Astapova 2017

In Search for Truth: Surveillance Rumors and Vernacular Panopticon in Belarus
Author(s): Anastasiya Astapova

Source: The Journal of American Folklore , Vol. 130, No. 517 (Summer 2017), pp. 276-
304
Published by: University of Illinois Press on behalf of American Folklore Society
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/jamerfolk.130.517.0276
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Anastasiya Astapova
In Search for Truth: Surveillance Rumors

and Vernacular Panopticon in Belarus
In this article, I analyze rumors about surveillance—unverified expressions of

belief and narratives, which, despite their global omnipresence, are contextualized
by local peculiarities and modalities. I concentrate on the narratives recorded in
Belarus, notoriously referred to as “the last dictatorship of Europe.” There, the
rumors, largely inherited from the USSR, are reiterated due to the nontranspar-
ency of current legislation and other features of the Belarusian hegemonic regime,
serving to create the sense of perpetual surveillance.
Keywords
afs ethnographic thesaurus: Rumors, belief, legends,
surveillance, vernacular culture
Scholars studying surveillance suggest various societal shifts as crucial for

its rise—industrialization, urbanization, globalization, terrorism—but most of them
agree that surveillance emerged “as a dominant organizing practice of late modernity”
(Lyon, Haggerty, and Ball 2012:1), making its way through the diversity of political
regimes all over the world. As an academic response, an autonomous discipline of
surveillance studies has recently emerged from international relations, political sci-
ence, criminology, and the sociology of policing and technology (Bigo 2012:279).
In one of the most comprehensive books on this discipline, Routledge Handbook of
Surveillance Studies, Gary T. Marx claims that scholarly awareness serves as a reminder
that while state and commercial interests or new, expanded public-private hybrid
forms are watching us, we are watching them (2012:xxix).
Surveillance studies departs from the Foucauldian theoretical notion of the panop-
ticon, a concept that originated in the ideas of brothers Jeremy and Samuel Bentham.
The Benthams put the panopticon forward as a structure designed mostly for prisons
but also useful for schools, hospitals, and other institutions. Due to its form as a cir-
cular edifice with an inspection house in the center, a single watchman can observe
all inmates of an institution stationed around the perimeter, while the inmates are
not able to determine whether or not they are being watched (Bentham 1843).
Anastasiya Astapova is a research fellow in the Department of Estonian and Comparative Folklore,
University of Tartu
Journal of American Folklore 130(517):276–304

Copyright © 2017 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

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Astapova, Surveillance Rumors and Vernacular Panopticon 277
Figure 1. Panopticon structure by Jeremy Bentham (1843).
Later philosophers have often chosen the panopticon as a metaphor; however, it

was Michel Foucault who used the idea most influentially in his 1975 book Surveiller
et Punir (Discipline and Punish, 1977). Foucault defined modern prisons, schools,
universities, and other hierarchical institutions as panopticon structures with the
pervasive proclivity to observe and normalize. According to Foucault, such institu-
tions maximize efficiency by placing the subjects in a state of permanent visibility.
The consciousness of constant surveillance makes the panopticon so novel and ideal
for maintaining control that previous methods of domination cannot compete with
it. Foucault’s application of the panopticon and the immense research that followed
became the pre-eminent theoretical basis for surveillance studies. Surveillance schol-
ars often base their research on either a panoptic or a nonpanoptic view of surveillance:

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278 Journal of American Folklore 130 (2017)
the first is a negative view that relates it to repression and domination, while the second
one is more neutral and broad, seeing surveillance as a means of collecting data, a
technical process (Allmer 2011:569–81). Surveillance studies is truly interdisciplinary,
and its students of different backgrounds concentrate on the history of surveillance,
surveillance techniques (especially Internet and closed-circuit television [CCTV]
surveillance), crime and policing, ethics and the possibilities of limiting surveillance,
social divisions and resistance caused by surveillance (especially depending on gender
and colonial relations), and literature and film about surveillance. The field of surveil-
lance studies was for the most part instigated by the 9/11 and the London Under-
ground terrorist attacks and the consequent rise of surveillance (especially CCTV).
The leading centers of surveillance studies are in Queen’s University (Canada) and
the University of Texas, with the leading scholars of surveillance studies also based in
Open University (UK), University of Alberta, Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
and elsewhere. The discipline has its own Surveillance Studies Network, which hosts
conferences, seminars, and the journal Surveillance and Society.
One might suppose that surveillance studies concentrates on nondemocratic and
underdeveloped societies with their predisposition to lawlessness, but, with a few
exceptions,1 democracies, mainly of Anglo-Saxon origin, became the focus of sur-
veillance studies research. The examination of Western democracies is much more
accessible, as the organizers of surveillance appear to be more willing to speak to
researchers. For instance, Catarina Frois, the author of a book about public surveil-
lance in Portugal, stresses that in spite of her initial preconceptions about the difficulty
of the planned research, the authorities of a relatively young Portuguese democracy
were willing to share a lot of information about their monitoring strategies (Frois
2013).
Meanwhile, the sources for research in nondemocratic societies are almost exclu-
sively based on rumors—a genre generally avoided by scholars of international rela-
tions, political science, and surveillance studies. Folkloristics, however, seems to
have a well-developed apparatus for such research. With this in mind, I presented a
paper entitled “‘We Are Being Watched, Constantly’: The Contemporary Belarusian
Panopticon,” based on surveillance rumors recorded in Belarus, at a 2013 folklore
conference. The mere suggestion of studying this topic caused immediate criticism
from the conference audience. They argued that surveillance rumors are all true and
cannot be studied as folklore. The main disapproval arose from scholars of former
socialist countries, who were, unfortunately, well experienced in being watched, lis-
tened to, and taped. However, the refusal to study possibly truthful rumors is not
just a post-socialist problem in folklore. Writing about the legend—a genre that is
not easy or even necessary to distinguish from rumor—Carl Lindahl insists that the
bias of understanding legends “as stories that we know to be untrue, but which the
naïve teller does not” runs deep in the history of folklore studies (2012:141).2 Elliott
Oring also observes that although “folklorists have acknowledged that a narrative
does not have to be false to qualify as a legend,” this formal recognition is not really
implemented in practice since “folklorists gravitate to narratives that they almost
invariably believe to be false” (2008:159). Folklorist Yvonne Milspaw told me that a
US folklore journal refused to accept her article on folklore surrounding the nuclear

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meltdown at the Three Mile Island Nuclear Power Plant because the rumors she
recorded seemed truthful to the editor.3 This took place in the early 1980s, but judg-
ing from the reactions of folklorists to my paper, not much has changed since then.
Dundes’ famous “Who are the folk? Among others, we are!” (1980:19), no matter
how often cited, may still be rarely applied. In spite of the theoretical arguments, in
practice we are uneasy with researching our own oral traditions.
Surveillance is ubiquitous and undeniable. It is impossible to find a person who
has not experienced it to some extent. All of us become the subjects of video surveil-
lance in shopping malls or in the so-called “smart spaces” that analyze our choices in
music, books, or friends. Many historical and contemporary precedents—from the
opening of communist archives to the disclosures of Edward Snowden—reveal the
illegal surveillance that states have conducted on their citizens. These cases confirm
that our fears of surveillance are well founded. It is quite surprising that Regina Ben-
dix’s rhetorical question, “where is the ethnography of secret service cultures when
we need it most?” (2003:34), still remains unnoticed.
Surveillance is deeply implicated in the process of globalization, which causes similar
security control technologies to emerge throughout the world, resulting in similar
rumors about them. Yet, as David Murakami Wood notes, globalization does not mean
homogeneity, and surveillance remains conditioned by local and temporal contexts
(2012:340). In spite of the similarities, surveillance rumors’ modalities, pragmatics,
and historical backgrounds significantly differ. For instance, countries as different as
Uzbekistan and the United States encourage participatory surveillance. In the United
States, the slogan for a campaign launched by The Metropolitan Transportation Author-
ity was “If you see something, say something.” In Uzbekistan, the catchphrase encoun-
tered on placards in the metro (in Russian and Uzbek) is “Vigilance is a requirement of
time.” In spite of their huge social and political differences, both countries have reasons
for instilling suspicious attitudes in their citizens. While in the United States it is mostly
a result of the national tragedy of 9/11, in Uzbekistan it is grounded in anti-government
protests and terrorist attacks, which caused suspicious attitudes toward foreigners
too. Fears become contagious: tourists I encountered in my 2014 trip to Uzbekistan
sometimes claimed they were being spied on by the locals who were just volunteering
to show them around or who invited them to their homes. Fears in the United States
have had their own effects. Uli Linke and Danielle Taana Smith describe a case where
a family of Muslims was removed from a US airliner after passengers were distressed
by their conversation about the safest place to sit on the plane (2009:1). Surveillance
stories, although deeply rooted in globally ubiquitous surveillance practices, have dif-
ferent backgrounds and consequences. It is not merely the level of democratization
(Uzbekistan is quite a closed country) that seems to define rumors about surveillance;
they differ depending on national traumas and state politics.
While it is logical to think that it is the totalitarian regimes that employ an immense
surveillance apparatus and, accordingly, produce a lot of rumors, it is, in fact, the
United Kingdom that, due to dissemination of video monitoring, is called a “Maxi-
mum Surveillance Society” by surveillance study scholars (Norris and Armstrong
1999). Why then is surveillance perceived as more characteristic—by both local
and foreign judges—of nondemocratic regimes? To answer this question, I examine

