interference. Yet events in Minsk faced no similar threats, and if anything showed the authorities emboldened. In this January’s election the opposition was near-totally silenced (official tallies gave Lukashenka almost 87 percent), and Western sanctions have failed to cause major disruption. Minsk has plenty of Soviet-era apartment blocks, and trains and trolleybuses from the 1980s as well as newer, Chinese rolling stock. But this is a showcase capital, with palatial modern hotels in the centraldistrict including Western chains like Marriott.

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Great Patriotic War Museum

That same neighborhood boasts Victory Park, a 200-hectare expanse of lakefront greenery today home to the Great Patriotic War Museum. Opened by Lukashenka and Putin in 2014, the four-floor complex stands next to a 45-meter obelisk and opposite a block whose roof bears the massive legend “Minsk—Hero City.” The stele is flanked by “Motherland,” a severe bronze female lifting trumpets skyward. Inside the Museum, the visitor passing a show of books on “21st-Century Belarus” enters an exhibition on the rise of 1930s European fascism. Touchscreens allow the visitor to choose which

Belarusian region’s history they wish to learn about—in each case, prompting the projection of Stalin-era footage of the USSR building its defenses. Painted mannequins lean from trucks and pedestals, recreating in stiff three-dimensional format some famous photographs of World War II.

There is a heavy focus on military matériel—glass cabinets of ammunition, fighter planes suspended from the ceiling, tanks with their guns inertly pointing indoors. But the ten thematic halls also layer in more democratic and inclusive aspects. This is especially because Belarus, German-occupied from 1941–44, produced a mass partisan war. Communist cadres and Red Army officers took the lead, but this also included myriad bottom-up initiatives. This is illustrated in one hall by huts sheltering different activities in mutual aid and military preparation—medical treatment, food preparation, the designing of handwritten newspapers and “leaflets” printed on tree bark. The collective story of Soviet heroism is expressed through a mass of personal mementos, from spoons and medals to “tobacco gifted by the workers of such-and-such city” or an embroidered message wishing “may my love protect you from the bullets.”

Lukashenka’s presence is rarely explicit. The Belarusian-national as distinct from Soviet message largely relies on the focus on partisan warfare and, especially, the “anti-Belarusian genocide,” in the Soviet republic with the highest death toll relative to population. Enshrined in a penal article against genocide denialism, this has been key to Lukashenka’s efforts to craft a national narrative of the war, also subsuming Jews and Roma people into Belarusian victimhood. The museum offers two cabinets on Nazi antisemitism, and Minsk has several Jewish memorial sites; the sin of omission is the lack of mention of quite what a large minority of Belarusian dead, and partisans, were Jewish. Other stories are also banished: not least the Polish partisans in Western regions only annexed to the Belarusian SSR in 1939. We read about the Red Army liberating Europe, or Soviet POWs joining the French maquis, yet even such a struggle as the Yugoslav Resistance is reduced to an appendage of Soviet efforts.

Victory Day

Right outside the museum, already on the night of May 6 temporary grandstands were full of spectators watching the dress rehearsal of uniformed teenagers and military trumpeters. Victory Day needed practice, and a thousand-strong audience realized that their iPhone cameras could glean clearer footage of this practice-run than the main event. This avenue was to be the symbolic heart of the May 9 festivities, albeit only from 8:30 PM, also allowing Lukashenka to appear in Moscow before returning to Minsk after lunchtime. I headed west to catch the morning parade in Brest, Belarus’s other “Hero City.”

Annexed to the Belarusian SSR after the 1939 pact, Brest boasts a nineteenth-century fortress that provided the first, dogged line of Soviet defense to the Hitlerite invasion of June 22, 1941. The brickwork is shattered from German artillery, and the museum bears touching graffiti where the fortress’s defenders promised to fight to the last. The statues at the postwar memorial hail both military ardor—the over-thirty-meter-high frowning stone head, entitled Courage—and suffering, as in Thirst, in which a bare-chested, stone soldier, lying on his front, desperately holds out his helmet as if to scoop up water.

I reached Brest at 7:30 AM, with UlitsaLenina cordoned off and spectators staking out viewing spots. My anxiety at conspicuously not belonging here was amplified by the realization that the keenest, or at least earliest, attendees were all bunched up in separate groups, representing this or that school, or workplace. I wasn’t going to stand with abattoir workers, or high schoolers, but could I hover near the railway union members? Fortunately, the crowd rapidly swelled, and soon elderly partisans began to file by, waving from cars.

