Two Essays from the Belarusian Cultural Catastrophe

Author

Max Zhbankou

Abstract

This dossier presents two texts by the Belarusian cultural studies scholar and film critic Max Zhbankou (Maksim Zhbankoŭ) in English translation. “Life in the Ruins: How to Build Culture for New Generations Outside the Country” (2022) maps the divisions of post-2020 Belarusian culture in exile – between ‘active evacuees’ and ‘internal partisans’, between ‘Statesmen’ and ‘New Europeans’ – and argues for horizontal self-organisation as the only viable infrastructure of cultural life under conditions of forced mobility. “The Music of the Rasps: An Introduction to No-Budget Style” (2023) reframes the collapse of Belarusian film infrastructure as the precondition for a new aesthetics of constraint – a No-Budget cinema modelled on the rock-and-roll single, the outsider’s gaze, and the discipline of minimalist construction.

Keywords

Belarusian cinema; Belarusian culture; cultural exile; No-Budget aesthetics; post-2020; cultural criticism; Eastern European film, Max Zhbankou (Maksim Zhbankoŭ)

Editors’ Introduction

Max Zhbankou (Maksim Zhbankoŭ) is one of the most distinctive voices in Belarusian cultural criticism. A cultural studies scholar and film critic, he writes from inside the wreckage of a field that, since 2020, has been violently rearranged by political repression, mass exile, and the erosion of inherited frameworks for thinking about national culture. The two texts gathered here circulated primarily in independent and diasporic Belarusian outlets.

“Life in the Ruins: How to Build Culture for New Generations Outside the Country” was originally published in 2022, on the website of the Bank of Ideas (Bank idei), a platform that features expert opinions, discussions, and research for the Belarusian community in exile.¹ The essay maps the fault lines of post-2020 Belarusian culture in exile: the bifurcation of the artistic class into “active evacuees” and “internal partisans”; the deadlock between the “Statesmen” of return-and-revival and the “New Europeans” of personal self-realisation; the missing infrastructure that would make a national culture in exile thinkable. Zhbankou’s prescription resides in horizontal connections, decentralisation, and the practice of living without guarantees.

“The Music of the Rasps: An Introduction to No-Budget Style” was originally published in 2023, on the website of Belarusian Filmmakers Network (BFN), an organisation that “unites filmmakers from Belarus, including those who are currently living in exile […] and aims to put Belarusian cinema back on the European film industry’s map.”² Zhbankou borrows his title from the 1986 debut album of the Soviet Russian rock band Nolʹ (Zero), and distils the same diagnosis into a manifesto for cinema without infrastructure. Confronted with the collapse of state funding and the impossibility of returning home, the author argues that the only viable Belarusian cinema today is a No-Budget cinema: stripped of ornament, hostile to ‘harmony’, and indebted to the rock-and-roll forty-five and the stray-dog gaze. Aesthetic poverty, in his reading, is not a deficiency but a discipline.

Both texts appear here in English translation for the first time. “Life in the Ruins” was translated by Volha Isakava with minor cuts approved by the author; “The Music of the Rasps” was translated by Sasha Razor.

Volha Isakava and Sasha Razor

Life in the Ruins: How to Build Culture for New Generations Outside the Country

When time is out of joint, you run out of words before the bullets, because the next delirious twist of our shared fate is one through which you live by yourself, for the first time. There is no cheat sheet. There is no stealing. There is nowhere to escape. Where would you hide from the breakdown of meaning, the online slop, the stun grenades and other ‘cultural’ events? Our destiny is our ashes. The vocabulary died at the border crossing, followed by the unidentifiable future, the movement above concepts that are done explaining anything. Perhaps the most honest thing to do is to abandon all your smart books with the next evacuation and step out into the shallow November rain with a completely emptied head.

No one in particular is responsible for this crisis of our localised intellectual genre. We – the sarcastic literati, the touring artists, the talkative proselytisers, and titans of fundraising – lived on autopilot for too long, proudly considering ourselves valuable human resources, lovingly building our pocket underground the size of another trip to the European Union, literary scholarship, or film festival.