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surveillance rumors in and about Belarus, a country often referred to as “the last
dictatorship of Europe” (“Belarus Is the Last Dictatorship” 2005).
Methodology and Terminology
In this study, I use research from both folklore and surveillance studies. In many ways,
the two disciplines parallel each other by concentrating on the same problems. For
instance, the 9/11 attacks pushed both disciplines to make a radical shift, resulting in
multiple surveillance studies publications on security measures and their ethics, as
well as folklore research on conspiracy theories, rumors, and jokes. The intersection
of the scholarship generated by the two approaches is productive.
My research stems from ongoing observation of the Belarusian political situa-
tion, expressed in informal and unrecorded talks, mass media readings, and public
events—both state-supported and oppositional. But most of the data I rely on in this
article comes from over 50 interviews I carried out between 2011 and 2014 on the
issues of political and ethnic identity with Belarusians living in Belarus and abroad.
Most of the interviews were held in the cities of Vitebsk and Minsk. With almost 2
million people, Minsk is the capital of Belarus, while Vitebsk, with 363,000 people,
is the country’s fourth largest city. Vitebsk is my native town, and the connections I
have there were very helpful for finding interviewees. Situated in the north of Belarus
close to the Russian border, Vitebsk is one of the most Russified cities, while Minsk
has a higher number of Belarusian speakers. This was also reflected in the language
of the interviews, which in Minsk were often conducted in Belarusian. A smaller
number of the interviews were conducted among the Belarusian diaspora in Russia,
the United Kingdom, the United States, Poland, Estonia, Lithuania, and China.
Belarusian friends posted information on social networking sites announcing that
there would be a native scholar coming to Belarus to do research on political and
ethnic identity. People who were interested in voicing their opinions on these issues
contacted me. Also, whenever I went to a foreign country, I looked for Belarusians
through acquaintances or by simply searching for them on the Internet in the countries
I was visiting (these were mainly very active people I could find through Googling,
for instance, “Belarusians in Harbin”). After the interviews, some of my interlocu-
tors told me about other people who might be willing to express their views on the
political issues in which I was interested. Using these methods, I found most of my
respondents, who were mainly males between 25 and 45 years of age. It seems to me
that they were representative of the most politically aware and interested members of
Belarusian society and its diaspora. This particular set of interviewees—more engaged
than average with politics and the dissident media, young enough to use the Inter-
net and to care about its safety—is, of course, not representative of the Belarusian
population as a whole. The issue of surveillance is, perhaps, not so important for the
average Belarusian as it was for my typical interviewee. Still, the concerns of the latter
are illustrative of general fears and are recurrent in the interviews of females and/or
older people too.
Among other questions, I asked my interviewees about cases of surveillance and
their consequences. Very often there was no need to ask; the topic emerged, for

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instance, when they discussed the safety of telling a political joke in Belarus or
expressed a reluctance to answer certain questions. Below, I will analyze excerpts
from interviews, transcribed verbatim and translated from Russian or Belarusian.
Due to the anonymity promised to the participants, they are referred to by pseud-
onyms, accompanied by the data about the time and place of the interviews. My own
questions and the remarks I made during the interviews are marked with square
brackets.
I realize that the panopticon rumors I read, overheard, or recorded in the interviews
sprang from understandings and misunderstandings of the circumstantial evidence
of surveillance. Nevertheless, trained as a folklorist, I do not aim to establish whether
the stories recorded are true or false. Admitting “the difficulty of trying to investigate
what by its very nature is not intended to be revealed” (Bendix and Bendix 2003:8),
I suggest analyzing the narratives about surveillance as rumors due to the absence
of their verification. Widely repeated as true, their veracity remains unconfirmed.
However, as the interviews I recorded show, these nonverified narratives become the
only source of knowledge about surveillance for Belarusians. These rumors paradoxi-
cally originate from the state’s attempt to preserve the country’s safety and stability
by obscuring information about its defensive mechanism—surveillance. As a result,
a vernacular discourse of surveillance rumors becomes the only source of informa-
tion about the issue, permitting concealed sentiments to enter public debate (Fine
and Ellis 2010:8). In the 1980s, the rumors surrounding the Chernobyl catastrophe
worked similarly in the Soviet Union, where the state provided either none or very
few of the verified facts (Fialkova 2001). Like rumors about Hiroshima (Miller 1985),
AIDS (Goldstein 2004), and September 11 (Marks 2001), they serve to make collective
sense in an ambiguous situation and attempt to manage the potential threat (DiFonzo
and Bordia 2007a:21–3), and they become very pervasive and influential in defining
a community response to new issues. Undoubtedly, the classic definition of Tamotsu
Shibutani of a rumor as “a recurrent form of communication through which men
caught together in an ambiguous situation attempt to construct a meaningful inter-
pretation of it” (1966:17) embraces the major features of the surveillance narratives.
Looking at the surveillance discourse in the frame of rumors in turn empowers us to
compare their motifs, functions, and impact, depending on their circumstances and
the concerns surrounding them in a particular society. Studying the general reasons
for the rumors’ popularity, we can locate differences, since “even minor variations
can reveal culture specific concerns” (Goldstein 2004:36).
Even though I choose to refer to the recorded stories as rumors, I should admit
that the genre hardly has any stable emic name. The stories can also easily fall into the
category of contemporary legend, based on traditional themes and modern motifs that
circulate orally in multiple versions and are told as if they are true or at least plausible
(Turner 1993:5), “maps by which one can determine what has happened, what is hap-
pening and what will happen” (Ellis 1989:202). Legend is traditionally regarded as a
more elaborate expression of belief than a “solidified rumor” (Allport and Postman
1947:162), although the boundaries between the two are hazy (Fine and Ellis 2010:4;
Kapferer 1990:9; Turner 1993:5; Goldstein 2004:25). At least as early as 1982, folklor-
ist Paul Smith noticed the “fluidity” of legend and rumor texts, changing forms and

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motifs not only from person to person but also from one telling to another in the
repertoire of the same person (1984). Many scholars refrain from defining each story
as representative of a rumor or a legend only, as they recognize that the material they
collect moves back and forth between rumor and legend, being nevertheless a part of
a clearly related narrative complex (Turner 1993:5; Goldstein 2004:27). Some remain
true to the classification, though. Nicholas DiFonzo and Prashant Bordia insist there
must be differentiation between rumor and legend (and gossip). They define rumor
as “unverified and instrumentally relevant information statements in circulation that
arise in the contexts of ambiguity, danger or potential threat, and that function to help
people make sense and manage risk” (2007b:13). DiFonzo and Bordia’s definition of
legends as “stories of unusual, humorous or horrible events that contain themes related
to the modern world . . . told as something that did or may have happened, variations
of which are found in numerous places and times, and contain moral implications”
(13) is also suitable to the stories I recorded (with a slightly different view on the moral
implications), thus making the classification problematic.
The matter is further complicated as the stories about surveillance may also be
defined as conspiracy theories alleging that “a secret, omnipotent individual or group
covertly controls the political and social order” (Fenster 1999:1). Conspiracy theories
are said to be not precisely rumors, but constructed out of rumors—plausible elements
combined in a totalizing discourse (Fine and Ellis 2010:52; Frankfurter 2006:2). These
narratives take disorder and make it orderly by providing one explanation—“a cleverly
forged key” making sense of “large swaths of an otherwise ambiguous world” (Fine
and Ellis 2010:52). Fine and Ellis also insist that the power of conspiracy theory is
that it connects rumors with documented, official facts (52), thus admitting that the
rumor is something that is not officially documented. In this sense, the surveillance
discourse can be seen as a conspiracy theory, as it is a blend of undocumented rumors
connected with a minimum of information from official sources.
I choose to refer to the stories I recorded as rumors because (1) I fail when trying
to classify each text as part of a particular category other than rumor, a term that
appears to be most inclusive; (2) rumor is less pejorative than the terms “legend” and
“conspiracy theory”; and (3) viewing the stories as rumors allows me to embrace not
only the basic beliefs (e.g., “mobile phones are tapped”) but also more fully developed
narratives that contain such beliefs.
In the following sections, I analyze Belarusian rumors about surveillance according
to their main determinants and themes. As it usually happens, it is the country’s past
that largely underlies current perceptions.
Belarusian Recent Past and Present
Throughout its early history, Belarus was a member of the Great Duchy of Lithuania
and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Beginning at the end of the eighteenth
century, a prolonged era of Russification culminating in Soviet rule followed. While
we know very little about surveillance in the pre-Russian past of Belarus, abundant
materials from both the Russian Empire and the USSR as well as the number of

