Month: April 2023

Musical “Les Misérables”

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When I wrote my review of Victor Hugo’s novel Les Misérables, I admitted that what pushed me to read it was the Hollywood adaptation of the musical based on the same book. Before the musical, I only knew the broad strokes about the novel. The musical interpretation, though a bit on the superficial side, turned out to be very engaging. I rewatch it from time to time, and many of the songs have made their way into my playlist.

At some point I got interested in the history of the musical itself. And it turned out not to be some little-known production. So I’ll try to give a brief overview.

The first staging of a musical based on the famous book was in France, in 1980—and of course in French. But that production ran on stage for only three months. And perhaps no one would have heard of it if, in 1983, a recording hadn’t been passed to Cameron Mackintosh, the producer of the Broadway version of the great musical Cats, with a proposal to create an English-language version. The text was rewritten for an English audience; a prologue and several new numbers were added; and most importantly, all the non-musical spoken dialogue was removed. This version premiered in London in 1985.

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The Death of Belarusian IT: How to Kill a Successful Industry

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No matter how Belarusian officials try to put a brave face on it, the exodus of IT from the country is a fact. And for many years the IT sector was the nation’s calling card and a fairly substantial share of GDP.

Just the other day I had to discuss yet again what will happen to this industry now, and when it might recover. Unfortunately, my forecast is bleak: Belarus will never again be an IT country. Or at least not for decades. I could be wrong—I’m no great economist—but I’ll try here to lay out the considerations on which I base this view.

But first—a bit of history.

Belarus didn’t become strong in IT out of thin air. In Soviet times, Minsk was an assembly shop, including for computing hardware. It was in Belarus that the large “Minsk” computers were made, and later the ES personal computers, which people chased after even when I was a teenager, because they were IBM-compatible machines you could buy for home use and, for better or worse, enjoy the benefits of a personal computer.

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Song: Tor Band “Go Away”

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Until 2020, I knew nothing at all about the band Tor Band from Rogachev, Belarus. The guys had found their niche and started releasing protest songs back in 2017, but they were still known to very few. In 2020, though, they became almost the anthem of the protests alongside many others. Their “We’re Not a ‘Little Nation’!” quickly gained popularity among protesters. After that, they began releasing similar songs one after another. You can’t say all of them are of the highest level of performance or use non-trivial musical approaches. But could you say that about Vysotsky, for example? And yet Tor Band’s work spoke to the soul.

But our “most humane state in the world” got to them as well. All the musicians—and even their wives—were arrested; the band itself was declared an extremist formation. I can’t even imagine what’s being done to them now in the regime’s jails. And the sentences they face are anything but humane.

I don’t consider the expression of an honest opinion to be extremism. They’re merely saying what those in power don’t want to hear. And that’s why I think it must be repeated and repeated until, someday, it’s heard. If only because, for now, I can still do it.

There’s no official music video for the song “Go Away,” but there is an unofficial one—that’s the one I’ll share.

Tor Band — Уходи