by Olga Bubich
Learning to live is learning to exist between life and death, in the existential stretch constituted by one’s own life span, from not yet being born to no longer existing, but also to learn to live in relation to those no longer there.
Hans Ruin
“Why do you want me to pay for them? They are not ours!” Mom used to react when my aunt Nina, her elder sister, suggested chipping in for Radunitsa—an integral part of the Belarusian calendar, a pagan-rooted day of the commemoration of the dead observed on the second Tuesday after Orthodox Easter, traditionally dedicated to visiting cemeteries and tending family graves. The amount Nina had calculated was never large, and what was to be done demanded more time than money: scrubbing moss off the tombstones, pulling overgrown weeds, repainting rust-bitten fences, and arranging bundles of artificial flowers—the kind that would not get ruined too fast with our capricious weather.
According to some theories, the origin of this holiday’s name comes from radasts— joy, a feeling that historically shaped the way our people approached death: as transformation, departure, or transition to another state. So, the tears shed when saying the last goodbye were rather because of the anticipation of the loved one being missed, than the death as such, unless it was considered a “bad death caused by a sudden tragic accident or suicide. The deceased were perceived as merely “leaving”, long prepared for this important journey. I can still remember my grandmother showing me her neat, unworn funeral dress of deep blue color and shoes she planned to be buried in. Neither of us felt sad during this instruction session.
In this country, said to be the most Christian out of all the pagan and the most pagan of all the Christian, no-one is explicitly taught the etiquette of caring for the dead. You learn it on your own, already as a kid, observing the actions of the elders and following their lead, gradually connecting with the tacit ethical order through the rites of the immediate family. Truth be told, we probably should not even call it “learning.” Covering the mirrors and leaving the door of the house where the coffin stays unlocked overnight, sharing the funeral luncheon with strangers, pouring out the water used to wash the dead body where it would not contact the paths of the living—many do not know the metaphysical meaning these rituals hold, and yet we do it the same way our ancestors did. We take for granted the fluid boundary between life and death and make sure transition unfolds smoothly. A homeless stranger at the remembrance gathering can be the messenger from the Other world, the locked door can obstruct the soul’s passage, and the water poured out at the wrong place can bring more “bad deaths” to the village. But knowing the explanations might not even be necessary because what is more important is to trust those who have learnt to perform these rites before us. It is trust that matters.
Appealing to collective mercy and questioning the distinction between “ours” and “others”, Nina would recall one name—that Shura, or “tyotya Shura”, her parents’ childless neighbor, who, as many women whose youth fell in the tumultuous decades of the rise of Bolshevism, occupations, and the Second World War, had many reasons to live and die alone. To my biological aunt, this woman I had never had a chance to meet, was also tyotya—aunt. Regardless of whether she belonged to the actual kin, in Nina’s understanding, Shura was also family.
“But you barely knew her! Why should we care? They don’t belong to us!” my mom objected. It’s true, formally, this woman, resting in her modest grave marked with only the metal cross, didn’t. But observing the divisionary discourse that unfolds in other contexts and is caused by reasons unrelated to the amount of money spent on plastic roses or black paint, I keep returning to the question my mom failed to find an answer to.
“Indeed,” I wonder, “who do the dead belong to?”
Necropolitics, thanatopolitics, or the politics of death, are among some of the terms philosophers and sociologists coined to point out that dying, death, and commemoration, similar to the principles that underlie the functioning of the social institutions of schools, hospitals, and prisons, can become the sites of political control. Repressive states—even now, almost a century after the Soviet GULAGs and the Nazis’ concentration camps existed all around Europe—attempt to control who is remembered and how. Even now, people have to adopt the role of memory keepers to prevent exclusion
In today’s Belarus, the job of memory-keepers is performed by journalists, human rights defenders, artists, writers, and activists with Katsiaryna Andreeva’s story marking one of the most resonant illustrations of the state’s memory politics. On November 15, 2020, the 27-year-old woman broadcast a peaceful march of remembrance held in honor of the artist Raman Bandarenka beaten to death by plainclothes policemen in his own yard three days before. Officially charged with “organization and preparation of actions that grossly violate public order and active participation in them,” Andreeva was sentenced to two years. In February 2022, after serving her term, she was not released—a newly-fabricated accusation of “high treason” added eight more years to her term.²
Usually, reason is defined as the crime of betraying one’s country, especially by attempting to kill or overthrow the sovereign or government. Who was Andreeva betraying or attempting to kill when she documented a peaceful commemorative gathering of people in their backyard? The answer is obvious, and the accusations she received meant that in Belarus the very act of remembering could be classified as a crime. By honoring the dead, she was performing the act of betrayal.
The case of Katsiaryna Andreeva brings me back to Sophocles’ Antigone—a defiant woman from a classical Greek tragedy who, despite the threat of her own death, refused to let her brother’s body lie unburied. Her firm ethical stance was a protest against the logic of necropolitical power itself, challenging the idea that a mortal human may claim their right to question the higher order and decide who deserves dignity after death.
Sadly, Bandarenka’s case was not the first and only one in the history of modern Belarus. To this day, mourning the disappeared former Minister of Internal Affairs Yury Zacharanka, electoral committee head Viktar Hanchar, businessman Anatol Krasouski, and journalist Dzmitry Zavadski all abducted in Belarus in the late 1990s—is taboo. The bodies of these opposition figures have never been found and those behind their assassinations have not been brought to court. The state claimed both ownership of the remains of the activists and tried to claim the ownership of memories of them. The latter, however, did not happen. Public commemoration campaigns are held annually on May 7: first in Belarusian cities and later, for safety reasons, mainly online, showing that, unwilling to remain indifferent, Belarusians feel responsible for their dead, that their dead are family.
In his book “Being with the Dead”, Swedish philosopher Hans Ruin suggests replacing the word responsibility with responsiveness when describing our relations with the deceased. As a linguist, I cannot but react to their common etymology: both come from the Latin prefix re- (back, or again) and root spondere (promise, pledge) and, thus, could be explained as “making a promise in return”. I feel these history-supported semantics serves as an appropriate explanation of the chain of promises the care for the dead puts every of us into. By embracing our humble role in the sequence of self-adopted obligations and promises, we accept our own mortality, as well as our own existential and symbolic equality with those who lived before us and those who will live after. The way we treat our dead speaks much more about us, our morals, and society, than about the dead, they say. And, coming to this conclusion, I think I have the answer to my mom’s question: on aunt Shura’s grave, there are plastic flowers.
¹ The title references the novel “Christ Landed in Garodnja” by Belarusian writer Uladzimir Karatkevich (1930-1984), whose style was compared to that of Umberto Eco.
² Katsiaryna Andreeva was eventually released on March 19, 2026, as a part of a larger group of 250 political prisoners, in a deal brokered by the United States of America (represented by John Coale, the US Special Envoy to Belarus). 235 people were released domestically and 15 were deported to Lithuania. https://europeanjournalists.org/blog/2026/03/19/belarus-released-250-political-prisoners-including-journalist-katsiaryna-andreeva/
You can read more about the case of Andreeva and other political prisoners in Belarus here: https://prisoners.spring96.org/en/person/kacjaryna-andreeva-bakhvalava.
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