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people persecuted as a result of being surveilled leads many scholars to compare its
consequences to those of the European Inquisition.
Although surveillance studies scholarship relies strongly on Foucault, it is rarely
mentioned that the model of the Benthams’ panopticon that inspired Foucault had
been designed in Belarus, on the estate of Krichev in the southern Mogilev prov-
ince, which at the time was part of Russia (Druzhinina 1959:82–4; Zakalinskaya
1958:56–71). The estate belonged to Prince Grigorii Potemkin, the most influential
of Catherine the Great’s favorites during the 1780s. Samuel and Jeremy Bentham
were working there at the same time. It was Samuel who contrived the plan of the
Inspection House as a response to the need for disciplining the workforce. It is also
important to know that the Krichev estate was part of the famous Potemkin village
itinerary—a 6,000-mile round-trip through the newly acquired territories of what is
now Ukraine. Prepared by Potemkin to impress Catherine the Great, the estates were
frequently used for extravagant spectacles and often completely transformed into
idealized or imaginary foreign landscapes. Samuel Bentham and Potemkin attempted
to transform the Krichev estate into a landscape of enlightened prosperity too. It was
amidst this theater of horticulture, model factories, palaces, and gardens that the
panopticon was to be built. In effect, it subsumed the spatial structure of the Russian
estate into a single building: the family house. The nobleman was placed at the center,
his peasant workforce around him. Like Krichev itself, the panopticon presented an
idealization of what the Russian estate might become under the watchful eye of the
enlightened Empress Catherine and her nobility: a Western, illuminating produc-
tion utopia, constructed amidst the horticultural splendor of a restored Eden. The
panopticon devised by Samuel Bentham was deeply embedded in a specific context
of absolutist Russia. Jeremy Bentham, in turn, was struck by his brother’s idea and
incorporated it into his own plans for a new prison for Middlesex. The design of
the panopticon at Krichev never materialized, but the idea itself did have its origin
in the Russian Empire context (Werrett 1999). So did many other techniques of
surveillance.
Politicheskii sysk (political detective work) of the Russian Empire implemented
massive surveillance achieved mainly through spying on citizens and foreigners and
the encouragement of denunciations. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, the
idea of “crime against the state” (gosudarstvennoe prestuplenie) as “an offense against
the interests of the state and people” first appeared in Russia (Anisimov 1999:18). It
originated from the growing need to deal with crimes against the tsar, his power, and
his property. The spies of politicheskii sysk were not always trained as police cadres.
Disguised soldiers, minor officials, merchants, or petty criminals released to work
off their crimes were also employed to monitor their fellows at social events, taverns,
or saunas. Anyone could report on a compatriot. As Nina Golikova, who studied
the documents from the so-called Preobrazhenskii Prikaz (the institution investi-
gating political crimes) notes, 767 out of 772 cases she looked through started with
denunciations (1957:58). Surveillance also made writing dangerous: postal censorship
existed at least since the time of Peter the Great, and letters were often tracked. Even
keeping a diary was not safe (Anisimov 1999:255–6). Through all these sources, the

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employees of politicheskii sysk were looking for signs of potential treason. Among these
signs, they focused on verbal insults against the tsars and officials and discussions of
their shady deeds, and they even identified some words as potentially traitorous. For
instance, those that used the words bunt (riot) or izmena (treason) were arrested and
interrogated (Anisimov 1999:37).
Along with other Russian domains, the Belarusian territory was subject to the poli-
cies described for both Tsarist and Soviet Russia. In spite of its criticism of Tsarism,
the Soviet Empire not only adopted its methods but also elevated its security services,
making them more professional and hierarchical. The whole structure of the surveil-
lance unit—from the individual informers (informants) to the Central Party, NKVD,4
and KGB5—was involved in monitoring public opinion and punishing nonconformist
thinkers (Davies 1997:10). Hiroaki Kuromiya acknowledges that it is hardly possible
to establish the extent of those involved in NKVD activities because it is not known
exactly how many secret informers, collaborators, and volunteers were employed
(2007:47).
Treason against the state was first of all expected from foreigners, former elites,
intelligentsia, and youth, due to their inclination to dissent. Enemies could be found
even among friends and neighbors, should they sabotage collective work. The damage
ascribed to such sleepers6 became the perfect excuse for the revolution not working
the way it was supposed to. Denunciations and complaints from ordinary people were
encouraged (Fitzpatrick 2008:197–227). Many people surveilled by professionals and
informed against by friends were charged under the notorious 58.10 “anti-Soviet agita-
tion” article of the Soviet Penal Code for expressing opinions that, as the authorities
judged, aimed at undermining Soviet power. With the elastic definition of this article
(Davies 1997:5), the numbers of those punished under it fluctuated and grew into
Stalin’s Great Terror. The state was omnipresent in private life, and not only through
direct surveillance and punishment: the feeling of the panopticon was amplified by
the limitless domination of the state in the bureaucracy, in distribution of goods, and
in employment.
Practices of surveillance were implemented by the Soviets in the territory of Belarus
as well. For instance, Andrew Savchenko describes how the Soviets extended the net-
work of secret police to the territory of Western Belarus, newly acquired from Poland,
in 1939. The fear of seemingly random arrests forced peasants, even in remote and
isolated villages, to display loyalty and devotion to the new rulers through denuncia-
tions and voluntary collaboration with the secret police (2009:120–1). This was gener-
ally true for the whole territory of what is contemporary Belarus. Persecution there
was ubiquitous and could befall virtually anyone for no apparent reason whatsoever
(2009:94).
This experience undoubtedly became one of the determinants of attitudes and
rumors about surveillance in contemporary Belarus. As Frois noticed, repressive
regimes that used methods of control and identification of citizens as a means to
impose political and moral values continue to leave a mark on social life regardless
of their current stage of development (2013:25). Ülo Valk (2011) has shown how in
Estonia, another post-Soviet country, contemporary beliefs in secret superpowers echo
the motifs of Soviet rumors about the control of the KGB. In 2000, Valk’s interviewee

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claimed to have discovered in a meadow not far from his home an omniscient super-
civilization of Ivirians possessing secret information about the world structure. In the
same interview, he referred to the immense knowledge and potencies of the Soviet
KGB, arguing that the KGB had held experiments in certain residential districts with
generators that emitted vibrations making it easier to control and manipulate people
but causing disease as well. Valk also remembers how in the 1980s, his friend told him
about a new surveillance technology that allowed one to see “through other people’s
eyes”; he had heard about this from his acquaintance who he thought was a KGB
informer (2011:858–60). While in post-Soviet democratic Estonia, the beliefs about
the controlling powers were often reactivated due to a wave of New Age spirituality,
post-Soviet Belarus had a very different but much more solid ground for the rebirth
of surveillance rumors.
In 1991, Belarus became independent from the Soviet Union, providing the first
serious opportunity to establish its own ethnic distinctiveness and direction for politi-
cal development. The long-lasting Russification of the country, mentioned above, had
influenced its ethnic identity, not often distinguished from Russian. The two peoples
shared a long history, domineering Orthodox religion, and similar languages. The
Belarusian language was often marginalized in favor of Russian and became unpopular
even among Belarusians. The Russian language gave greater access to education and
employment, while Belarusian was often perceived as a rural dialect. The contrast
between this history of Russification and the earlier European past brought young
independent Belarus to the crossroads of two competing constructions of identity.
While the pro-European direction emphasized an imagined Golden Age in the Great
Duchy of Lithuania, pro-Russian moods were nurtured by nostalgic memories of
Soviet stability and the brotherhood of Slavs.
In 1994, choosing between these two constructs, Belarus elected its first president.
The main candidates for election were Zianon Pazniak, a radical nationalist, and Alex-
ander Lukashenka, a candidate “of the people.” Representing two different discourses,
Pazniak frequently made aggressive and nationalistic statements, while Lukashenka
appealed to Soviet patriotism and made promises of a return to socialist security.
Figure 2. Cartoon
“Lukashenko—the head of the
prison” (the contours of the
prison resemble the contours of
the Belarusian border)
(“Lukashenko Wants” 2013).

