The women who reinvented revolution: Olga Shparaga’s “The Revolution Has a Female Face. The case of Belarus”11 min read
There is an image of the Belarusian protests of 2020 that is difficult to forget: women dressed in white, sometimes carrying flowers, standing opposite rows of black-clad riot police. The contrast seemed almost too perfect. On one side were helmets, shields and batons; on the other, vulnerability transformed into defiance.
Women became one of the most recognisable faces of the extraordinary mobilisation that followed Belarus’s disputed presidential election on 9 August 2020. But in The Revolution Has a Female Face. The Case of Belarus, Belarusian philosopher Olga Shparaga asks us to look beyond those images. Women, she argues, were not simply the peaceful or photogenic face of somebody else’s revolution. Their emergence as political actors helped define what the revolution itself was.
Published in 2021 and written while the events of 2020 were still painfully immediate, Shparaga’s book combines political essay, feminist analysis and personal testimony. She describes the Belarusian movement as female, peaceful and postnational, placing it within a broader history of struggles for political emancipation. Read six years later, however, the book has acquired another quality. It preserves a moment when Belarus’s political future appeared radically open – and when assumptions about a passive society supposedly reconciled to authoritarian rule suddenly collapsed.
Shparaga is particularly well placed to tell this story because she was not observing it from a distance. A philosopher and feminist thinker who had long worked on democracy, civil society and gender, she became directly involved in the political mobilisation of 2020, joining the feminist group within the opposition’s Coordination Council. She was detained and later left Belarus amid the repression that followed. The resulting book is deliberately situated rather than detached: Shparaga writes both as an intellectual attempting to interpret a political rupture and as someone personally caught inside it.
A country that was not supposed to revolt
For years, Belarus was frequently portrayed from outside as one of Europe’s least politically dynamic societies. Alexander Lukashenka had ruled since 1994. Elections came and went without seriously threatening his hold on power, earlier protests had been suppressed, and the country was often associated more with stability and political resignation than mass mobilisation.
There was a corresponding stereotype of Belarusians themselves: politically passive, accustomed to paternalistic rule and perhaps even broadly satisfied with a president who promised stability in exchange for limited political freedom.
The summer of 2020 demolished that image.
Hundreds of thousands of people participated in demonstrations in Minsk and across the country. Workers at major state enterprises protested. Doctors, teachers, students, athletes, writers, musicians and other public figures expressed support for change. Mobilisation spread far beyond the circles that had traditionally constituted the Belarusian opposition.
One of the most consequential achievements of 2020 was therefore epistemic as much as political. Belarusians discovered something about themselves, while outsiders were forced to revise what they thought they knew about Belarus. Political passivity, the protests suggested, was not necessarily political consent.
This transformation is fundamental to Shparaga’s book. Her revolution is not simply a contest between Lukashenka and an established opposition. It is the moment in which people who had not necessarily considered themselves political actors began to understand themselves as such. Nowhere was this transformation more striking than among women.
When women became political subjects
The gendered character of Belarusian politics before 2020 makes what followed particularly significant. Lukashenka had cultivated an intensely paternalistic style of government and repeatedly treated political leadership as an essentially masculine occupation.
Yet the regime’s repression of male presidential hopefuls inadvertently created the conditions for three women to become the public face of the electoral challenge. Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya entered the presidential race after the imprisonment of her husband, blogger Siarhei Tsikhanouski. She was joined on the campaign trail by Maria Kalesnikava, representing the campaign of jailed banker Viktar Babaryka, and Veranika Tsepkala, whose husband Valery Tsepkala had been prevented from standing.
Their instantly recognisable gestures – a fist, a heart and a victory sign – became symbols of the campaign.
Shparaga’s interest, however, goes much further than these three women. Women organised solidarity chains and women’s marches, supported detainees and their families, documented violence and became visible throughout the decentralised networks that sustained the movement. For Shparaga, this amounted to the emergence of a new political subject.
The revolution did not have a woman’s face simply because women happened to be particularly visible. It had a woman’s face because women’s participation challenged assumptions about who was entitled to occupy political space and what political action could look like.
This is among the most persuasive elements of the book. It also contains an intriguing tension. Women carrying flowers before riot police presented an extraordinarily powerful image of peaceful resistance. But if women are celebrated primarily for being caring, empathetic and non-violent, does this liberate them from conventional gender roles – or reproduce those roles in a more flattering form?
The movement challenged Belarus’s patriarchal political order while sometimes drawing its symbolic strength from recognisably traditional understandings of femininity. That contradiction makes Shparaga’s analysis more interesting, not less.
Hearts, hashtags and a gun
The revolution developed a political language of its own. There was the historical white-red-white flag, transformed once again into a mass political symbol. There were flowers, hearts and victory signs. “Жыве Беларусь!” – “Long live Belarus!” – returned as a political slogan, while hashtags and Telegram channels helped create a common vocabulary among people who were often organising outside conventional political structures.
This digital dimension was crucial. The movement had no single revolutionary headquarters. Political activity became decentralised, with Telegram channels, independent media, neighbourhood groups and informal networks allowing information and mobilisation to spread through a society in which state television remained firmly under government control. NEXTA became particularly prominent during the protests, while established independent outlets provided an alternative account of events to that offered by the state.
The authorities understood the importance of this information sphere. The repression that followed was therefore not limited to clearing demonstrators from the streets. Independent media were blocked, raided or criminalised, journalists were detained, and some of Belarus’s most important news organisations were eventually forced to operate from abroad. TUT.BY, for years the country’s leading independent online outlet, became one of the most visible casualties.
Against the hearts, flowers and human chains stood another defining image of 2020. On 23 August, after a huge demonstration approached the presidential residence in Minsk, Lukashenka appeared in state-released footage carrying an assault rifle.