The procession centered on modern tanks, armored recovery vehicles, and artillery; it ended at the fortress. Yet, compared to the parade in Minsk that evening, the Brest events seemed much more like a festival and family day out. The official attendance was 70,000—I might even have guessed higher—as crowds with balloons and face paint pushed up toward the Courage monument to listen to the military bands. A hundred or so stalls sold beer and grilled meat and ice-creams and lacework and plush toy birds and posters of Joseph Stalin. Parents queued up politely with their cameras as kids clambered over a working steam engine bearing the slogan “Thanks for the victory!”

Telling of the mix of state pageantry and personal connection were the hundreds of people bearing framed pictures of relatives, held on a stick like a placard. This might include, for example, an arrangement of photos of four young, uniformed men, captioned “born 1921, died 1942, born 1921, died 1942, born 1922, died 1942, born 1923, died 2006.” A striking illustration of a family story—but also a recently invented practice, starting in Putin’s Russia in the 2010s as the “Immortal Regiment,” in which relatives with photos march instead of veterans who are no longer with us. Still, the idea of “regimentation” ought not be overstated: the placards here mingled poignantly through the crowd, rather than forming a separate procession.

Khatyn

A centerpiece of the narrative of anti-Belarusian genocide is Khatyn, once a village thirty miles northeast of Minsk. Here, on March 22, 1943, the Schutzmannschaft Battalion 118 massacred almost the entire population in a reprisal for a partisan attack. In a story echoed in the 1985 movie Come and See, inhabitants were either shot or driven into a shed which was then set ablaze. 149 people were slaughtered.

The memorial complex opened in 1969, designed by Jewish architect Leonid Levin, features the Unbowed Man, a haunting cast of one of the massacre’s few survivors standing bereft as he clutches his murdered child. This is a Soviet-era statue, but its tone is humane and bleak rather than monumental. It stands in front of 186 squares of earth, each taken from one of the villages forever destroyed by the Nazis.

Inside, the museum—freshly reorganized in 2023—promises to tell the story not through documents but immersion. This offers an incongruously flashy sound-and-light show, with fiery orange glowing through cracks in the wall. Pointing to a barely audible, AI-assisted hologram of a wartime toddler speaking to us, our guide shouts: “This is not imaginary. She was real!”

Khatyn is indeed, real, the site of an appalling atrocity. Its selection for individual symbolic status however remains controversial—because it has a similar name to Katyn, Poland, site of the NKVD massacre of Polish officers, but also because the paramilitaries of Battalion 118 were largely recruited in Western Ukraine. Scholars report that this Ukrainian connection was suppressed in Soviet times—but isn’t today.

For the Russian tour group I joined for the excursion, this part of the story was unmissable. Starting our bus journey, the guide announced that we had an “international” guest with us (i.e. me); another lady who had misheard where I was from asked whether French people had heard of Khatyn. Probably not, I ventured. One tourist from Moscow kindly offered me a “traditional Belarusian candy” (the wrapping bore the English words “Protein Bar”). Having gauged my interest in history, he said he wanted to show me a “fantasy video” on his phone, also AI-created. In it, massive stone monuments like the ones at Brest Fortress start to shift restlessly, then set on the march like real soldiers, alongside the modern Russian army. “Interesting, no?” he asked me in Russian. “This is an interesting experience!” I feebly replied.

Whose Victory?

Pennants and pin badges and balloons were strikingly in view before May 9. Yet I wondered if this collective display represented similar political attitudes in the present. Even airspacey laptop cafés bore the official Victory Day posters; I even saw a young woman with a nose-ring and a shock of blue hair, dressed as a Soviet soldier. If the specific memorial events were state-orchestrated, how much did people’s attitude toward the government condition their feelings about all this? Even during the 2020 election protests, oppositionists draped the Motherland statue in their own white-red-white flag, neutering or reclaiming this symbolism.

Western press coverage habitually casts Victory Day as regime grandstanding, exploiting the past to justify militarism in the present. This integrates elements of reality, at least insofar as the history is a monumentalized, state affair. Yet, it is also troubling to see the Soviet past so pushed out of the collective understanding of World War II in the West, where the Belarusian civilian experience is probably today less well-known even than when Come and See appeared four decades ago. The tendency, even on parts of the Left, to imagine Ukraine’s World War II history in terms of Nazi collaboration, and not as a mostly Soviet experience, likewise reflects this ignorance.

Donald Trump’s casting of the United States as so decisive in both wars that its Allies are barely worth mentioning is an extreme example of Western pigheadedness. Yet the overlooking of Soviet civilians and Soviet partisans is a much broader problem, painfully apparent in undergrad essays as in the statements of British or German government officials. It’s not that we have to copy the Belarusian state’s story. But when we talk about World War II, we ought to talk about them, too.