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Once elected, Lukashenka largely fulfilled his commitment to reviving the socialist
way of life, along with the KGB, bureaucracy, and the practice of blaming the West
for Belarusian troubles. These attitudes, familiar to Belarusians, became the basis of
his political success. Surveillance was justified as preventing imagined or real protest,
terrorist attacks, and foreign intervention. The government’s deep concern about
stability was demonstrated frequently enough to rekindle the sense of a panopticon
due to the omnipresence of the state, the president, and special services in private life.
The methods employed by the government to secure the well-being of its citizens,
however, remain concealed. For instance, an ordinary Belarusian citizen does not have
access to reliable sources of information about the actual numbers of those involved
in the security services. The lack of official information generates recurrent rumors
such as that there is one militiaman per 3-to-10 citizens. In an attempt to get precise
numbers, maverick Belarusian political activists refer to data from the International
Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), the leading authority on global security, which
claims that there are 7.6 active military men per 1,000 citizens in Belarus, compared to
2.3 in Germany, 4.3 in Venezuela, 7.2 in Russia, and 2.6 in Latvia (Preiherman 2013).
These numbers and scales—from the ones encountered in the rumors to the ones
based on IISS data—make Belarus one of the most militarized countries in the former
Soviet Union. It is little wonder that people imagine the secret services, militia, and
army as an omnipotent Big Brother. This feeling is heightened because it is unclear
how the power is distributed and who is responsible for what. Still, the scariest and
most inscrutable secret service is perhaps the KGB. Belarus is the only country in the
former Soviet Union that retained this name for the Committee for State Security.
Furthermore, there is still a monument to Felix Dzerzhinsky—the infamous head of
Soviet Cheka (Commission to Combat Counter-Revolution and Sabotage)—at the
KGB’s main headquarters.
The faithfulness to Soviet standards of secret services does not only reflect the ideals
of the government, but also influences the continuity of rumors about these services.
Most of my interviewees never had a personal encounter with the KGB. Knowledge
of it came rather from a strong oral tradition about the institution. In an interview I
conducted in 2011, Igor, a political refugee living in a European country whose family
members were nonconformists from the very beginning of Lukashenka’s rule, claimed
that the KGB School in Minsk had been the strongest within the Soviet Union. He
also argued that the contemporary Belarusian KGB inherited a lot of its tools and
techniques from the earlier KGB school and still possessed powerful methods for
the surveillance and persecution of those who would commit political crimes. The
belief in the immense power of the KGB is indeed widespread, with various rationales
serving for its justification. Anna Ivanovna, an elderly woman I interviewed in Minsk
in 2012, emphasized that the present Belarusian KGB School was still the best, by
arguing that even Vladimir Putin, the current Russian president, had studied there.
The power Putin has, she thought, is also rooted in his education in a Belarusian KGB
School. The legacy of the Soviet belief in KGB strength includes motifs stating that
the secret police is especially threatening to alternative thinkers, such as intelligentsia,
foreigners, youth, journalists, and other potential or current dissidents.

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Dissidence and Surveillance
Surveillance studies prove that surveillance is disproportionally targeted at the mar-

ginal (Murakami Wood 2012:340) as a way of imposing norms on those who have
been categorized as “abnormal” (Fiske 1998:81). In Belarus, there are also active and
passive nonconformists who are especially sensitive to the possibilities of surveillance
and from whom I most often recorded stories. The dissident movement has become
one of the major sources of rumors about the panopticon, and many stories group
around violently surveilled and suppressed protests and their aftermath. I categorize
these stories as rumors because they remain unconfirmed by the official discourse.
The study of these rumors is the only possibility of studying surveillance in Belarus,
unlike the situation with surveillance studies in Anglo-Saxon democracies, mentioned
before, in which a scholar may gain information from the authorities.
Following two consecutive terms as president, Alexander Lukashenka changed the
constitution through a referendum, enabling him to run yet again. He was elected to
another two terms. A minority protested, with tension increasing after every election.
The protests involving the largest number of people took place in the capital, Minsk,
and were referred to as “Ploshcha” (“square,” where the protests were held). These
demonstrations were violently suppressed by the state; the protesters were badly
beaten and often arrested. My interviewees also reported that their phone signals
were monitored during demonstrations, and personal letters about their mere interest
or plans to participate in the protests were read by the KGB. Consider the following
account from an interview I recorded:
My Belarusian-speaking friend studies at school; when she was only about 16 years
old, she communicated with people who organized the meetings at Ploshchas. She
was just communicating with them, she never even wanted to participate in it, and
she just supported their idea. Her mother received a call from the KGB advising her
to calm down the daughter, they reminded the mother that her contract at school (she
was a teacher) was expiring. And her mother forbade her to participate in anything—
no matter a folk choir or dances. [Author: But how did they know?] Everything is
on a platter on social networks—our words and our thoughts. It can be easily read.
According to the story, the young girl’s mother was threatened with dismissal because
her 16-year-old daughter supposedly was interested in dissent. This interest was
revealed by the KGB surveilling her correspondence in vk.com, a social network
similar to Facebook. The surveillance was illegal and unexpected; the punishment
that followed did not fit the “crime,” nor was it directed at the supposed offender.
The teacher threatened with dismissal, moreover, was a single mother: losing her job
and the general situation of unemployment was also a serious threat for her family’s
well-being. Finally, gossip about why she was dismissed would have been a source of
shame for her and her daughter.
The stories of average people threatened or persecuted when they or their close
relatives merely thought about change constitute a widespread plot. Similar stories
come from mature dissidents: the narratives about unfair persecution resulting from

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surveillance become an important part of their publications in nongovernmental

media sources. For instance, the 2006 and 2010 presidential elections were followed
by protest rallies that were brutally suppressed. Several presidential candidates and
their supporters (including journalists) were beaten badly, arrested, and accused of
organizing or participating in the riots. Once released, many of them became politi-
cal refugees in democratic countries, where they tried to disseminate their truths
about what was happening in Belarus through the mass media channels they cre-
ated and maintained. Belarusian oppositional press headquarters, although usually
based in the European Union, are represented by websites accessible from Belarus.
Certainly they are much less popular—if even known—than the state-supported or
state-approved press. Lacking the channels for transmitting their ideas, compared to
the dissemination of the official propaganda machine, the oppositional press depicts
the gruesomeness of the regime, frequently employing sensationalism to attract atten-
tion to their point of view and to bolster people’s fears by spreading rumors. In their
unequal struggle with Belarusian official ideology and with each other, oppositionists
try to hit the target audience in the most direct ways through concerns people already
have. The rumors of suppression often have similar plots: a recurrent motif of being
surveilled before being detained, lists of advice useful for avoiding or diminishing
surveillance, and the anonymous confessions of the employees of the KGB or of the
phone network (presumably designed to surveil, as well). It is hard to blame the
dissidents; in circumstances of political oppression, many choose to tell a riveting
narrative to make other people acknowledge the truth of political oppression.
The panopticon-like image drawn by the dissident press is, however, contested
by government-controlled television and newspapers that constantly emphasize the
country’s stability and offer promises of a better tomorrow. Nelly Bekus-Goncharova
(2003) notes that the state and the independent media remain locked in separate
discourses, neither of which provide an accurate portrait of what is really happen-
ing in Belarus. The subjects most essential to the matter of Belarusian public life are
being interpreted in two opposite ways. Each discourse tries to provide a privatized,
singular interpretation of the Belarusian situation, and in doing so, each excludes the
other (Bekus-Goncharova 2003). Interested parties—the government and the opposi-
tion—also rationalize and interpret the process of surveillance differently. While the
state appeals directly to collective concerns about security, oppositional media only
depicts surveillance in the rumors reflecting the totalitarianism of the state. While
the conformists see the former as an exaggeration, the dissidents refuse to acknowl-
edge that surveillance is in many ways advocated by the citizens themselves, ready
to sacrifice their privacy for the sake of stability.
For instance, while the supporters of Lukashenka frequently use the phrase “What-
ever, but not a war” (Lish by ne bylo voiny), appealing to the national trauma of the
Second World War, which has deeply penetrated the mentalities of Belarusians, the
dissidents strive for alternative interpretations of the war’s history. They forget that
the trauma of war has been used for years to support and promote Soviet, and later
Lukashenka’s, ideology (Kotljarchuk 2013) and cannot be erased or ideologically
changed so quickly. Belarus was one of the first Soviet republics to be invaded by
the Nazis in World War II. The country was purposefully and utterly destroyed, and

