Conducting Interviews in Belarus: Reliability, Trust and Importance of the Unpoken in a Dictatorship Setting

Belarusian society has been under some form of dictatorship for the last 105 years. This fact has significantly impacted the cultural norms and customs of this country. Widespread repressions have sowed an atmosphere of distrust and fear of publicity, people tend to avoid any open conversations with strangers, even more so they do on the record. In 2018 the presenter of this abstract has conducted a series of interviews related to environmental politics with the people of Belarusian settlements of Brest, Kamenec and Kamyanyuki. Initially the interviews were planned to be semi-structured in their format, but in practice many of them turned out to be in-depth interviews, because semi-structured interview method has proven to have significant flaws in authoritarian environment. Attempts to structure the conversations according to the pre-planned questions has created emotional tensions, which has caused the interviewees to either hold back information or to stick to the pre-planned and government-approved answers. Thus, the method itself caused the diminishment of the reliability of information. The most significant value of these government-approved answers in the further analysis was not in what was told, but in the omissions, the gazes, the body language and the unspoken truth – things a researcher cannot transcribe and to make matters even worse – things which people interpret very differently. Therefore – to get any insight on what is being omitted trust had to earned, language had to be non-structured, and the method had to be changed.