Aliaksei Lastouski: MSA Memory Scholars at Risk Fellow

The first time I visited Lund University was at the end of January 2020. I was invited as one of the participants in a meeting of historians from the Nordic countries (Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway) and historians from Belarus. We discussed the state of the art in historical research and the possibilities for future projects. The initiators of this meeting were Finnish historians, but Lund University took over the organization, and Barbara Törnqvist-Plewa acted as the patron of the meeting. I was very happy to see Per Anders Rudling in Lund, whom I had known and become friends with for a long time. But it was the end of January 2020, news of the coronavirus epidemic was already spreading around the world, and soon all previous agreements, plans, and ideas collapsed. In the case of Belarus, the epidemic was superimposed on an acute political crisis; protests began after the presidential elections in August 2020, followed by state repressions.

Our region finally acquired a new face after the start of Russian aggression in Ukraine. For me, the beginning of the war coincided with my dismissal from Polotsk State University, but in the last days, as a university lecturer, I still managed to be one of the first to sign a collective petition of Belarusian intellectuals condemning the war.

In any case, my dismissal meant that I would no longer have a job in my profession in Belarus, and I had to leave the country, since the threat of arrest due to participation in protests still hung over me.

After that, my personal period of emigration began, burdened not only by the impossibility of returning to my home country, but also by the fact that I have Belarusian citizenship. Most of the offers of help that I received immediately after my dismissal from the university were withdrawn. Fortunately, I received support from the European Humanities University in Vilnius.

But I was also very happy to receive an invitation from Per Anders Rudling and Barbara Törnquest-Plewa about the possibility of coming to Lund University for MSA fellowship. I spent two months there, in October-November 2023. The university service helped with renting an apartment, which made my stay in a city overcrowded with students much easier. Unfortunately, the Swedish weather was not very pleasant, autumn was very rainy, but there was little to distract me from academic activities. I was glad to join a new academic environment, take part in seminars on topics close to me (for example, Memories making and taking place symposium, 05.10.2023), listen to discussions of articles and books. It was especially nice to get to know Joanna Beata Michlic, with whom we discussed the intellectual landscape of interwar Poland.

My stay in Lund gave me the opportunity to work on my research project on the current transformations of the image of Kastus’ Kalinouski. Once an unshakable hero of the Belarusian national pantheon, who even in Soviet times gained fame as a revolutionary, he became a stumbling block for the creation of a “common” Belarusian-Russian history, in fact, attempts by Russians to reformat Belarusian history under the slogans of unity and subordination to the “big brother”. I presented the results of my research at the faculty seminar on November 23, 2023, the subsequent discussion was very interesting for me. useful.

I also had to leave Lund to participate in some events. In Berlin, I took part in the conference “(Re)Considering Violence: New Configurations of History, Memory, and the Present in Belarusian and Neighboring Societies” (Hagen University, November 9-11). We also held a general meeting in Warsaw, where we discussed the prospects for creating the Belarusian Institute of Public History. A little later, I would be elected academic director of this organization of independent historians.

The meetings with Per Anders Rudling were especially warm, and I even managed to visit him and meet his children. The result of these conversations was the publication of a joint article, “A Silent Death: The Destruction of Academic Scholarship in Belarus”.

Another effect of my stay in Lund was the idea of ​​holding a conference on the politics of memory in Belarus. I prepared a preliminary concept for this conference, it received support from MSA, and is scheduled for February 27-28, 2025 at Lund University. My stay there gave me positive intellectual impulses, because in emigration, when you constantly solve problems with documents and finding a job, you have to spin like a squirrel in a wheel. This scholarship gave me the opportunity to collect my thoughts and decide on the future.

During this time, we managed to open a new history program at the European Humanities University, I received a Fulbright scholarship at Columbia University, wrote and published several good texts. Belarusian historians, whom the Lukashenko regime expelled from the country, united and now together we defend the academic view of the country’s history.

Finally, I would like to express purely human gratitude to those who helped me at a difficult moment in my life.