The story of the creation of this book begins with the work on the group project Stand By which Milach was planning to make together with the collective Sputnik Photos. During a trip to Belarus he was trying to find the roots of his family.
Once more thing turned out differently to how I had planned – said the artist in a conversation with Filip Springer which was published by the weekly Tygodnik Powszechny. – I was most stunned by the Belarusian superficiality, the message which I was being insistently offered at all places. That seemingly everything was alright, when we knew in fact that it wasn’t.
The series of photographs which was eventually created during this trip is a documentation of Milach’s encounters with the propaganda of the Belarusian system. The pictures show the winners of various propagandistic competitions. Thanks to this we learn that Arri the sheepdog is the best dog of the border protection forces, that the best room for ideological work is located in a sugar factory in Słuck and that Miss Belarusian Railway is named Marina. We also learn that the best chambermaid of the Hotel Belarus can change a set of sheets in 33 seconds, that the best milker can be found in the Staryca Agro kolkhoz and also who is the best Jennifer Lopez lookalike.
Private life also serves propagandistic purposes – in Milach’s photographs we learn about the best Belarusian pair of sweethearts, the best multi-children family and the winners of the Rulers of the Village competition. On an average day these winners can be found in kolkhozes, schools, state institutions, night clubs and rural discos. The names of the winners feature on boards of glory that are present in almost all the towns of Belarus.
According to Olivier Chanarin, "Milach created an encyclopaedic work with a tragicomic dimension. It is an ironic look from the outside at the last communist dictatorship in Europe".
One of the persons photographed by Rafał Milach is a Belarusian internet star. Ksenia Degielko, a 13-year-old member of the pro-Lukashenko BRSM youth organization, took second place in a country-wide competition for young leaders. As DJ Ksenia she raps a confession of faith, in which she praises the Belarusian reality and stability – she thinks about the future of the fatherland, is a good student, doesn’t smoke or drink and calls for a general ban on wearing miniskirts and for people to buy domestic products.
On the red cover of The Winners, next to a fragment of the lyrics of one of Ksenia’s songs, the decree 111 is shown. It is an order given by Lukashenko which serves the purpose of propagating state ideology. The decree from 20th February, 2004, orders the creation of a position of director of ideological affairs, or a department of ideological affairs at every company with more than 150 workers. Because of this decree, special ideological courses were introduced to high schools and higher education institutions.
My work isn't about pointing fingers and saying directly how things are. The Winners was to be a maximally neutral message which would enable the viewers to make use of the context in which Belarus is viewed today, regardless of the viewers’ political preferences. Politics in Belarus cannot be separated from image and from the particular winners, after all, the winners were created in response to the needs of the system, sometimes literally. I repeatedly experienced, for instance at visited schools, a situation in which the ideological worker chose the people for the photographs. By being chosen these people automatically became champions. This might sound strange, but I wasn’t bothered by this, this actually helped me keep to my guideline of staying on the surface – said Rafał Milach in a conversation with Jakub Śwircz which was published by the magazine Kikimora.