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nearly every family suffered casualties. Current political stability is often achieved
by emphasizing issues of security, giving more guarantees to the traumatized people.
However, it does not suit the marginalized dissidents who are striving for change.
Choosing which discourse—state or dissident—to believe is a big problem, involv-
ing the negotiation of ethnic identity. While the current Belarusian regime appeals to
the Soviet, Russified past and erases Belarusian identity, the dissidents mostly insist on
the uniqueness of Belarusians and their distinctiveness from Russians. Correspond-
ingly, the dissidents see rumors about surveillance and the totalitarian panopticon
in Belarus as confirmation of a need for change, breaking through the frames of the
socialist past and present. Speaking to general fears, the dissidents use rumors to
challenge and resist the government’s actions (Fine and Ellis 2010:6); built around
a political impulse, the stories strive for knowledge, implying that the citizens have
the right to know about the emerging menace (25). The rumors about surveillance
become a tool for debate about the country’s politics and ethnic identity. As Gary
Alan Fine and Patricia Turner remark: “Motive is the worm in the apple of belief ”
(2001:74).
Negotiating the choice of controlling narratives and central mythologies is certainly
one of the major functions of rumors. As explanations, rumors present different
points of view (Smith 1995:12). Carl Smith, researching the documented reactions to
the Great Chicago Fire and the Haymarket Bombing, shows how rumors emerge in
periods of transition and conflict, becoming a matter of contention between romantic
and realistic imagination and interpretation (1995:98). Similarly, Linda Dégh writes
about the ideology of legends—“the setting of a system of belief on which legends
can thrive”—and the impact the news has on spreading, creating, and maintaining
different systems of belief (2001:202). The types of contentions may be different, but
they are always present where the rumors are. The choice of which rumor to tell, to
trust, or to spread is ideologically grounded.
Terrorist Attacks
In many countries, the upgrading of security policies involving surveillance can rea-
sonably be traced to specific events. The best known is, perhaps, the case of the 9/11
attack in the United States, which caused a great increase in surveillance and, con-
sequently, marginalization and prejudice against certain social groups. The United
Kingdom’s turn into a maximum surveillance society largely happened due to the
abduction of a 2-year-old from a shopping center (the kidnappers were caught as a
result of having been captured on film). Similarly, Belarus had its moment of public
crisis resulting in calls for the reinforcement of watching. After terrorist attacks in
Vitebsk in 2005 (with 52 people injured) and in Minsk in 2008 (54 people injured),
the Minsk metro was bombed in 2011 and at least 15 people were killed. Those lead-
ing the investigation linked all the terrorist attacks together, and almost immediately,
two suspects were detained based on obscure and conflicting videos from several
metro cameras. A lathe operator and a carpenter, both in their early twenties, were
executed after a very brief trial in which they confessed their guilt. The attacks caused
a multiplicity of rumors about those who could have organized it: the United States,

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President Lukashenka’s son, Lukashenka himself, dissidents, extremist organizations, a

mentally ill criminal, and so forth. The official version provided no explanation of the
reasons for the attack or the possible motives of the accused, Dzimitry Kanavalau and
Uladzislau Kavalyou. The official press covered the court case briefly, mostly sympa-
thizing with the victims of the terrorist attacks; meanwhile, the dissident accounts were
much more detailed and largely commiserated with the accused and their families
(in particular, the mother of Uladzislau Kavalyou, who, unlike Kanavalau’s relatives,
cooperated with the dissident press). After the sentencing, Alexander Lukashenka
refused to grant pardon to the accused. While the supporters of Lukashenka mostly
agreed with the outcome of the case, many other people were unsure about both the
outcome and the need for capital punishment. The possibility of the irrevocable death
of an innocent caused by surveillance is too well known to the Belarusian citizens,
especially since the Stalinist terror.
Beliefs that the accused lacked both the motives and the qualifications to make a
bomb, along with their unseemly fast detention, trial, and punishment, left a lot of
questions unresolved; the lack of accountability prompted the emergence of rumors.
Although the state officially closed the case, these questions generated many con-
spiracy theories about the explosion. The attack took place in the middle of a severe
economic crisis in Belarus, when prices rose and foreign currency was not available
for exchange in the banks. As a result, many thought that the terrorist attack was
organized by the government to distract people’s attention from the economic prob-
lems and that those accused and executed were just randomly chosen.
Bombings in Belarus certainly became a turning point for its citizens’ sense of
security. It is not only the bombings, but also the state that is now seen as potentially
threatening, as one of my male interviewees claimed in Vitebsk in 2012:
It was the time just after the Vitebsk terrorist attack, when we got into an argument
with my colleague. We started to discuss how people know how to make the explo-
sives, are they so good at chemistry? It is possible to find information about it on the
Internet, we agreed. Next morning this colleague’s wife retold our conversation in
her workplace, while having coffee. Her boss got interested, used the Internet, and
searched how to make a bomb. He said that there were almost no useful links, just
rubbish, they laughed and forgot about it. Closer to lunchtime a comrade militiaman
appeared in uniform, asking the boss for a private talk. The militiaman opened his
folder, and there was a considerable printout of the websites the boss had visited.
The militiaman asked, “Why do you actually visit these websites, do you know that
it is a crime? Be careful, next time do not be so naughty.”
I told this story at work, and my colleagues dropped their jaws, concluding, “We
should not use the Internet at all, it is so dangerous.”
Unanswered questions caused people to make their own inquiries about the case
and reinforced the rumors about surveillance, confirming that anyone may become
its victim. It is also important how fast the reaction of the militia to the boss’s mis-
conduct was: he searched for how to make a bomb after his morning coffee, and the
militiaman appeared before lunchtime. The efficiency of the secret services is shown

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as almost a reflex. Although the boss from the interview escaped punishment for
his supposed crime, the story about him became a warning for average Belarusians
about the state’s might and omnipresence, as the moral at the end shows. Under the
circumstances of a lack of knowledge, such rumors become cautionary tales for the
citizenry.
Complaints and Denunciations
When one of the first terrorist attacks happened in Vitebsk in 2005, Siarhei, a school-
mate of mine of rather heterodox views, was hosting a Norwegian visitor in his home.
Several years after the bombing, in 2013, he told me that another schoolmate of ours
and friend of his, Alexei, had reported this Norwegian tourist to the special services
to make sure that this foreigner had not been involved in the attack. The friend had
been employed at the Belarusian Republican Youth Union—the successor of the
USSR’s Leninist Communist Youth League and the largest youth group in Belarus
supported by the Belarusian government and promoting its ideology. Like Alexei,
many of those who are employed in this youth union are committed to its values,
sometimes trying to save the country from the threat of potential enemies. Often,
young people try to get employed in the Union since it guarantees many benefits
and promises a successful career. The Soviet idea of complaint and denunciation
for the sake of personal privilege or as part of the struggle against assumed foes
seems to have been revived in Belarus. Complaints are sometimes initiated by the
supporters of the regime against alternative thinkers, as happened in the story of
maverick Siarhei and pro-Lukashenka Alexei despite their long acquaintance and
companionship.
This and similar rumors show that one should always remain alert: even a friend
may initiate a complaint. It is not only terrorism that provokes extreme watchfulness
but the politics of the state that make complaints an effective tool used for different
purposes. While the US experience of terrorism developed a rubric of “preparedness”
or “readiness” (Andrejevic 2007), Belarus developed a rubric of denunciations and
complaints not necessarily related to the terrorist attacks. As I demonstrated in my
historical overview, denunciations were encouraged for at least two centuries. Cur-
rent socialist politics supports the value of complaint as well: the surveillance and
complaints against neighbors and co-workers in Belarus have been highly effective
in practice. For instance, the complaints became an instrument of influence and
punishment within the condition of high unemployment. My interviewees working
in different organizations told me about an unspoken rule that three complaints—no
matter of what quality—are always followed by a dismissal. They often stated that
the complaints are unsubstantiated, and the one who complains is always regarded
de facto as right, over the target of the complaint. Dismissal following a complaint is
scary also due to the widespread belief that it is impossible for the one dismissed to
find another job. On the level of discussion, there is general condemnation of those
who complain, also reflected in a number of pejorative terms used to label the one
who complains—shestiorka (from criminal jargon, also, “one who cringes”), stukach

