Open Access

In focussing on Belarus from a comparative perspective, the historian and public history expert Aliaksei Bratachkin discusses how the use of popular cultural elements in public history has played a crucial role in post-Soviet nation-building since 1991. Historical themes in particular were promoted as didactic and educational tools by the state, but have also been used by opposition groups in competing national narratives, especially since 2020.

Thee locale of horror games, i.e., the space in which the player moves, lives, and survives, is usually saturated with elements of gothic aesthetics such as decaying, ruined scenery, 'dark' music, and the ubiquity of monsters. Merging the gothic entourage with the elements of action-oriented games (e.g., shooters or adventures), the 'survival horror' games place the player character, who is usually vulnerable and under-armed, in the middle of this uncanny environment. Ever since the release of its originator, "Resident Evil" in 1996, the genre of the survival horror has been gradually expanding its aesthetic features, for instance,by incorporating 'ecogothic' elements for modelling the in-game landscapes or for the representation of ecological crises. If gothic is understood as centring around some profoundly historical motifs like the "return of the repressed" or revealing the "unburied past", ecogothic mediates cultural anxieties about the human relationship to the non-human world through uncanny apparitions of a monstrous nature. However, a clear boundary that separates the non-human world of nature from the human realm of history is often impossible to draw. Their interconnectedness is particularly evident in the case of the Chernobyl nuclear accident, where the environmental disaster is often regarded as a pivotal point in history - a dark metonym for the fate of the Soviet Union. Chernobyl has been the subject of historical documentaries, crime thrillers, and haunting photo installations - all focusing on both historical and ecological features of the nuclear catastrophe. Similarly, the gaming industry has been invoking the ghostly area of Chernobyl with striking regularity. This paper explores the representation of Soviet history and culture in the main instigator of this trend, the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. game series, which combines the elements of survival horror and ego-shooter against the backdrop of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.

Violent traumatic events in history have become an extremely successful and favoured topic in popular culture, which can be appropriated and narrated in very different ways. Lidia Martinovich discusses how "cultural trauma" has become an important medium for narrating national history in Belarus in recent times, analysing popular novels of the last decades. The "suffering Belarusian" has become a central figure to confront readers with different options for action and survival strategies in a historical guise, sometimes in a ridiculous, sometimes in a frightening way.

Nina Weller looks at a special combatant figure from World War II, namely the partisan, who enjoyed enormous popularity in post-Soviet Belarus, both in official circles and among the artistic and political opposition. His tactics and strategies of subversion were appropriated and reinterpreted for the post-Soviet present in a wide range of media formats and genres, from large historical films to small forms of street protest.

Maria Galina and Ilya Kukulin analyse Russian alternative histories of the Soviet Union, focusing on soldiers and fighters who are primarily concerned with avoiding the collapse of a mighty statehood. While in the 1990s the main subject of interest was to remove taboos from certain topics, more recent counterfactual works increasingly deal with an imagined revenge and a deep resentment against external enemies.