To love one’s cage is also a talent. And this is how things came to be: by the end of the 2010s, the country had a new generation of cultural elites. Not the unimaginative bureaucrats or the subservient managerial class. Not the kings of summer stages and alco-boogie.³ Not the permanently intimidated government officials. Onto the stage walked masters of international alliances, creative manoeuvring, and games of negotiation with the state. Cautious resisters.

It was a celebration for those in the know. A comfortable alternative that did not wage war with anyone, and that is why it could not win. The year 2020 was necessary for this truth to manifest itself. The street drift, performed in the mode of a continuous children’s matinée, was charming as a naïve performance and absolutely disastrous as a political resource for change.

The people had an incomplete understanding of what to do with their protest energy and remained alone with their own fading angry fervour – left with a dumb, outdated system that immediately started shooting point-blank, a cast of old-school politicians, and a culture that was just as much a thing of the past.

It seems that everyone here was getting ready for some other kind of war. The kind where they pelt each other with candy. This is why everyone remained where they were – in the yesterday – only this time divided by the border, with different degrees of ideological fervour and different chances for tomorrow.

A systemic political alternative is only now emerging, and with great difficulty. A cultural one still does not exist.

The schemes of action from the previous era are no longer effective in conditions of emergency mobility and a state of exception. The former state-bound figures have completely transformed into a factory of clichés, providers of ceremonial service and cultural support for ideologically compliant events. Partnerships with the authorities, once available to a ‘soft’ alternative, have moved into the territory of administrative ultimatums, political denunciations, and arrests of undesirables.

The old archetype of the independent artist – a daring look, an easy gait, a Schengen visa in hand, a show in Berlin – has irreversibly split in two. On one hand, an active evacuee with a portfolio of useful contacts and a notional European status. On the other hand, a conditionally free human from ‘Mordor’,⁴ an internal partisan in the deep trenches of (self-)defence. Both sides observe each other from a distance that is safe for everyone. Contact is understandably sporadic.

What does this mean? We live in the ruins of Belkult (shorthand for Belarusian culture). The state has no working system for culture. But neither do we.

The previous ecosystem of cultural life has been destroyed and will not, in the foreseeable future, be revived within the country.

A natural turn of events would be the establishing of a culture industry for the new generation outside Belarus – a ‘factory of meaning-making’ for a country beyond its borders.

There are, however, several serious problems.

First, the quality of the human resources. Emergency evacuees experience traumatic adaptation to their new cultural and linguistic environments, and do not always retain the ability or the desire to remain in the profession. And there aren’t many who can pivot.

Second, cultural reconstruction. Émigré arts enterprises face a dilemma: do they create a niche product for their own, or engage in broader collaborations? The former offers the prospect of a ‘Belarusian ghetto’ with an artificially maintained ‘purity’ of national identity; the latter calls for a more complex, post-classical form of self-identification. The first is barely realisable. The second is highly problematic.

Third, the internal confliction, mosaic quality, and conceptual diffusion of the field. The absence of a single shared ‘Project Belarus’ creates, even among circles of situationally aligned exiles, competition between rival versions of ‘belaruskasts'’ (Belarusianness) and a sharp ideological standoff. Even abroad, Belarus remains an “archipelago” (Valiantsin Akudovich).⁵

Fourth, the misalignment of goals and orientations between the two poles of the new cultural emigration – the ‘Statesmen’ and the ‘New Europeans’. The former are the ‘party of return and revival’; the latter the ‘party of personal self-realisation’. Accordingly, the former are characterised by nationally inflected romanticism and lyrically melancholic sentiment, while the latter by a practical and professional Euro-pragmatism.

Fifth, the lack of infrastructure for developing the cultural field. There is a need for cultural reforms; for the establishment, in exile, of a Belarusian system of education at every level; for publishing industry and consistent cultural representation; for regular residencies and internships for artists and arts managers; for creative hubs and discussion platforms; for the formation of a pool of cultural critics; and for a system of grants, creative competitions, prizes, and festivals.

This is, for now, still a project. But without it, there will be no cultural nation.

The most interesting question remains: who will pay for any of this, and why would the host countries want it? But that's a matter of cultural diplomacy in a new playing field.

What might work? Practices of self-organisation. The establishment of horizontal connections.

