In early April 2021 the Belarusian creator Victor Martinovich wrote an article for the information portal Budzma, wherein he poured out his nervousness about what was taking place in his nation. ‘Every new morning is a challenge: Are you still human? Are you still free? Everything is forbidden, even reporting the activity on the streets. We are forbidden from setting foot outside on the wrong day.’
The regime, he realized, was shutting down all alternatives for self-fulfilment and engagement. He had by no means skilled something prefer it: ‘For the first time, there are no longer any niches.’ The areas that had acted as sanctuaries for various identities and methods of life had been being closed off. The intention was to forestall the vital mass that had constructed up for the reason that starting of the large-scale protests 9 months in the past from voicing any type of opposition. The spirit of resistance was to be stifled, if not banished from individuals’s minds altogether. To attain this, violence and oppression needed to turn into the first mechanisms of rule.
More and more heavy punishments and ever extra legal guidelines and amendments curbing fundamental freedoms have been an integral a part of the Lukashenka regime because it began on its authoritarian trajectory. However what has occurred since 2021 is of a complete new order of magnitude. Article 23.34 of the Code of Administrative Offences (renumbered 24.23 in March 2021) prohibiting ‘participation in and organization of unauthorised mass events’ was used to convict the overwhelming majority of the tens of hundreds protestors arrested, in order that because the revolution progressed it got here to be referred to as the ‘people’s paragraph’. These convicted underneath this offence had been usually sentenced to fifteen days in jail, a high-quality or neighborhood service.
When this ceased to be an efficient deterrent, the parliament tightened the legislation, growing the punishment to as much as 30 days imprisonment. The monetary penalties had been additionally drastically raised to 100 base quantities (roughly 1100 US {dollars} in 2021) for participation in an unauthorized protest, and to 150 base quantities for the organisation of such a protest. If one is convicted 3 times underneath the article, the general public prosecutor might launch felony proceedings, which may result in a jail time period of as much as six years.
Kurapaty. Creator: Andrej Kuźniečyk / Supply: Wikimedia Commons
The article has additionally been used to penalize people who publicly show the colors of the white-red-white nationwide flag that turned the image of the protests (though the flag itself has not been formally outlawed). The identical goes for the Pahonia – the nationwide emblem of the Belarusian Democratic Republic of 1918 – and the opposition battle cry žhyve Belarus! Lengthy stay Belarus! In such circumstances, people are charged with organizing an unauthorized one-person demonstration. Individuals have been fined or given jail phrases for posting the flag on a Telegram channel, carrying purple and white socks, carrying purple and white umbrellas, hanging purple and white towels out to dry on their balconies, and handing out sweets in purple and white wrappers. PEN Belarus has established that in 2021, people tried for such offences had been handed down jail sentences totalling no less than 2589 days and fines totalling 53,000 euros.
‘Anti-extremism’
In Could 2021, the regime tightened the ‘extremist’ provision within the penal code (Article 361–4), which was launched in 2016 however had solely been deployed sometimes. The only function of this statute is the political persecution of undesirable people, organizations, media, books, and web sites, and the social media channels of analysts, journalists, politicians and activists on platforms like Telegram. Even chat channels are declared ‘extremist’. In November 2024, the checklist of ‘extremist materials’ numbered 6565 objects and was over 1400 pages lengthy.
It’s a felony offence not solely to arrange an ‘extremist organization’, but additionally to be concerned in a single; the punishment is as much as six years’ imprisonment. Journalists, media organizations and others who fall into this class stand can’t proceed to stay and work freely within the nation. The use or dissemination of ‘extremist materials’, together with liking or reposting feedback by people categorised as ‘extremists’, can also be handled as an offence and might result in heavy fines and jail sentences of as much as 30 days. ‘Insulting state officials’ or ‘the President’ are additionally handled as ‘extremist offences’, as are ‘discrediting the Belarusian state’ and ‘calling for sanctions’ (penalty: six to 12 years). Though the regime has not but blocked Fb, X, YouTube or different digital platforms, elevated surveillance and criminalization has led many Belarusians to comb by their timelines, deleting posts or Telegram subscriptions that might trigger them issues.
It’s also unlawful to donate to and obtain support from ‘extremist organizations’ or ‘international organizations’. Individuals charged with this offence – for instance these despatched meals parcels by the US diaspora group INeedHelpBY – are visited by the KGB, charged with fines, detained pending trial, and positioned on Ministry of the Inside lists of residents thought of disloyal to the regime. They’ve misplaced their jobs and have nearly no probability of discovering new work, particularly outdoors the cities. In 2023, round 740,000 individuals misplaced their jobs as a consequence of the repression, in line with a report by the UN Human Rights Council. Individuals who acquired help with authorized charges from Bysol (the Belarus Solidarity Basis) after being arrested in 2020 have additionally been prosecuted. Relations of political prisoners convicted of accepting help are likewise being pressurised and prosecuted.
