“For the last few years I have been living with the awareness that I could be targeted at any moment,” Diana says. “It’s not a pleasant feeling. At first I had attacks of paranoia.”
It is three years since Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenka launched a campaign of unprecedented political repression that has seen tens of thousands of people subjected to administrative arrests, criminal prosecution, and various forms of torture and abuse. Between 200,000 and 500,000 people emigrated.
Diana, however, is not one of them. Having actively supported the mass protests against the Belarusian government and Lukashenka that took place in 2020, she knows she is at risk. Yet Diana, a 40-year-old worker in the arts, chose to stay in her country.
“I started understanding what the classics were talking about 100 years ago,” she adds, referring to the era of political repression under the Soviet Union that culminated during the Stalin era.
Now many Belarusians are turning to similar analogies.
“Before, when I read about Stalin’s purges, I always tried to imagine the atmosphere of those years. How did people live, knowing that they could be arrested at any moment? What does it feel like to be startled by any knock on the door? And now I don’t even need to imagine anything: I know what it feels like,” says 35-year-old freelancer Andrey, who was detained several times in 2020 and 2021 but remained in Belarus.
If during the Stalinist repressions “black ravens” (as Stalin’s secret police cars were nicknamed) arrived at night, now the security forces like to break into apartments in the early morning.
Many Belarusians think that the bulk of arrests occur at the end of the work week, on Thursday or Friday. Especially for those who have been detained before, this is the most alarming time.
“People usually feel safest at home. And I’ve already been detained in my own apartment twice, so psychologically for me this is the place where I feel most vulnerable,” Andrey says.
Arrests have been made everywhere: on the street, at work, at the hairdresser’s or at school, during a meeting with a teacher. This is often done with demonstrative and completely disproportionate cruelty. For comments on social networks or reposts, people have been detained aggressively by armed security forces – knocked to the ground and handcuffed like dangerous criminals. Many are forced to record “repentance videos” (pro-government Telegram channels publish such videos almost daily), apologise on camera and confess to their “crimes”. Public humiliation of detainees has become commonplace.
Often, what frightens people the most is not prison itself, but the risk of being tortured.
“I really hope I will have the strength to remain human in this case,” says Ivan, a 43-year-old individual entrepreneur. He tries not to think about worst-case scenarios.
Totalitarian turn
Lukashenka has been in power for 29 years, during which Belarus has firmly established its image as ‘Europe’s last dictatorship’ where protests are harshly dispersed and the opposition and journalists are persecuted. For an external observer, the difference between Belarus before and after 2020 may not seem so fundamental – the country has been and remains undemocratic. But in reality the differences are colossal.
Before the start of the 2020 presidential campaign, Luakshenka’s regime looked more like an informational autocracy than the dictatorships of the 20th century. Previously, 2011 was considered the most severe period of the dictatorship: then, at its peak, there were just over 50 political prisoners in prison. Between 2015 and 2019, when Minsk tried to improve relations with the West, political prisoners could be counted on one hand.
But in 2020, everything changed. Repression has become the main method of government. There are now about 1,500 political prisoners and this list is constantly growing. In total, according to the Justice Hub Center for Law and Democracy, repression in various forms affected at least 136,000 Belarusians. This spring, the Office of the UN High Commissioner concluded the current campaign of repression in Belarus could be regarded as crimes against humanity.
No more rules
For its people, the worst thing is probably the complete disappearance of any “rules of the game.”
Previously, the authorities drew fairly clear “red lines” for dissidents and they only faced serious problems if they crossed them. Until 2020, within the limits permitted by the dictatorship, dissidents could feel relatively safe. If a person did not support Lukashenka’s policies, was a member of an opposition party, an NGO, or a journalist for an independent media, this in itself was not sufficient to persecute them. Even taking part in an unauthorised protest rarely led to more than 15 days of detention.
Now the very fact that a person does not support the authorities, voted for Svetlana Tikhanovskaya or reads independent media is enough for the special services to target them.
“If a person is interested in this, then he will have committed other violations. The formal absence of elements [of a crime] is not a reason to ignore the perpetrator,” explained the GUBOPiK, the Main Directorate for Combating Crime and Corruption.
The authorities now update lists of “extremist formations” and “extremist materials” several times a week, and any interaction with them can be considered criminal even retroactively. The criminalisation of the past has become a trend: legal activities that were not hidden and carried out openly for many years are suddenly declared “treason,” “inciting hatred,” or “extremism.”
All this deprives Belarusians of the opportunity to know what is safe. A person can completely refuse to publicly express his civic position, unsubscribe from “extremist” media and delete their social media accounts. But a few years later, the security forces will discover their photo attending a peaceful protest, a seditious like, comment or repost – and they will go to jail.
Those who were suspected of having oppositional views are now also subject to the principle of collective responsibility. For example, in response to the sabotage against the Machulishchy air base attack, where a Russian A-50U aircraft was damaged in March, Lukashenka ordered a “cruel purge” of all those who “haven’t understood anything in these 2.5 years.”
