Conceptualizing Revivals
Belarusian State-Affiliated Youth Organizations and the Legacy of the Communist Youth League
Keywords:
Belarus, authoritarian governance, Soviet legacies, legitimation, organisationsAbstract
Three decades after the collapse of the USSR, revivals, defined as elements of the past that have been brought back to life, continue to puzzle scholars who work on legacies in general and Soviet legacies in particular. Yet there is no consensus on what unites and differentiates revivals from legacies, and little prior research into revivals in particular. By using state-affiliated youth organizations of post-Soviet Belarus as a case study, this article develops a framework for analyzing revivalism of communist-era structures. It argues that a revival is characterized by its dependence on the reviving agent, while relying on a legacy narrative for the purposes of legitimization. The article concludes by pointing to the difficulty of resurrecting an ‘improved’ version of a past institution.
