Performing Khatyn. The History of one WWII Massacre and Its Representations in Image and Text

Keywords: Memory Politics, Social Media, Post-Socialism, WWII, Web-Archiving

On March 22, 1943, the village of Khatyn (located in Lahoisk region, Belarus) was burnt down together with its 149 inhabitants by the Nazis and their collaborators. In 1969, a magnificent monument was erected on the site of the extermination, commemorating the suffering and resilience of Khatyn inhabitants quite in the spirit of Brezhnev’s memory policies of the time (Oushakine 2013). The monument attracted millions of local and foreign tourists, including dozens of high-level officials, whilst its images were reproduced in countless copies in the Soviet Union and abroad.

 The village’s history and even more so its various interpretations in image and text rendered Belarus’ particularity, laying the foundation stone of its post-war identity, Soviet and post-Soviet alike (Lewis 2015; Dorman 2017). Not less significant was the “export” value of Khatyn – the painful experience of war and its overcoming were melted together with the success of the Soviet modernization, and, ultimately, ensured the country’s (even if limited) political autonomy.  Whilst the memory of WWII remained in the kernel of the collective remembrances in Belarus during the whole period of post-socialism, in the aftermath of the suppressed Revolution 2020, and even more so with the beginning of the Russian full-scale war in Ukraine its meaning was elevated once again.

 In this vein, the tragedy of Khatyn has been re-actualized. Aliaksandr Lukashenka’s authoritarian regime announced the massive reconstruction of the memory site, adjoined by an ambitious media campaign. In search for legitimacy, the regime embarks on the symbolic meaning of Khatyn, attempting to claim its geopolitical significance in the region, justify its animosity to Ukraine, and patch internal raptures in the Belarusian society.  In this paper, I trace how the memory of Khatyn’s has been again and again performed on Soviet and Post-Soviet (social) media, focusing on the interaction of the visual and the textual. I am interested in how new digital technologies have been employed to revive and weaponize the “old” historical mythology, and whether the former significantly alters the mode of the representation of the latter.