Virtually 5,000 people have been declared ‘extremist’ since 2021. The Ministry of the Inside updates its checklist each Friday. Lots of the media retailers that had been pressured to go away the nation in the course of the repression and that at the moment are working out of Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Georgia have been declared ‘extremist associations’. These embrace not simply impartial Belarusian media but additionally Deutsche Welle, Germany’s state-funded overseas language service. Additionally declared extremist are the political buildings of the brand new democracy motion and impartial civil society organizations. Belonging to the latter class are PEN Belarus, the Belarusian journalists’ affiliation BAJ, and the human rights group Viasna, which meticulously analyses and paperwork circumstances of political persecution. Ales Bialiatski, who based Viasna in 1996 and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022, was sentenced to 10 years in jail in March 2023.
Radio Svaboda has established that the youngest convicted ‘extremist’ was 16 years outdated and the oldest 82. ‘The lists include entire families (3–4 people each, for example a father and children). There are numerous mothers with children on the lists, as well as people who are seriously ill or with disabilities.’ Within the three months from July to September 2024, human rights group Human Constanta recorded no less than 142 new felony proceedings and 119 convictions for ‘extremism‘. It is unclear what criteria are used to declare people extremists, or organizations and media ‘extremist associations’, or how web sites and books turn into ‘extremist material’.
Artistic artists are additionally subjected to such a political persecution. Total, lots of have been arrested in the middle of the clampdown. Top-of-the-line-known circumstances is Tor Band, a rock group whose catchy songs have turn into anthems of the revolution. The lyrics of Uchodi, for instance, run, ‘Go away! Peacefully, quietly and silently / Go away! We’ll discover new males of honour / Go away! Now’s the time for the courageous, not cowards / Go away! That’s what the Belarusians need!’ The three musicians – Dimitri Golovach, Yevgeny Burlo and Andrei Yaremchik – had been arrested in October 2022 and in late October 2023 sentenced to between seven-and-a-half and 9 years in jail. Tor Band itself was declared an ‘extremist organization’ in January 2023.
The literary arts are additionally affected. The author Alhierd Bakharevich has had the doubtful honour of getting two of his novels declared ‘extremist material’, together with the epic Canine of Europe, which gained the Leipzig Ebook Prize for European Understanding in spring 2025. In Could 2022, his writer Andrej Janushkevich acquired a go to from the siloviki (safety forces) at his newly opened bookshop in Minsk, for allegedly distributing ‘extremist literature’. After spending 28 days in custody, Januskevich fled to Poland, the place he has rebuilt his publishing home.
The regime’s warfare on various tradition goes again a great distance. It’s rooted primarily within the failure of the Lukashenka state to develop an interesting cultural mannequin of its personal. The writers, musicians, artists and publishers on the choice scene have at all times been miles forward of the inflexible state with regards to creativity, flexibility and willingness to experiment. ‘This is a conflict between irreconcilable world views and a battle between value systems’, as cultural research scholar and movie critic Maxim Zhbankov put it in an interview with Deutsche Welle.
Political prisoners
The ‘extremism’ legal guidelines (Article 361-4) are nonetheless the commonest means by which the Lukashenka regime prosecutes regime opponents. A complete of 21,495 ‘extremist crimes’ had been recorded between August 2020 and November 2024. However draconian jail sentences additionally proceed to be handed all the way down to these accused of ‘high treason’ (Article 365) or ‘organizing mass riots’ (Article 293 of the Felony Code). The general intention is to forestall Belarusians from collaborating with organizations and individuals who have been branded extremist and from being impressed by their work and concepts. It’s also to forestall the continuation or enlargement of dialogue, dialogue and knowledge flows between individuals in Belarus and people in exile.
