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Paper Short Abstract:

In this paper, I analyse how the brazenly neglectful response of Belarusian authorities to the COVID-19 pandemic at its early stage first promoted despair and alienation in the atomised countryside, while later the plurality of experiences of abandonment prompted political and moral mobilisation

Paper Abstract:

In my paper, I examine the COVID-19 pandemic in Belarus, as it was experienced in the countryside; a rollercoaster of visceral and solitary despair, that later gave way to a search for solidarity and political mobilisation. The paper is based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, done from 08.2019 to 09.2020 in one of the rural localities in Northwestern Belarus.

For decades, the unilateral social contract in Belarus presumed political passivity towards the authoritarian regime, in exchange for economic stability and extended social support, including universal healthcare. As the COVID-19 pandemic emerged, however, the state responded to it with brazen neglect, denying the dangers of the virus and forcing people to attend the workplace, whilst blaming victims for carelessness.

Lack of any trustworthy public health information and outward disregard for the very lives of people, in turn, led to emotional and moral disaster in the countryside, already bereft of public venues for collective organisation and struggling with poverty. Despair, fear, distrust, and moral numbness, caused by the inability to do anything – those were the predominant emotions of April 2020 in the Belarusian countryside.

In my paper, I engage critically with the recent anthropological discussions on social reproduction in disastrous times, as well as with those from the anthropology of state, power, and social contracts, arguing that it was precisely the abruptness and profundity of state neglect and the grim despair it caused, that lead to political mobilisation in summer 2020, rooted in the (re)discovered mutuality, the one based loneliness and abandonment.