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(lit. “one who knocks”), donoschik (lit. “one who reports”); these latter two words
mean “informer” or “sneak”—and the corresponding verbs for denoting complain-
ing: shesterit’, stuchat’, donosit’. Despite this condemnation, in practice, participatory
surveillance is believed to be highly efficient.
Surveillance of Telecommunications
During Soviet times, poor phone connections often caused overlap between two
separate telephone conversations, and this often generated the belief that KGB agents
were always listening. Today, variations of this rumor are still extremely strong, and
although it has been upgraded to contemporary technological realities, political dis-
sidents still report feeling endangered. A former political activist, Andrei, who has
now settled down with a family and given up his activities, still feels that he is being
surveilled (interview recorded in Minsk, 2013):
They may listen to all mobile phone calls. It does not mean that the Major is now
listening to us, but, as our phones now have microphones, they are switched on
and any comrade Major may listen to what we are talking about. There is not even
a need to make calls for it, it is still possible to listen to a phone that is switched off,
even with the battery removed. It is possible since the electrical contour [circuit]
connected to the microphone still sends this information to the air. But tapping a
phone that is switched off is very expensive, they may fork out the money for it, but
only if they really need it, for a very important person. The KGB exists, it has its tools.
I am still on their list, not erased. When [dissident] meetings are held in town, my
phone loses its charge very fast. It means that it constantly works in the heightened
regime, because they listen to it.
The recurrent motifs of not being able to avoid surveillance no matter how hard one
tries, the vulnerability of (even former) dissidents “on the list,” and the danger coming
from gadgets are reiterated in this piece. It is little wonder that this and other inter-
views reference the Major from the well-known Soviet joke, still retold and widely
known in Belarus as well as in other post-Soviet countries:
A hotel. A room for four with four strangers. Three of them soon open a bottle of
vodka and proceed to get acquainted, then drunk, then noisy, singing and telling
political jokes. The fourth one desperately tries to get some sleep; finally, frustrated,
he surreptitiously leaves the room, goes downstairs, and asks the lady concierge to
bring tea to Room 67 in 10 minutes. Then he returns and joins the party.
Five minutes later, he bends over an ashtray and says with utter nonchalance:
“Comrade Major, some tea to Room 67, please.” In a few minutes, there’s a knock at
the door, and in comes the lady concierge with a tea tray. The room falls silent; the
party dies a sudden death, and the joker finally gets to sleep.
The next morning he wakes up alone in the room. Surprised, he runs downstairs
and asks the concierge where his neighbors have gone. “Oh, the KGB has arrested
them!” she answers. “B-but . . . but what about me?” asks the guy in terror. “Oh, well,
they decided to let you go. You made Comrade Major laugh a lot with your tea joke.”
(“KGB. Jokes” 2006)

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A significant iterant motif of this story and the joke it references is the omnipresence of
surveillance, when those who do not expect it find that they are the objects of watch-
ing. This is, perhaps, the main theme of Belarusian surveillance rumors. For instance,
another interviewee, Nikolai, an employee from the state organization, confessed that
he frequently uses his position for gaining personal advantages, complaining how
dangerous such behavior has become recently. He drew on an example of his close
friend serving for another state organization and being accused of bribery. Nikolai
complained that the militia knew everything about the crime—the things his friend
discussed only with his partner and only on the phone. “Any deal on the phone is
dangerous now,” he concluded (recorded in Minsk, 2014). In such a situation, engi-
neers and other technical specialists who participated in the interviews often searched
for understanding: how the special services manage to listen to everyone with the
minimum of resources employed. One of the frequent explanations was that there
are certain words like bribe, bomb, or president that the phone system reacts to and
automatically taps. These tapes then get to the professionals, and people using such
words are carefully surveilled.
Many interviews emphasize that the more developed the technology, the more likely
it is to serve for surveillance. Mobile phones are regarded as much more effective for
surveillance than landline phones. It is believed that mobile phones can be listened
to even with their battery removed; the smartphone versions are said to provide even
more information about the owner. Of course, these rumors appear to be global. In
the United States, civil rights groups are raising serious constitutional questions about
the Justice Department’s use of dragnet technology on board aircraft to collect data
from suspects’ smartphones (Frizell 2014).
Sometimes I held my interviews on Skype, and the usage of this channel revealed
in unexpected ways fears of talking about politics. For instance, one of my interlocu-
tors ironically noticed that as soon as we started to talk about Lukashenka, the Skype
connection became noisy, as if it had been interfered with. Very often, whole stories
on Skype surveillance appear on the Internet with multiple comments of the users
aiming to prove the story. A typical comment (supporting the main story) is: “I also
always have a strange noise, when I call Ukraine. . . . They start exactly when we start
to discuss life in our countries” (Nadoel nam etot Lukashenko 2013). According to
the rumors, both phones and Skype are especially subject to tapping when one calls
from abroad. For instance, Vladimir, born in Belarus and now living in a European
country, commented on calling his parents in Belarus: “They listen in; always, when
I call home something is like tuk-tuk-tuk [imitating the noise he hears]” (recorded
in Vitebsk, 2012). An IT specialist, Oleg, claimed in an interview I held in Minsk
in 2013 that Skype and phone surveillance are accompanied by other techniques if
necessary; no one is ever safe:
What is the sound through Internet? These are the same ones and zeros as in the text.
It is possible to record it, but it is technically difficult. Why spend the resources? Once,
one of our research institutes started to deal with similar things, including making
the filter for the 220 volts in order to prevent the attack. Because not only ones and
zeros are there, but also electric oscillation. Even in the 1990s it was possible to get

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connected to the electrical socket in the building and get the image from almost any
monitor. Taping the messages from Skype is not a big deal.
Obviously, the rumors about Internet monitoring are not uniquely Belarusian: they are
widespread all over the world. Many countries have been proven to use the Internet
as a platform for surveillance. For instance, China, often characterized as one of the
most effective totalitarian states, is known for its Golden Shield Project (colloquially
referred to as the Great Firewall of China) aimed at censorship and surveillance on
the Internet mainly of groups outlawed by the government (such as those seeking
independence for Tibet and the Uighur people). Internet nonconformism is dangerous
for any regime, totalitarian or democratic. At the “e-G8” meeting in 2011, only months
after the “Arab Spring” uprisings were partly facilitated by the Internet media, Nicolas
Sarkozy, the president of France, suggested that democratically elected governments
should control the unaccountable and unruly Internet. Similarly, Mike McConnell,
former US Director of National Intelligence, has argued for the re-engineering of the
Internet through making geolocation, intelligent analysis, and impact assessment
accessible. To his mind, due to the current openness of the Internet, it is a productive
field for terrorists and criminals (Murakami Wood 2012:338). The case of Edward
Snowden, again, showed how many ideas of Internet control have already been applied.
The situation in democracies does not seem to differ substantially from that in China.
The Belarusian government has special reasons to monitor the Internet. It was not
only the “Arab Spring” that was partly facilitated by Internet media, but also the Belaru-
sian 2011 “Revolution through the Social Network” (Revoliuciia cherez socialnuiu set’)
movement, which increased the number of participants by the successful promotion
of protest on the Internet. Not allowed to protest openly, the participants got together
just to clap ironically to the Belarusian regime instead of chanting protests or, after this
protest was suppressed, just to hold a silent protest together without slogans or placards.
The dissident mass media again reported on illegal arrests, beatings, and other events
confirming that the rights of protest organizers, participants, and journalists were vio-
lated. It is also claimed that these violations were preceded by surveillance of the Internet
accounts of those who were involved in the protests. The belief that telecommunications
and computer technology had evolved into a tool that better enabled the invasion of
people’s privacy was confirmed. Some, however, also treat paranoia with humor.
From the Fear of Joke-Telling to

the Conversational Humor about Surveillance
Along with the fear of pronouncing certain words (e.g., bomb or president), fear of
joke-telling persists in Belarus, even though I have not been able to trace any docu-
mented cases of punishment for it. Many narratives I recorded are again related to
the general omnipresence and alertness of the special services at the events crucial
for today’s Belarusian stability.
Author: Do you know any jokes about Lukashenka?

Interviewee: None. Seriously. This is not a topic for joking.

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Author: And do you think people here in Belarus easily tell these jokes or are they
to some extent scared?
Interviewee: Well, I do not know, it depends on where, in what circumstances. I
do not know, they do not do it for instance in public places, where there are many
people, employees.
Author: And at home, do they?
Interviewee: Sure.
Author: Why are people scared to tell these jokes?
Interviewee: They are afraid of the responsibility, well, not responsibility, but pun-
ishment, possible, well, anti-political . . .
Author: Is it recorded, or somebody reports about it?
Interviewee: Well, I do not know 100%, so actually I do not know. My opinion is
yes, phone calls are tapped.
Author: Why do you think so?
Interviewee: When there was a terrorist attack in Vitebsk [in 2005], my aunt was
there. She wasn’t wounded, but the first thing she did after the explosion was that
she called her daughter to make sure she wasn’t there and was fine. And after
several days the aunt received a call from the KGB. . . . They said they had registered
her phone call to her daughter and asked her to come and give a witness account
of the explosion.
In this interview, recorded from 18-year-old Victor in Vitebsk in 2011, the idea of
danger in telling a political joke is again related to the matters of the Belarusian
terrorist attacks, the omnipresence of the KGB, and the danger of denunciations.
Another interviewee described a case in which a teacher told a political joke to her
colleagues during the coffee break at school. She was immediately reported and lost
her job. The possibility of being punished for any crime becomes a matter of concern
in many other stories I recorded:
Author: Are people generally afraid to tell jokes?