Decentralisation. Competition. Privatisation of the creative sector. Permanent project work. Regular contacts with the new diaspora. Practices in living without insurance or guarantees.

To think non-stop. To take risks. To persuade. To find partners.

Cultural work is just one aspect of a larger story. We are not gathering the pieces of yesterday. We are making a country for tomorrow.

And here the choice is simple: remain forever the nostalgic victims of half-baked change, or learn anew how to live in this terrible and beautiful time.

Max Zhbankou

Translated by Volha Isakava

The Music of the Rasps: An Introduction to No-Budget Style

The correct opening question to our debates about the future of Belkino (Belarusian cinema) is not ‘How do we fit into someone else’s game?’ but ‘How do we invent our own?’ Only then can we enter the field of global cultural production as full-fledged masters of events – not as itinerant landsknechts or migrant workers. Our style, our rules.⁶

But initially, it is worth taking stock of the current landscape and its characteristics.

First: there is no Belarusian film industry today. There are incompatible forms of life – a factory of ideological phantoms funded through ‘whatever is left’ principle, contract Euro-work, and private improvisations.

Second: the Belarusian regime is busy with political repression and cultural terror, producing and sustaining yet another wave of emergency creative emigration and rapid evacuation.

Third: this means that the Belarusian cultural field is collapsing before our eyes. The regime is forcibly fragmenting and censoring it, turning it into a set of semantic ruptures, conflicting communications, and mental deformations.

‘Our’ culture no longer exists. There are only rough drafts, hysterics, rhythmic chants, and typos.

Fourth: Belkult (Belarusian culture), once a (relatively) coherent and (seemingly) well-structured organism, has in fact become a chaotic stream of disparate noise signals and intuitive gestures of unclear purpose. Geographic mobility compounds a collapse of values and style.

The natural form of utterance turns out to be hasty verbatim, stolen platitudes, and flustered inarticulateness.

Fifth: this produces a strange world of patchwork ‘partisan’ culture, forced to reinvent itself and its own function under conditions of emotional stupor and double alienation – from a lost ‘peace-time’ homeland and the new, foreign cultural contexts.

Sixth: this new world of scattered semantic mosaics, sullen ideological convictions, nervous breakdowns, the catastrophic texture of daily life, samurai-like stubbornness, hopeless sentiments, and accidental epiphanies remains, to this day, unwritten and misunderstood.

No one taught us to be traumatically contemporary and catastrophically beautiful. We live without clear ideas and a precise vocabulary for our strange times. It is full of draughts and gaps.

And here is the main challenge. As we harness it, so we shall ride.

What are we talking about? Rebooting Belarusian cinema by rebooting ourselves.

Genre does not matter. Length does not matter. Subject is beside the point. Location is secondary.

What matters is understanding our homelessness as an opportunity.

No Hollywood. No Venice. No Moscow. The bosses have been zeroed out. The templates are gone. The structures are dead. There’s no budget. Hooray!

No one ever taught us freedom – so, here you go, take it!

A twisted reality kicks us out of our comfort zone and into a field of such extremes that it is simply shameful to be untalented, shameful not to spark a response. Yes, it is a risk zone. A territory of self-experimentation. A test of precision.

The beauty of it is that there is no one from whom to copy. And no copybooks. You are your own boss. Your own reference. No budgets? Then it is time to shoot with pocket change.

And here, everything is, in principle, clear from the start. We’re making a contemporary urban genre story with a few characters and a limited number of locations.

What is good about it? No-Budget eliminates a whole pile of nonsense. Wild special effects. Star casts. Fancy design. Scripts calculated by textbook. Pompous symbolism and costume chic. A polished style and a trendy soundtrack. Global ambitions. Semantic overload. Festival conformity. The author’s vanity, pretentious brain-flexing, financial greed, and cheap posturing are thrown overboard.

What’s left? Clarity of thought. Precision of assembly. Healthy minimalism. It’s all very Zen: less is more. Teach the void to bite.

There is no – and can be no – comfort or ‘harmony’ here. There is passion and anger. The stranger’s stance. The energy of a stray dog.

This is the logic of the creative outsider. A view from the margins of the cardboard mainstream. The normal optics of a mobile Belarusian in an era of cultural catastrophe.