The point of this “cleansing” was solely to intimidate dissenters, since all those suspected of damaging the A-50U had already been arrested by that time.
After this, the number of arrests soared sharply: on some days, security forces took away 60 people at once, and across the whole of March 614 arrests were recorded. The Ministry of Internal Affairs called this action “a comprehensive training of individuals who support anti-state views.”
Emergency suitcase
“The most amazing thing is that you can even get used to such a reality to some extent,” says Andrey. “Not come to terms with it, no. But just learn to survive it.”
Life under conditions of mass repression has taught many Belarusians to regularly delete their emails, hide and anonymise their contacts and sometimes completely delete their accounts on social media. Some keep an ‘emergency suitcase’ at hand, containing things that will be needed for prison: a change of underwear and hygiene products.
Public figures sometimes record appeals in advance, which they ask to be published in the event of an arrest. They usually start with the phrase: “If you are watching this video, it means I was detained.”
“When you understand that you can be arrested at any moment, accused of anything and given from 15 days to 15 years in prison (depending on your luck), it leaves a mark on your entire life,” explains Andrey.
“I have long been used to living one day at a time, without tomorrow nor any day after tomorrow. I don’t plan anything in advance, I don’t see the point in it. I use an old phone and laptop – after all, it would be taken away during a search. I only buy things that will be comfortable in a prison cell (tank tops, jeans, shoes without laces). It’s not even forethought anymore – it’s just a habit”, he says.
Igor Ilyash
Denunciations and trust
After 2020, the authorities also began to actively encourage denunciations of dissidents. Propagandists openly call for this on television and in newspapers.
“I saw a zmagar (a derogatory name for a dissident), I heard his strange speeches – call the police, write to the GUBOPik chat bot, don’t let the traitor walk the earth,” Grigory Azaryonok, Lukashenka’s favourite propagandist, says.
Such agitation is bearing fruit: people are now being denounced for careless conversations, tattoos, flags or stickers. Serial informers and even provocateurs have appeared.
This forces Belarusians to be more careful. But still, “informing” has not yet become a truly mass phenomenon and has not given rise to total mistrust among friends, colleagues or neighbours.
“I don’t hide my views,” says Diana. “There are common themes that are relevant for representatives of opposite camps – everyone wants peace and a good life, but not everyone understands what we need to do to achieve these goals. This makes discussion possible. Whether we like it or not, we will have to communicate with each other. There are those who are not ready to speak the language of humanity, but it’s extremely rare.”
‘I don’t want to be away, I want to be here’
“Could I have avoided detention by going abroad? I don’t see the point. My entire adult life is connected with my motherland and my struggle for a better fate for it. Everyone I have loved and love appeared in my life during this struggle. The most precious things I have are my mother, my friends and my country. I found my real home and became myself only because I live in Belarus, and I can’t imagine my destiny without it. You can be free and safe, have a cosy home and a good job, see beautiful places – but for me there would be no joy in this if it was the price of parting with the motherland. Therefore, it would be better for me to be in prison, but on my native land, than in a foreign land, than to betray everything that I believe in and for which I live.”
This heartfelt message is a letter that former Grodno activist of the Belarusian Popular Front party Ekaterina Shust wrote in case of her arrest. It was published by the newspaper “Novy Chas” in March, when Shust was detained during the “cruel purge” announced by Lukashenka.
She was partly lucky: her letter was clearly written with the expectation that she would be given several years in prison, but she received “only” 10 days of administrative arrest. After her release, she remained true to herself and did not leave Belarus.
Of course, there are also more practical reasons for staying: some cannot leave their elderly and sick loved ones, others want to help their friends and relatives who are behind bars. But still, Shust’s motivation is, to one degree or another, a popular one.
Ivan says the main mood in today’s Belarus is melancholy and depression. But he’s not ready to leave yet. “This is my home, I can’t yet imagine that another country could become home,” he says.
Diana stressed her decision to stay is based on her desire to change something in Belarus. “Why did I stay? Because of children, home, work, people I love – because there is a whole world around me that is part of me. I don’t want to be away, I want to be here”, she explains.
However, Diana does not rule out “relocation” if it’s necessary to save her freedom or her life.
“Unfortunately, the space around me is becoming increasingly unfree: I have lost the opportunity to work,” she says.
‘Are they still putting people in prison?’
“In my family, the generations who lived in the 1930s experienced the repression,” Diana says. “This genetic memory is quite firmly sewn into our subconscious. So yes, what is happening now is reminiscent of the nightmare of the ’30s. It terrifies me how easily people facing this system accept the conditions that are imposed on them. Nobody likes it, but the overwhelming majority obediently accepts, thus putting a noose around their neck.”
Not everyone in Belarus is aware of the mass repression. People often ask: “Are they still putting people in prison? I thought it had all stopped in 2020”.
“When I see such people, I never cease to be amazed,” Andrey says, “how do they manage to live as if nothing is happening? On the other hand, now I have no doubt that such people exist at all times. Probably, 1937 also had some people who hardly even noticed the Great Terror.”