Interviewee: Well . . . not too much afraid, they of course tell jokes. Sometimes in
a half-whisper: well, you know “who” or just “himself ” [trans. sam]. It is not as it
used to be in the Soviet times, a bit more liberal.
Author: Is it true that a person telling a joke may be arrested?
Interviewee: I do not remember any examples, but since they may arrest for any-
thing . . . I think there were such cases. There is an article in the criminal code
“Personal insult.” So, they insulted.
This 2013 interview with a Minsk journalist is an example of a process comparable

to the fear of joke-telling—tabooing Lukashenka’s name. The interviewee in fact
mentioned Lukashenka several times, but never with a name, rather using “who” or
“himself ” or just omitting the name, as in the last sentence in the previous quota-
tion. Both taboos—on jokes and on naming—exist in other nondemocratic coun-
tries. Researchers on Cuba describe not only the taboos on mentioning Fidel Castro
by name (Arkhipova and Manolo 2014a), but also rumors stating, for instance,
that a Cuban was arrested for telling a joke about Castro (Arkhipova and Manolo
2014b:193).

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Interestingly, the anxieties of Belarusians do not exclude expressions of irony over

the fear of surveillance. At the end of the interview, Victor, who told the story about
his aunt being invited to the KGB after the terrorist attack, joked: “Oh, I have got such
a headache from the interview. It is probably because of the Belarusian satellites, they
must be inflicting something on me, as I am telling vile things about Belarus.” After I
asked permission from another respondent, Vitalij, to record his interview and took
the recorder out of my bag, he grinned: “Comrade Major, our president is very good,
everything in our country is good” (again referring to the joke about Major). At the
hairdresser’s in Minsk in 2014, a woman was discussing the passage of a law making
parasitism a social offense: those who are not officially employed must pay a fine.
The law was worrisome for her since her son was unemployed. Criticizing the law,
she looked up and said: “There is nothing more stupid than this law. I am saying this
aloud as I am not afraid that you hear me”—obviously addressing the omnipresent
president (the quote is, of course, imprecise as it was not recorded).
The Internet is also full of jokes and humorous poems about surveillance in Belarus.
Consider two short examples:
The Belarusians do not have paranoia. They know exactly that they are being watched!
(Libertarnoe Soprotivlenie 2011; translated from Belarusian)
The first two lines of the following poem almost fully repeat the first two lines of the
Belarusian anthem:
We are Belarusians,
We are the peaceful people,
Why do we have such severe laws then?
A man wearing shoulder straps per every three citizens!
(Zharty pa-belarusku 2011, translated from Belarusian)
These two pieces appeared on the Internet with a gap of only several days in November
2011, while the case of the Minsk terrorist attack was being heard in court and only
two weeks before the accused were sentenced to death. As mentioned above, it was
a moment of great tension for Belarusians, as many saw no comprehensible rules or
grounds for arrest and conviction apart from a poor-quality video from the metro
cameras. In the frame of multiple conspiracy theories that accompanied the case—for
instance, that Lukashenka organized the bombing to distract the citizens’ attention
from the country’s economic problems—the idea that anyone could be accused per-
sisted. Obviously, one cannot exist in total fear, and Belarusian jokes suggest one should
not feel that he or she is the only paranoid in the country. I am reluctant to claim that
these jokes are either indications of resistance or a disregard of surveillance; rather,
they are logical responses marking the natural need to react to the overwhelming
sensation of the panopticon, the product of reflexivity about what is going on, and
one’s own attitudes toward these circumstances (Graham 2004)—as the rumors are too.
Humor and rumor intertwine so often that scholars even have to search for the
boundaries between seriously presented truth claims and practical jokes (Ciardy
1965:18; Fine and Ellis 2010:125–7; Bennett 1988, 1993). The same narratives may

85.75.115.84 on Sun, 28 Jun 2020 21:25:45 UTC
be used for both purposes: to raise a laugh and to recommend others to be alert. As
rumors, jokes provide a vent for frustration and an outlet for emotions (Banc and
Dundes 1989:10; Dundes 1971:51), or they can become “tiny revolutions” (Orwell
1945:1) or the weapons of the weak (Scott 1985). Dégh writes about a case of family
conversational folklore: an elderly couple she came to interview were telling jokes and
legends alternately and interdependently. The naratives of these two genres consti-
tuted what she calls a symbiotic relationship. As she proves, the jokes and legends do
not only go well together, but they also provide the necessary environment for each
other (Dégh 1995:293). In the case of surveillance folklore, jokes serve as a means of
seriously probing and potentially debating a group’s fears as voiced in the legends.
According to the student of late Soviet socialism Alexei Yurchak, the jokes of this
period emerge from the cognitive dissonance created by the coexistence of two incon-
gruous spheres, official and parallel (Yurchak 1997:180). This cognitive dissonance is
definitely present in Belarusian surveillance discourse, almost completely represented
in rumors rather than official information. The jokes also may be considered a reflec-
tion of the deeply cynical perspective resulting from living in current Belarusian
circumstances. On the other hand, such jokes become the means for the regime, the
leaders, the incompetence, the hardships, the duplicity, the surveillance, and even the
terror to be domesticated and discounted. These jokes do not just express an opinion
but crystallize it in aesthetic forms (Oring 2004:227). They work in a way similar to
the famous Lenin bed joke, in which the party’s intrusion into personal life is carried
to an absurd conclusion:
And then they came out with a bed that sleeps three—Lenin is always with us.
(Oring 2004:213)
No Rules—No Trust: Surveillance and Accountability
My interviews regarding rumors about surveillance—the only source of information

about the issue in Belarus—often show how an innocent person chosen randomly
through inevitable omnipresent surveillance gets a punishment not corresponding
to his or her deeds. There is little wonder that Belarusians are sometimes afraid of
joking, free-thinking, foreigners, naming the president, and so on. The possible list
of offenses is as long as the list of variations of any folklore genre; many acts can be
imagined as punishable. The unverifiable rumors circulating in the multiplicity of
variants shape cautious and alert behavior.
As in the case of the teacher threatened with dismissal because of the mere interest
in dissent that her daughter displayed, it is not even “criminals” who are imagined
to be threatened with punishment but their relatives as well. This creates a climate
of fear that was described well by one of my interviewees, a journalist for a dissident
newspaper:
Author: Is there a reason for the fear in Belarus?

Interviewee: Yes, there is. For instance, when I studied at the university and par-
ticipated in the events organized by the oppositionists, my parents were saying,

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“Do not do that, finish your studies.” When I started to work later, they said the
same, “You will lose your job.” In other words, there is always something to lose—
this is the basis of the fear. That is why people are fired and dismissed.
Author: So, there were real examples of it?
Interviewee: Yes, yes, maybe not too often, but they work for the fear. That is to
say, when one is dismissed it is not a big deal—you will not blare about it all over
Europe. But it is the fear for the population, they will be afraid.
In democratic countries, “common law, statute or common procedure codes deter-

mine the range of powers at the disposal of the police to discharge these tasks” (Early
1993:806). Of course, many techniques remain concealed, but in general, the activities
of the state are supposed to be open for public discussion. Meanwhile, totalitarian
surveillance is characterized by very close, even paranoid attention to the personal
lives of citizens, as is known, for instance, from the Stasi archives (Murakami Wood
2012:334). Nondemocratic surveillance regimes “bring more practices to the atten-
tion of surveillance agencies, but they do so in ways that are not openly accountable”
(Brighenti 2010:64). It is the lack of accountability that makes the difference. The
Belarusian state does not feel obliged to report its safety measures to the people.
Referring to the most famous metaphor of Foucault, the difference in surveillance in
the two types of societies is whether the fellows in the prison see the watchman on
duty and act accordingly, or whether they assume that they are always being watched
and consequently discipline themselves.
Moreover, Belarusian law still contains the rudiments of Soviet law and does not
allow its citizens to know why or how they might be punished. Belarusian schools
still teach lessons, as in Soviet times, on how to survive a nuclear attack (presumably
coming from the West) but provide no education on law. Once an esteemed profes-
sion, jurisprudence attracted a lot of students, but the abundance of graduates did
not correspond to the low demand, and most of them could not find jobs in the field.
The lack of both a general law education and a body of professionals who may explain
the laws makes the Belarusian legal system opaque. It is therefore not surprising that
threats are seen everywhere. While there are certain hints in vernacular knowledge
about what to do to avoid prosecution (e.g., one should not tell a political joke or
host a foreigner), there remains plenty of space for speculating about potential threats
and searching for potential dangers in many acts. Unfamiliarity with the rules, along
with the disbelief that there actually are working rules, leads Belarusians to interpret
many deeds as potentially risky. They employ self-discipline and self-censorship to
avoid the risks.
Moreover, while multiple public debates in the United Kingdom and other democra-
cies are dedicated to the issues of privacy and democratic approaches to surveillance
(Hammarskjold 1993:789), this is not the case in Belarus. In spite of the partial isola-
tion, Western ideas about the importance of privacy occasionally—not through the
government-controlled channels—reach Belarus, raising awareness of individuality
and uniqueness. Consequently, people are then puzzled by Western concerns about
these issues. The question of privacy and surveillance is not officially raised, and the
government information on it, as on other issues, is censored and limited. Tamotsu