Contributors within the 2020 protests are nonetheless being recognized, arrested and placed on trial. The blogger Ihar Losik was sentenced to fifteen years in jail and has already tried to take his personal life twice. His spouse, Darya Losik, was sentenced to 2 years in jail for giving an interview about her husband to the Polish-based Belarusian TV station Belsat – which the courtroom deemed as ‘support for extremism’. The lengthiest politically-motivated jail sentence within the historical past of impartial Belarus was imposed in October 2022 by a courtroom in Hrodna. The taxi firm operator Mikalay Autukhovich was sentenced to 25 years, amongst different issues for ‘attempting to seize state power by unconstitutional means’, ‘high treason’ and ‘incitement of hatred’. Eleven different individuals had been sentenced alongside him, to a complete of 193 years in jail and fines totalling a million US {dollars}. Autukhovich, who had repeatedly been subjected to state repression earlier than 2020, is a acknowledged political prisoner.
Since 2020, greater than 3,300 political prisoners have been held in Belarusian prisons and labour camps, with the overall at anybody time reaching as much as 1,600. There have at all times been political prisoners underneath Lukashenka, however by no means on such a scale. Two years after the protests that adopted the suppression of the December 2010 presidential election, there have been solely 9 registered political prisoners. On the finish of 2024 there have been 1265. Russia, whose inhabitants is nearly 16 occasions the dimensions of Belarus, had 768 registered political prisoners in September 2024.
With a purpose to defend their households, who’re afraid they may even fall sufferer to state repression, many detainees don’t allow human rights organizations to declare them political prisoners. Furthermore, political prisoners are pressured to put on a yellow triangle on their clothes as a mark of disgrace, and are subjected to humiliation, bullying and deliberate degradation. They’re positioned in cells with convicted murderers and held underneath notably harsh circumstances, and are pressured to work for state forestry, textile and agricultural enterprises.
Sascha Janouski, a health care provider sentenced to a yr and a half in jail in Could 2022, remembers his first day on the notorious Okrestina jail, which turned a logo of the violence unleashed by the state within the wake of the protests: ‘It was a single cell with a concrete floor, containing nine unhappy people who had just been sentenced. Some were clutching their heads in shock; others had been planning to get married. At night the concrete floor was cold, and to keep myself from getting ill, I slid a broom under my body. It was very cramped; people were lying on the floor like Tetris blocks, so that you couldn’t transfer. It was inconceivable to sleep.’
In August 2020, policeman Dimitri Kulakovski resigned in protest on the violence meted out by the Belarusian authorities in opposition to the demonstrators. He was arrested and remanded in custody for 27 days. After his arrest he swallowed 4 metallic objects in protest. At his trial, he stated, ‘I believe the criminal proceedings against me were fabricated because I resigned from my job at the Ministry of the Interior out of conviction … The conditions I was held in were inhumane, 25 days in prison without medication or medical care.’ Others have reported being interrogated at gunpoint within the forest and being brutally maltreated whereas being arrested.
Many well-known political prisoners are held in what is named the incommunicado system, the place they’re stored in strict solitary confinement and haven’t any contact with the skin world. That is the case for Maria Kalesnikava, one of many three members of the united opposition marketing campaign who was arrested in September 2020 and is presently being held on the Ladies’s Penal Colony no. 4 in Homel. Her jail circumstances have been described by the Belarusian department of on-line information outlet Mediazona as follows:
The isolation cell is about 1.6 by 2.5 metres. Two plank beds, for 2 individuals every, are connected to the partitions; they’re solely lowered throughout evening hours, from 8.30 pm to five.00 am. The bathroom is a gap within the ground within the nook of the cell, and a sheet of metallic the dimensions of an open newspaper serves as a privateness display screen. It isn’t match for the aim: irrespective of the way you squat, you’re uncovered to view.
No phrase was heard from Kalesnikava for 620 days. Relations and attorneys weren’t permitted to go to her and she or he was forbidden to ship any letters to the skin. Her father was solely allowed to see her once more on the finish of October 2024. There isn’t any contact in any respect with different political prisoners. The households and buddies of Maxim Znak, Mikola Statkevich and Sergei Tikhanovsky haven’t heard from them for between 500 and 600 days. They’re being held in darkness, a type of psychological torture.
Political prisoners usually die in these inhumane circumstances. The artist Ales Pushkin, for instance, died of a burst abdomen ulcer. He’s one in all no less than seven political prisoners to have perished in custody. It isn’t unusual to drive political prisoners by a second authorized course of by scary them to interrupt jail guidelines and misusing Article 411 of the Penal Code (‘malicious disobedience’) to delay their detention. So referred to as ‘custodial detainees’, who’re sentenced to 30 days’ imprisonment for misdemeanours, additionally report being overwhelmed throughout arrest and interrogation, being held in humiliating circumstances in chilly cells the place the lights are stored on at evening, and being denied washing amenities, hygiene and menstrual merchandise.
