The counter-revolution was complete well before the revolution had even been seriously contemplated. A few thousand people (estimates vary) went out into October Square at 20:00 on Sunday Dec 19 for a peaceful protest against the rigging of the “elections”. Leading opposition candidate Uladzimir Nyaklyaeu was beaten and hospitalised before he even made it there. Others soon followed. In total over 600 people were arrested and taken to Akrestsina prison (doesn’t that sound horribly similar to Kresty in Akhmatova’s Petersburg?). Now they are being sentenced. My friend’s sister has received 15 days. The candidates held behind bars have until Wednesday to officially appeal against the election results – which, obviously, they can’t if they’re behind bars. They will apparently be released on Thursday. In the last 24 hours, official statements have been made by other opposition candidates and the representatives of those in prison denouncing the ‘disturbances’ of Sunday night. Duress is widely suspected. Yesterday (Monday), a second, much smaller protest was violently suppressed within 5 minutes. Away from the epicentre, in non-mediatised Minsk, life goes on as it has for the last 16 years. Nothing has changed, people go to work, shop for groceries, go about their daily lives – it is as if the “elections” were dreamed up and didn’t happen at all.

Perhaps “Bloody Sunday” (as some opposition voices are calling it) isn’t really the right phrase. Not that much actual blood was spilt, as far as we know at this stage. No deaths have been reported. I think that “pre-emptive counter-revolution”, though not as elegant or catchy, is more accurate. We now know that it was the OMON (or other plain-clothes law enforcers) who started the ‘storming’ of the government building. They provoked the protest which made a crackdown ‘justifiable’. The state powers obviously had a plan – keep it quiet, make them look guilty, quickly clear up the mess. The demonstrators, equally obviously, had none, and they were shown up by the more organised state bureaucracy.

On Monday afternoon, Lukashenka gave his post-victory press conference, thereby de facto ending the confrontation and the election process. What struck me most was how confident he was, how comfortable his position is in power. After 16 years of running the show, he knows the ropes – even better, the ropes are part of him. “Show” is definitely the right word: Guy de Bord described modern society as a “spectacle” over 40 years ago, and this seems especially apt for today’s Belarus. Society’s ‘organic’ ties are weak, horizontal communications within civil society are fragmented. There is not much of a public sphere. The state media is hegemonic, including in the streets where red-green flags and flashy propaganda billboards dominate the skyline. Once the barricades have been dismantled, state-owned “Belarusian Television” is where politics really takes place.

The press conference was rather well-suited to its aims: journalists of all colours were invited, including from the most anti-state newspapers (e.g. Nasha Niva, Nasha Volya) and from a number of different countries. The trickery was in the setting and format of the conference: journalists were only allowed to ask one question each, and they had no right or opportunity to comment on or follow up the answers given by Lukashenka. Thus, the challenging questions (e.g. whether the storming of the government bore any resemblance to the burning of the Reichstag, whether Lukashenka had a chance to run for president in the first place) only served to let Lukashenka set out his official justifications for putting down the protest. He was given carte blanche to rubbish the opposition in his usual, denigrating tone, and accuse them of hoarding bombs in their cars, lying, attempting to make a fool out of the president, etc. This being the first and last opportunity to discuss these issues in front of a wide public, the only result was that Lukashenka could officially (1) acknowledge the protest and the arrest of the activists (i.e. the state has nothing to hide and is acting in accordance with the law) and then (2) offer his official version of events, totally unchallenged.

Luakshenka ended the press conference with a declaration that the “war has ended”. He meant, of course, the civil war between the usurpatory forces of opposition discontent on the one hand, and the righteous expression of the people’s will on the other. With hindsight, it seems clear that it was a conflict which was deliberately allowed to develop, so that there would be a rift to publicly heal. We will never know for sure what the initial intentions of the state organs were (if state organs can actually have intentions); in any case, the declaration of peace was yet another rotation in the permanent counter-revolution of Lukashenka’s Belarus.

Last night at about 1900, the Minsk skyline was briefly lit up by a red-green fireworks display...

A week ago, they were on stage with some of Britain’s biggest stars at the Young Vic in London. Today, with exactly a week to go until the presidential elections, the reality of life in Minsk had caught up. A routine performance for ordinary Belarusians - their kernel audience. Here, they don’t charge for tickets, they collect donations at the end of the performance. Spectators are invited by mobile phone 24 hours in advance, using a rota system where only a few dozen of a two-thousand strong waiting list can be invited for a single show. The venue is an unmarked house on the outskirts of the capital, with makeshift benches in a whitewashed room serving as the audience hall and the kitchen as a cloakroom. They used to play in cafes and other public venues but these were quickly threatened with loss of trading licence. This house has also been raided by law enforcement forces, and every performance is played out with a slight edginess brought on by the imminent threat of a bust.

