Balaclavas Inside Out

Wildly fantastic and frequently absurd

(Demonstrator from the Women’s March held in Minsk on September 19, 2020. The sign reads, “Balaclavas Inside Out)

Andrei Kolesnikov at the Moscow Carnegie Center has written an interesting article about the revolution underway in Belarus.

He opines that the confrontation with everything official there is designed to ridicule authorities, who long ago became ridiculous in their super-serious attitudes towards themselves.

[The events] resemble a merry carnival exposing an already caricatured dictator as a naked emperor, roi pour rire, a king to be laughed at, Kolesnikov said.

Which brings us to Mikhail Bakhtin, a philosopher of language, who last century in Vitebsk thought a lot about about thinking the essence of the word in its correspondence to being.

Kolesnikov says what’s going on in Belarus today indeed resembles a carnival, which is the opposite of official ceremonies and actions, which seemed to have migrated from the Middle Ages to modern post-Soviet autocracies, in this case…