Living in an authoritarian country, It’s hard to ignore the ever-increasing militarisation of Belarusian society. We are constantly reminded of both war and our enemies. The cult of Soviet victories in WWII is omnipresent. War is everywhere: in movies about brave Russian soldiers, in books, in school, in university disciplines, in contests, in state holidays, in war monuments, in street names, in jokes, even in kindergartens. The latter has always been the most disturbing for me; when a society militarises its children, it surely won't end well.
In 2019, an Instagram post appeared in my feed showing a newborn in a military beret. I checked the hashtags; that's how this project started. As it turned out, there are several thousand posts on Russian-speaking Instagram tagged #будущийзащитник – meaning ‘young soldier’. The hashtags correspond with pictures of kids of all ages, often dressed up as soldiers, from amateur snapshots to those made professionally. Some of the kids are just 2 or 3 years old.
After my discovery, I felt that our society was heading for disaster. That disaster came in 2020, when the presidential election was falsified, leading to peaceful mass protests that were brutally suppressed by police and special forces. Hundreds of detained protesters later reported that they were tortured, humiliated, and severely beaten. Despite the unprecedented violence, which has been documented and made public, the government refuses to admit any of it.
When working with this contemporary online archive, I try to understand if the violence we see today has its roots in the militarisation of children. Who is to blame for these Instagram posts? Is it the parents who orchestrate the images, or the social media platforms that facilitate or encourage their posts? Since the police recruit our own citizens, not those from abroad, I want to understand the forces in our society that make some of us capable of such cruelty.