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Shibutani claimed long ago that if the demand for news in the public exceeds the
supply made available through institutional channels, rumor construction is likely
to occur (1966:56–8). Indeed, with the absence of official comments, justifications,
and accounts in Belarus, rumors serve to clarify the policies of the state and prevent
others from potential mistakes.
The analysis of the surveillance discourse in the rumor frame proves to be produc-
tive, as these nonverified narratives uncover many different problems other than those
disclosed in the official reports about human rights violations from abroad. Study-
ing unverified rumors may be very fruitful in many other situations where the truth
remains concealed and inaccessible both to the people who care about it and to the
researcher. Among the narratives a folklorist may study, there may be rumors about
surveillance, bribes, border crossing, visa issuing, and so on. These urgent problems
are often settled only through vernacular knowledge, since the truth about them
remains unverified through institutional authority. This and other immediate issues
people encounter in everyday life and fix with a set of vernacular, rather than purely
official, rules are yet to be studied.
Conclusion
The understanding of rumor and legend as stories that people believe but scholars
know to be not true was once an implicit assumption in folkloristics. Treating these
unverified but potentially true stories as folklore allows for the use of the methods of
folklore analysis: conducting interviews, marking their main motives, and locating
culture-specific concerns. These constitute the research apparatus that folkloristics
can offer to surveillance studies, while the latter can offer a well-developed theoreti-
cal basis and a wide geographical distribution of research. It is quite surprising that
while studying the Internet in such depth, folklorists have not turned to one of the
main concerns of its users: surveillance.
Rumors about surveillance appear to intertwine with other folklore genres, shap-
ing the vernacular discourse about surveillance. I recorded the following joke several
times in Belarus:
Lukashenko opens the fridge, sees meat jelly there, and says to it, “Why are you
trembling? I came for the sour cream.”
One of my interviewees, Dmitri, living in Minsk, commented on it: “Who does the
joke target? The meat jelly? No, us!” The joke, not surprisingly, is also told about
Vladimir Putin (Berry 2006) and was inherited from the Soviet Union along with
other features of the socialist lifestyle, infused with a strong oral tradition of surveil-
lance narratives. Independence did not heal the memory of Soviet lack of account-
ability; on the contrary, the power that trained Belarusians to be afraid has persisted.
My interlocutors—although mostly young urban males interested in politics—carry
both the baggage of surveillance rumors of the Soviet past and the updates of such
narratives shaped by the current political situation and the development of digital

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communication. Of course, Belarusian fears must be weaker now than in the Stalinist
period, and seem closer to that of the Brezhnev era, to which modern Belarus is often
compared on the whole (Savchenko 2009:188).
As in the Brezhnev epoch, oppositional groups claim to be marginalized by state
surveillance. Yet average Belarusians also claim they never feel safe. As a result, they
prefer to avoid political joking or mentioning bombs or even Lukashenka himself, in
spite of the absence of any formal prohibition against such acts. The citizens believe in
the immense strength and professionalism of the secret forces, and it is this panoply of
reasons that, along with the global spread of surveillance rumors, fosters Belarusian
fears and narratives about them. The ongoing debates about the country’s develop-
ment, including that of ethnic identity choice, force the dissident mass media to depict
any gesture of the state as oppressive. The same gesture, however, is justified by the
state as being in the interest of public safety. The most obvious example was perhaps
the terrorist attack hastily investigated by the government to assure stability but char-
acterized by the opposition as another illustration of dictatorial lawlessness. Such a
gap between official and dissident propaganda intersects with greater disharmonies:
the absence of public discussion on the ethics of privacy, the lack of accountability,
the nontransparency of legislation and its execution, outdated laws, the discrepancy
between punishments and crimes, and the reports about people who have not violated
the legal code being made to suffer. In the space of these intersections, speculations
and rumors on the secret powers responsible for these disharmonies (re)appear and
are disseminated. It is not masterfulness in surveillance in a nondemocracy that
makes the difference, but the fact that the object under surveillance cannot see back,
and the punishment (sometimes irrevocable) resulting from such surveillance is
seen as unpredictable, unfair, and inappropriate even to the de facto guilt. Thus, the
rumors about surveillance reflect and condition a regime of rigorous self-discipline.
In many ways, they resemble other unverifiable rumors that emerge in the absence
of official information and accountability, serving as behavioral guides when there is
a shortage of official rules. Whether they are true or not, these narratives, character-
ized by recurrent themes and circulating in multiple versions, fortify the ideology of
the panopticon by creating the sense of perpetual surveillance.
Notes
This research was supported by the European Social Fund’s Doctoral Studies and Internationalisation
Programme DoRa; the European Union through the European Regional Development Fund (Centre of
Excellence, CECT); Estonian Research Council (Institutional Research Project ‘Tradition, creativity, and
society: minorities and alternative discourses’ [IUT2-43]). I would like to thank Elliott Oring and Ülo Valk,
not only for the close reading and advice on this article but also for their constant support and friendship.
1. These exceptions concentrate on Latin and South America (Botello 2011; Wacquant 2008; etc.). Yet in
other disciplines the situation is slightly better. For instance, in spite of the lack of official data, a historian
and specialist in Korean studies, Andrei Lankov, wrote a canonic study of everyday life in North Korea,
largely based on interviews and publications containing what may be characterized as rumors (1995).
2. Carl Lindahl provides a list of folklore studies still feeding the vernacular perception that “legend”
and “false story” are synonyms (2012:141).
3. The article was nevertheless published later (Milspaw 1981, 2007).

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4. An abbreviation from “Narodnyy Komissariat Vnutrennikh Del” (The People’s Commissariat for
Internal Affairs), a law enforcement agency of the Soviet Union that directly executed the rule of power
of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
5. An initialism for “Komitet gosudarstvennoy bezopasnosti” (Committee for State Security), the main
security agency for the Soviet Union from 1954 until its collapse in 1991.
6. Certainly, blaming the sleepers is not a unique Soviet situation. In the volume of Ethnologia Euro-
paea dedicated to sleepers, Sabina Magliocco admits that the discourse of the evil sleeper hiding among
us, waiting to strike, is also “a part of continuing discourse in American history that blames social and
political ills on evil infiltrators” (2003:20).
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In Search for Truth: Surveillance Rumors and Vernacular Panopticon in Belarus

Author(s): Anastasiya Astapova

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/jamerfolk.130.517.0276

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In Search for Truth: Surveillance Rumors

In this article, I analyze rumors about surveillance—unverified expressions of

Scholars studying surveillance suggest various societal shifts as crucial for

Journal of American Folklore 130(517):276–304

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Figure 1. Panopticon structure by Jeremy Bentham (1843).

Later philosophers have often chosen the panopticon as a metaphor; however, it

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Methodology and Terminology

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Belarusian Recent Past and Present

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Dissidence and Surveillance

Surveillance studies prove that surveillance is disproportionally targeted at the mar-

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surveillance become an important part of their publications in nongovernmental

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President Lukashenka’s son, Lukashenka himself, dissidents, extremist organizations, a

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Complaints and Denunciations

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From the Fear of Joke-Telling to

Author: Do you know any jokes about Lukashenka?

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Author: Are people generally afraid to tell jokes?

This 2013 interview with a Minsk journalist is an example of a process comparable

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Interestingly, the anxieties of Belarusians do not exclude expressions of irony over

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No Rules—No Trust: Surveillance and Accountability

My interviews regarding rumors about surveillance—the only source of information

Author: Is there a reason for the fear in Belarus?

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In democratic countries, “common law, statute or common procedure codes deter-

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