The symbolism could hardly have been clearer. Shparaga’s protesters offered a conception of political power rooted in collective participation, vulnerability and non-violence. The regime answered with a performance of armed authority – and, unmistakably, armed masculinity.
Holding hands across history
Human chains were another recurring element in the imagery of 2020. They also connected Belarus to an older regional history.
On 23 August 1989, more than a million people joined hands across Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania in the Baltic Way, creating a human chain stretching across the three Soviet republics in one of the defining demonstrations of the final years of the USSR. Exactly thirty-one years later, tens of thousands of people formed another chain from Vilnius towards the Belarusian border in solidarity with Belarusian protesters.
The echo matters because it places the uprising within a wider East European repertoire of peaceful political mobilisation. Bodies standing together, hands joined across physical space, turned ordinary citizens into a visible political community.
Yet there was also an important difference. The Belarusian movement was not primarily a national independence movement, nor was it straightforwardly anti-Russian. This helps explain Shparaga’s description of it as “postnational”.
That point gives the book a significance extending beyond gender. Belarus is deeply intertwined with Russia economically, politically and institutionally, including through the Union State. Yet the central divide on the streets in 2020 was not between Moscow and Brussels. Protesters were not primarily demanding that Belarus switch geopolitical camps. Their language centred on fair elections, dignity, an end to police violence and the right of citizens to choose their government.
Shparaga’s interpretation therefore resists the familiar tendency to understand Belarus almost exclusively through competition between Russia and the West. It insists instead on Belarusian political agency – on the possibility that Belarusians might have political demands of their own rather than simply serving as objects of rival geopolitical projects.
Seen from 2026, this dimension has become even more striking. The suppression of the 2020 movement was followed by a dramatic deepening of Belarus’s dependence on Moscow, particularly after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Shparaga’s book consequently documents a moment when Belarusian society asserted an unusually autonomous political voice shortly before the country’s room for independent geopolitical manoeuvre narrowed further.
A revolution written in the present tense
Perhaps the most fascinating feature of The Revolution Has a Female Face. The Case of Belarus today is something Shparaga could not have controlled: when she wrote it.
She was not reconstructing events after their conclusion. She was attempting to understand a political transformation while it was still unfolding. The urgency of that moment remains embedded in the book, giving it an immediacy that a retrospective political history could never reproduce.
But that proximity also means that the optimism of 2020 survives within the text.
The Belarus of 2026 provides a brutal counterpoint. Lukashenka remains in power. The mass mobilisation was suppressed. Independent civil society organisations and media have largely been dismantled inside the country or forced abroad. Activists, journalists, cultural figures and opposition politicians have experienced imprisonment, prosecution and exile.
Exile is therefore not merely an epilogue to the story Shparaga tells. It has become one of its central consequences. A remarkable part of the political and intellectual community generated or energised by the protests now exists outside Belarus: journalists working from Warsaw or Vilnius, activists organising across borders, artists producing Belarusian culture in exile, and political figures attempting to maintain links with a constituency dispersed across Europe and beyond.
Shparaga herself belongs to that story. Her biography mirrors one of the defining afterlives of the revolution she sought to understand.
This raises one of the most difficult questions surrounding the book when read today: what happens to a revolution when many of the people who made it possible are forced to leave the country?
Did the revolution fail?
If revolution means the seizure of political power, the answer seems obvious. Lukashenka survived. The opposition did not take control of the state. Repression became more extensive rather than less, while Belarus’s dependence on Russia increased.
It is difficult to read some of the expectations surrounding 2020 without feeling the distance between the political possibility of that summer and the Belarus that followed.
But Shparaga invites a broader understanding of revolution. The transformation she describes is also about people’s relationship to politics: who considers themselves entitled to speak, organise and participate; who is recognised as a political actor; and what forms political action can assume.
From this perspective, 2020 cannot simply be erased because Lukashenka remained in the presidential palace. Millions of Belarusians saw colleagues, neighbours, relatives and strangers become political actors. Women who had routinely been treated as peripheral to politics suddenly occupied its centre. People who had supposedly accepted authoritarian stability demonstrated that apparent acquiescence should never have been confused with enthusiasm.
The regime succeeded in emptying the streets. It is much harder to know whether it succeeded in restoring the society that existed before August 2020.
After the square empties
This is ultimately why The Revolution Has a Female Face. The Case of Belarus remains worth reading six years later. Its importance does not lie in proving that Belarus experienced a successful democratic revolution. History has denied the book such a straightforward ending. Instead, Shparaga captures the moment when the boundaries of political possibility suddenly widened and when people who had previously been treated as marginal to political life began to see themselves differently.
The book is particularly convincing when it describes women not as decorative symbols of peaceful protest, but as people discovering and exercising political agency. Yet its significance extends further. The revolution also challenged the idea of Belarus itself as passive, politically immobile and broadly content with paternalistic authoritarianism. In 2020, Belarusian women showed that they belonged at the centre of politics, while Belarusians more broadly demonstrated that apparent acquiescence should never have been mistaken for genuine consent.
Reading the book today inevitably means reading it alongside everything that came afterwards: prisons, closed media outlets, greater political dependence on Russia, displacement and exile. That knowledge makes the optimism running through Shparaga’s account more painful, but it does not necessarily make it wrong. The government survived, yet the fact of its survival cannot erase the political transformation that Shparaga witnessed and tried to understand while it was still unfolding.
Revolutions are normally judged by whether they overthrow governments. They can also transform the political imagination of the people who participate in them, altering ideas about who has the right to speak, organise and belong in public life. Six years later, Lukashenka remains in power. The more difficult question – and perhaps the most enduring one raised by Shparaga’s book – is whether the Belarus that existed before the revolution can ever fully return.
