Bus stop, Polesia, the region of origin of Belarusian settlement.

Minsk.

New Astravets nuclear power plant, built by Russia, near the Lithuanian border. (2020)

Bridge in works on the river Pripiat, near the border with Ukraine.

"My wife died here, so I stay", Piotr, contaminated village of Bartalomieievka inside the Belarusian Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. (1986)

Cemetery of soviet mass executions of Kurapaty near Minsk. (1937)

Arrival in Minsk through fields near the Kurapaty Soviet mass execution cemetery. (1937)

Good morning Minsk.

Along the Minsk ring road near the cemetery of soviet mass executions of Kurapaty.

Wedding at war memorial of the Afghan war on Tears Island in Minsk.

Nastia in front of the bust of Lenin on October Street in Minsk. (1917) Nastia has never known the Soviet era and has never had any president other than Alexander Lukashenko.

Cross draped with ruchnyks (traditional hand-embroidered textiles, symbols of memory and spirituality) in Gorky. (mid-Medieval period)

A broom resting in a quiet corner of Minsk.

Village of Kamarin, edge of the Belarusian Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. (1986)

Herding the kolkhoz cattle (state-controlled collective farm) in Kosava. (established 1928)

Protest in Minsk. White-red-white – the historic Belarusian flag inherited from the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. (1793)

Irina in front of the Pripyat River in Turov, in Polesia, the ancestral homeland of the Belarusian people. "Kind sun, give me your strength," her grandmother used to say, welcoming the sun with open hands.

Village of Alexandraouka in the Belarusian Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. (1986)

Cemetery of soviet mass executions of Kurapaty near Minsk. (1937)

Black swan, carousel at Chelyuskinsov Park in Minsk.

Walking home from school in Vetka, on the edge of the Belarusian Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. (1986)

Abandoned house for 40 years in the contaminated village of Katichev in the Belarusian Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. (1986)

“Hero city”. Honorary title granted to 12 cities of the Soviet Union after the Second World War, Minsk.

New casino in Minsk.

Oleg at Kamarin, border of the contaminated area of the Belarusian Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. (1986)

Cemetery of soviet mass executions of Kurapaty near Minsk. (1937)

Sunway. Street vendor in Minsk on Women’s Day.

Kalodnae crossroads in Polesia, the ancestral homeland of the Belarusian people. (26,000 BC)

Residential neighborhoods of Minsk.

Belarus’ Legacy

This long-term documentary project explores several important places of memory across Belarus and reveals traces of the country's history in order to shed light on its present.
"Memory is constitutive of identity... It is precisely the discontinuity, the intermittence that best characterizes the Belarusian collective memory." Tatiana Glukhova

The occultation of the past for political purposes characterizes actual Belarus, slows down the emergence of a collective identity, favoring the perpetuation of the system put in place by Alexander Lukashenko over the past 30 years.
While the history of the Nazi German invasion is acknowledged, the very existence of Soviet mass executions and the explosion of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant — 70% of whose radioactive fallout contaminated Belarusian territory — has been erased from the collective imagination as much as possible.
Today, Russia is once again tightening its grip through the Astravets nuclear power plant and through Belarus’s participation in the war effort against Ukraine.

By bringing together historical and more recent traumatic events, the series questions the cycles created by forgetting and recreates a dialogue between two silences.
And a way of continuing to resist oppression through memory.

Belarus’ Legacy

More stories by Jef Bonifacino