The Minsk–Khabarovsk nexus: Ethical, performative, corporeal

Abstract

This essay attempts to juxtapose mass-scale protest movements that almost simultaneously erupted in summer 2020 in Belarus and Russia’s Far East. In spite of dissimilar root causes of both events, they however share a number of common characteristics, such as spontaneity, lack of wellestablished leadership, networking/horizontal structure (Paneyakh, 2020) and explicitly nonideological character. What made the symbolic connection between the two post-Soviet ‘‘hot spots’’ even more politically pronounced were explicit and unprecedented signs of solidarity expressed by protesters in Khabarovsk with the anti-Lukashenka movement. Since we can see some emerging similarities in these two cases, let us try to understand what they are, why did they emerge, and how they can be conceptualized theoretically. The protests that have been unfolding in parallel to each other in Minsk (as well as other major cities of Belarus) and Khabarovsk were driven by obviously different reasons and could have remained detached from each other. The outburst of street activity in Belarus was triggered by the fraudulent presidential election, while in Khabarovsk people went to streets as a reaction to the sudden arrest of the region’s governor by the order of the federal center. For Belarus the protests constituted a basis for national anti-authoritarian consolidation, while the anti-Moscow actions in the Far East are regarded as potentially conducive to Russia’s decentralization (Luchikhin, 2020). However, the appearance of slogans of solidarity with Belarus among protesters in Khabarovsk has created a symbolic connection between the two events (Sibir’ Realii, 2020), which looked quite unique since never before had the Russian opposition expressed any well-articulated sympathy with democratic movements in other post-Soviet countries. For example, Alexei Navalny’s attitude towards Ukrainian national discourse on retrieving the annexed Crimea was always quite