To hell with penmanship. Cut the brakes. There are two things ‘poor’ cinema will not forgive: cowardice of thought and sluggish delivery. The closest analogue is the rock-and-roll forty-five – three minutes of raw, sandpaper-like bliss with no particular concern for refined arrangement or purity of sound.

For the viewer to soar, the author must soar first.

It’s time to learn from outsiders and tear up the templates. Vivid poverty is already almost a style. As the wild rock-and-roll daddy Chuck Berry said: “You say I only have three chords? Yeah! But they’re three right chords!”

How does this differ from bad dilettantism? By the quality of the writing and the hooligan beauty of the execution. Controlled abandon. The skilful delivery of gritty drive. Brazen integrity.

No-Budget puts the mind in order and allows the author to cut loose without losing control. Not a blowout – a layout. Not a drunken party in the costume room, but a chess problem. A clean move, scored out in parts. There are no wasted pieces; everything works like clockwork. Even the void around the characters.

Action turns into suspense. And back again.

Clearly, any No-Budget film is a minimalist construct. And for the game to work, you need clear rules. The skeleton of a story. Well thought-out characters. Clear connections between them. Precision of tone. A recognisable landscape. A well-written unfolding of the plot. Montage drift. A cheeky finale. And the ability to improvise, to stumble – and at some point to play not on the board but with the board.

No-Budget is not a financial category but an aesthetic one. No-Budget is a cinema from which anything unnecessary has been removed – because there is neither time nor money for it.

You cannot hide behind décor here. You cannot lure with star power. You cannot buy a camera manoeuvre. Everything is simple: the key idea, and the right to express it when you have nothing to buy it with.

Got a theme? Has the plot come together? Have characters shown up? Is the image clear? Add a little icing to the scheme – a pair of wild accents. A strange mixture.

Where do you get it from when you have nothing? But whatever the case, the author has… the author. A private mixtape. An old memory. Feelings and fears. Favourite songs and a comic book under the pillow. What you always wanted to steal from Hitchcock but did not know how. Thrill, nerve, and an extra stamp in the passport.

Nothing means anything goes.

Handheld camera? Fine. Spontaneous dialogue? Okay. A prison-visit scene dubbed with a Japanese cartoon? Sure. A dance in the rain? Why not? If that is what you decided.

The author cooks like a master chef at a kitchen table, where the only stable element is the knife in the hand. Everything else will follow.

Belarusian craziness needs not captains but jazzmen. And the budget has nothing to do with it.

Max Zhbankou

Translated by Sasha Razor

Bio

Max Zhbankou is a Belarusian cultural studies scholar, film critic, journalist, and media educator. He holds a PhD in philosophy and has taught at the European Humanities University, Belarusian State University, and the Belarusian Collegium. Before going into exile, he was the long-time host of the KinoKlub film club at Minsk’s Pobeda cinema. He is a co-founder of the Belarusian Filmmakers Network (BFN) and created and hosted the YouTube projects ShokingKul’t and Sto hod belaruskaha kino (One Hundred Years of Belarusian Cinema, with Artsiom Lobach). He writes regularly on contemporary Belarusian culture, film, and media and is the author of three books of cultural criticism: NO STYLE. Belkul’t mezhdu Vudstokom i “Dazhynkami” [No Style: Belkult between Woodstock and Dazhynki] (2013), SloMo. Khatniaia krytyka kul’turnaha dyzainu [SloMo: A Home Critique of Cultural Design] (2021), and ShokingKul’t. Kniga peremen [ShockingCult: The Book of Changes] (2026).

Suggested Citation

Zhbankou, Max. 2026. “Two Essays from the Belarusian Cultural Catastrophe”. Translated by Volha Isakava and Sasha Razor. Belarusian Cinema and the Protests of 2020: Cinema in Exile (ed. Volha Isakava and Sasha Razor). Special issue of Apparatus. Film, Media and Digital Cultures in Central and Eastern Europe 22. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17892/app.2026.00022.440.

URL: http://www.apparatusjournal.net/

Copyright: The text of this article has been published under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This licence does not apply to the media referenced in the article, which are subject to the individual rights owner's terms