They begin with the first public screening of good tidings from London, a video message from actor Samuel West supporting freedom and democracy in Belarus. The organisers explain that it is for us, the viewers, that these messages are recorded, and stress the importance of showing it to us first. The audience is made to feel important and respected, darkly foreshadowing the tragic loss of individual dignity which is the main theme of the spectacle we are about to watch.

This is a play about disappearance, about human rights violations, about politically motivated murders in this little-known country dubbed the “last dictatorship in Europe”. It is, or rather it transpires to be, the true story of Anatol Krasouski, a businessman murdered by the authorities in 1999 while travelling in the same car as Viktar Hanchar, formerly Deputy Prime Minister and Chair of the Central Election Commission of Belarus and prominent opponent of Alyaksandr Lukashenka’s then-developing dictatorship. The incredibly moving climax, where Anatol’s murder and his wife Irina’s mourning are played out with merciless realism, leaves the entire audience in tears. The final scene is, quite literally, a prayer.

This is also a play about memory, and this is what I will concentrate on here. In this setting rather far removed from the immediate concerns of the ‘international community’, in sub-zero Minsk, the deeper resonances seem to be in the everyday details - in Russian, the zhiteyskoe - the concerns of real life, of actual lived experience. On this reading, “Discover Love” is a danse macabre of fading memory, and at the same time a celebration of life’s flow amidst the oppressive silencing of official ideology. It calls not for direct political action, but for the activation of memory as a form of civic subversion.

The initial plot is the life story of Irina, which she tells herself, starting from her nostalgic childhood in the Soviet Union through to her marriage to Anatol and their uneven but happy life together. It is told with a lightness conveyed through virtuosic modulation of tone and anecdotal narration, and the frequent changes of roles expertly executed by the three actors on stage add a vivid spontaneity. The audience recognise details from their own bygone lives: ice creams no longer sold, the special treat of oranges and tangerines available only at New Year, school rituals, familiar teacher types, domestic mannerisms, grandma’s stories, waking up to the Soviet national anthem and falling asleep with the radio transmission of Belarusian fairytales, Jewish neighbours who emigrated to Israel, the economic hardships of the post-independence years. While these associations of course vary from person to person and between generations, the overall effect is unmistakably uniform. This is the material of kitchen table discussion, the memories shared amongst family members, the social glue of a community which has undergone mass historical change. This is precisely the reason why I can relate: I have been told so many similar stories with real-life meanings, memories kept alive because they make us function as part of this society.

The importance of these memories is in their juxtaposition to the actuality of present-day Belarus. Under Alyaksandr Lukashenka, time has been frozen under an official memory culture which leaves little room for the personal, the zhiteyskoe. The public sphere is saturated with commemoration of the Second World War, part of a neo-Soviet propaganda campaign which seeks to cement the glorious past of the nation in its wartime feats as the “Partisan Republic” during the Soviet era. Hardly any of this is Lukashenka’s own initiative: the city’s dominant victory monuments were put in place from the 1950s onwards; the capital’s most central and biggest museum commemorating the Great Patriotic War has existed since 1945; and the memorial culture has been active in literature, painting and film for just as long. However the present regime has made active efforts to preserve this myth through nationalising it and re-deploying it to fit its own needs: for example, earlier this year one of the city’s biggest parks was renamed Victory Park, with new attractions and monuments, and the Lukashenka government has revived Soviet-style parades on holidays such as May 9, Victory Day. The official wartime narrative is monolithic and, naturally, distorted: it is a straightforward story of heroism and brotherly unity which prevails in the face of Nazi terror. When Irina, early in the play, recalls her grandma’s stories about friendly Germans and requisitions by less-than-friendly Soviet partisans, actual lived memory rises up in protest against official history.