Stress and intimidation
There are lots of different technique of repression and prosecution. A basic of kinds is Article 243 of the penal code (tax evasion). Up to now, it was used to place strain on impartial media. Now it’s a part of the usual repertoire, used as the idea for locking up opposition figures such because the 2020 presidential candidate Viktar Babaryka, and for eliminating media, firms and organizations. It additionally permits convicted events’ houses and properties to be seized and auctioned off.
The Belarusian authorities have additionally repeatedly threatened to revoke the citizenship of well-known activists and members of the opposition. Political prisoners’ households are harassed and threatened with the elimination of their youngsters. In September 2023, Lukashenka decreed that Belarusians dwelling overseas would now not have the ability to acquire new identification paperwork from the nation’s embassies; they must return to their dwelling nation, the place they might very in all probability be arrested.
Attorneys who tackle political circumstances are targets of repression. Since 2020, the state has disbarred greater than 140 attorneys and over 300 have left the occupation. The authorized system is now being filled with former militia and secret service officers. Open threats and insults are sometimes issued by the enforcement companies, illustrating simply how unbridled and normalized violence has turn into. In November 2024, workers of the Directorate for Combating Organized Crime used its official Telegram channel to threaten exiled blogger Mikita Melkaziorau, warning that the houses of his family members can be searched with specific ‘zeal’.
Many may additionally face arrest and conviction in a second or third spherical of felony proceedings: confiscated laptops and cell telephones are carefully examined by the key providers and legislation enforcement companies. Contacts and correspondence are then in contrast with lists of individuals with prior convictions and the felony circumstances in opposition to them. Whatever the expenses, anybody who seems on these lists is dismissed from employment with state-run banks, theatres, hospitals, administrative our bodies and agricultural companies. As a ‘listed person’ this can be very tough to discover a job, and finally the one choice is to flee the nation.
Such was the destiny of the members of the Yanka Kupala State Theatre ensemble, who had been fired for participating within the protests. The actors and administrators went into exile and based the impartial theatre group Kupalaucy, which loosely interprets as ‘Kupala’s disciples’. Yanka Kupala’s early-twentieth century poems and performs gave expression to the Belarusians’ need for independence. He died in 1942 in mysterious circumstances, ‘falling down a staircase’ on the Resort Moskva in Moscow. The Kupalaucy theatre group has been declared an ‘extremist organization’. It is just a matter of time earlier than the regime adjustments the title of the venerable theatre, which opened in 1920.
The trouble to which the authorities and the siloviki have gone to detain specific people, their willpower and their willingness to take excessive dangers, had been demonstrated by the spectacular case of blogger and activist Roman Protasevich, who on the time of his arrest in Minsk on 23 Could 2021 was editor-in-chief of the Nexta Telegram channel. Protasevich was arrested after the Belarusian authorities pressured the Ryanair flight 4978 from Athens to Vilnius on which he was travelling together with his girlfriend Sofia Sapega to land in Minsk. Protasevich was subsequently damaged and now features as a regime stooge.
‘Here, the public is being presented with a living example, a potential alternative, by way of illustration,’ commented political scientist Valery Karbalevich on exiled Radio Svaboda. ‘This is what political opponents need to do to be released: show remorse or, as Soviet newspapers wrote in 1937, “disarm” before the regime, “reorient themselves”, swear allegiance and ideally call on people to vote for Lukashenka.’ It’s also the regime’s means of demonstrating that the democracy motion in exile is powerless and that just one particular person has energy over political prisoners: Lukashenka.
Lukashenka’s cynicism
Since his election in 1994, the person with the moustache and stilted speeches has been frequently underrated and incessantly ridiculed; however this has solely contributed to his success. Within the Nineties, the opposition was satisfied they might be rid of the previous collective farm supervisor in only a few years. However Lukashenka is making it abundantly clear: that even after 30 years in energy, he shouldn’t be underestimated.
The EU responded to the de facto hijacking of an aeroplane with a complete package deal of sanctions that focused Lukashenka’s banks, authorities officers, businesspeople, judges, civil servants, and key state-owned firms such because the Minsk Car Plant (MAZ) and the New Oil Firm, the one personal firm allowed to export oil merchandise from Belarus and import oil into the nation. For the primary time, the worldwide neighborhood additionally imposed sectoral sanctions. This minimize off one of many regime’s key sources of revenue: EU imports of Belarusian petroleum merchandise and potash fertilisers.