Belarus’ public memory is frozen in other ways too, for instance in the billboard campaign in place since the 2006 elections which proudly announces slogans such as “For Belarus”, “Flower, Belarus!” and “Together We are Belarus” in gaudy colours against a photographic background featuring war veterans, public service officials in uniforms, or rural idyll in peasant costumes. The latter represents a second major front of Lukashenka’s war on memory, locating the spirit of the people in an idealised and rather crude village commune – Timothy Snyder aptly calls this a policy of “vegetation” , presenting Belarusians as “an ethnic group, dressed in Soviet-era folk costumes, somewhere amidst the livestock and the crops, mindful chiefly of food and shelter”. Ethnography museums dotted around the country add to this illusion, their empty peasant huts bearing incomplete witness to a time when Belarusians supposedly lived like Tolkien’s hobbits. The lack of dynamism in this culture of national commemoration makes comparison to Brezhnev’s USSR very appropriate: ‘stagnation’ is the order of the day, hidden behind Lukashenka’s catchphrase of ‘stability’. The lively, urgent nostalgia of the first half of “Discover Love” riles against this uniformity, asserting the primacy of individual experience and the liveliness of the actual past.

The key turning point is when the audience discovers that Anatol’s character is not just a social type, but a real historical figure. So far he has been called only ‘Tolya’, in the familiar form of address, an ordinary family man with a story which is touching because of its normality. In an instant he becomes Anatol Krasouski, co-victim of the better known Viktar Hanchar, one of a number of disappeared persons in Belarus’ dark recent past. Here the play turns from one form of memory to another: from the idyllic recollection of things past to the preservation of traumatic historical truth.

Naturally, the Lukashenka government silences any whistleblowers who attempt to bring out the truth of these murders, including the Free Theatre themselves. The stories of those individuals who have died or disappeared in mysterious circumstances - also including former parliamentary deputy speaker Henadz Karpenka, former interior minister Yury Zakharenka, journalist Dzmitser Zavadzki, and more recently journalist Aleh Byabenin - are well-known to those who care to look. This year their fates were made public to a much wider audience by the Russian state-owned television channel NTV, in the prime-time documentary series “Krestny Bat’ka”. This, like every other smaller-scale attempt before it, was banned from Belarusian television.

Amidst this enforced silence and still-widespread ignorance, the need to remember becomes imperative. The crimes of the recent past are the strongest symbol of a sinister reality hidden behind the veil of economic progress and national unity. Tolya’s murder and its effect on Irina signify a calculated denial of basic human dignity which potentially threatens every single member of the audience. The raw humanity of the couple’s story so far acts as a mirror which helps the audience to recognise themselves in this hidden tragedy, and to begin to protect themselves from this fate through remembering. This play, in fact, is about much more than democracy or human rights – it is an exercise in transcendental memory, a lesson in the imperative of commemorative preservation as a defensive shield against the onslaught of the state’s ideological hegemony. The company’s website states that their “main aim... is to break through stereotypes of the Belarusian population that are imposed by the ideological system of the Belarusian dictatorial regime”. In “Discover Love” it does this by appealing to the need to remember.

The final scene employs another device, a transposed memory, in order to generalise the message and translate its significance from the individual level to the societal. The three actors kneel facing the audience and tell the story of Father Jerzy Popiełuszko, the prominent Polish priest who worked with the Solidarity movement and was brutally murdered by the police in 1984, shortly after the official end of martial law in Poland. In the closing incantation they repeat phrases from Popiełuszko’s final sermon, calling on all Poles to resist terror peacefully, through spiritual regeneration which will fill the land and overcome violence. In this new setting, the Polish example becomes a model for Belarus, for a non-violent resistance inspired by the past experience of other nations - a recontextualised memory which seeks to place Belarus in the lineage of post-totalitarian democratic revolution.

A week before the elections, with Lukashenka seeking a fourth term in office, the restorative revolution (to use Habermas’ well-known phrase) in Belarus seems far away indeed. There are scant signs of change. In fact, you have to look hard to find any sign that there is an election going on. The opposition is divided, their youthful demonstrations closer resembling spontaneous street parties than organised political campaigns. Most of Belarus’ neighbours have effectively acknowledged Lukashenka’s victory at the top diplomatic level. Has the international fame of the Free Theatre of Belarus brought any change to the country? The answer, realistically, has to be no – they are in any case preaching to the already converted, and their underground activity confines their reach to those already in the know. With “Discover Love”, however, their aim is not political change, but preservation of memory. The Free Theatre of Belarus calls upon Belarusians not to let the regime’s crimes slip into the ‘dustbin of history’, and in doing so it aligns itself with a strong tradition of memorial groups throughout the world. It acknowledges the regime’s declaration of war against public memory, and refuses to be conquered without a fight.