However on this case, too, Lukashenka responded to ‘the hostile actions of the West’ with a particular operation few would have thought him able to. He engineered a man-made refugee disaster on the EU border by encouraging Syrians, Iraqis and Afghans to journey to Belarus by way of journey companies that promised them a simple crossing from the Belarusian aspect. By July 2021, greater than 4,000 individuals had entered Lithuania by way of this route; Belarusians, by the way, had been additionally utilizing it to flee. In accordance with EU information, no less than 47 plane from Center Japanese international locations landed in Minsk each week in November 2021. On 26 November, Lukashenka visited the transport and logistics centre close to the Brusgi border crossing, the place migrants had been being quickly housed. At an impromptu rally, he instructed them that, ‘if you want to go to the West, we will neither arrest you nor beat you. It is your choice. If you can get through, then go ahead.’
This operation revealed Lukashenka’s cynicism and crafty. Whereas waging warfare by itself individuals at dwelling, the regime was abusing the great religion of refugees, sending them to a border zone the place they had been met with Lithuanian and Polish border guards and compelled to spend weeks within the chilly forests of no-man’s-land. By the top of 2021, 14 individuals had died. The migration disaster this triggered gave Lukashenka one other strategic benefit: conflicts flared up between EU member states and worldwide reporting was diverted from the political persecution of Belarusians.
In April 2021, in an interview with state broadcaster Belarus 1, the overseas minister Vladimir Makei had threatened penalties in case of additional tightening of sanctions. ‘This will mean civil society will cease to exist,’ stated Makei. ‘And I believe that would be fully justified under these circumstances … In my view, those who are now calling for sanctions are committing a crime against their own people.’
Makei, who till his loss of life in 2022 held quite a few senior posts in Lukashenka’s regime, was seen because the architect of the so-called seesaw coverage. With a purpose to counterbalance the nation’s rising financial and political dependence on Russia, the regime had sometimes opened as much as the EU and different western democracies. These durations of détente had been by no means adopted by far-reaching reforms. However political prisoners had been launched, together with outstanding opposition politician Mikola Statkevich in 2015 (arrested when standing as a presidential candidate within the 2010 elections and sentenced to 6 years in a labour camp, rearrested in 2020) and human rights activist Ales Bialiatski in 2014 (arrested in 2011 and sentenced to 4 and a half years in jail for tax fraud). As well as, civil society and cultural initiatives got larger freedoms.
After the 2020 revolution, these freedoms weren’t solely curtailed however eradicated fully. The next yr was dominated by footage of raids and searches, with masked members of the tax and legislation enforcement authorities storming into workplaces and houses, confiscating paperwork, laborious drives and computer systems. By the summer season of 2021, 50 non-profit organizations and establishments had been dissolved or liquidated; by October 2021, their quantity had risen to 270, and by the top of 2024, it had exceeded 2,000. Together with human rights organizations such because the Belarusian Helsinki Committee, the purge additionally focused impartial commerce unions, environmental and scholar initiatives, associations for individuals with disabilities, city growth and historic analysis tasks, the Radislava girls’s shelters, the Affiliation of the Polish Minority in Belarus, bicycle lovers, ornithologists – and cultural establishments.
Totalitarian transformation
The regime’s aggression stems from its worry that Belarus’s resourceful civil society sector may turn into the driving drive of one other revolution. As in Russia, the place the state has been utilizing the International Brokers Legislation to crack down on non-commercial organizations since 2012, and on the media since 2017, the Belarusian regime is obsessive about the concept ‘the West’ is utilizing civil society to foment revolution. This narrative has been a part of the propaganda toolkit for the reason that color revolutions in Serbia, Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan. The repressions are meant not solely to unfold worry and terror amongst these ready to protest, and to bolster the regime’s resolve; in addition they sign to the Kremlin that Lukashenka could be relied upon – that he’s in management and might deal with severe crises. By crushing civil society, Lukashenka proves himself a reliable companion to Putin as within the preservation of their authoritarian methods, whose political survival will depend on states of emergency.
Belarusians have lengthy referred to their very own nation sarcastically as ‘the North Korea of Europe’. Those that are dissatisfied are nonetheless capable of go away the nation. In any case, when critics of the regime to migrate, it consolidates the dictatorship. The free market has not but been fully abolished, though the federal government is making larger use of regulatory devices and financial controls and isn’t afraid to requisition privately owned firms. Though the state doesn’t but intrude on all facets of life, the previous 5 years have introduced a fast and unmistakeable transformation: from an authoritarian regime that allows sure freedoms, right into a totalitarian regime that wages all-out warfare on its opponents and ‘singles out’ anybody who fails the loyalty take a look at. These individuals lose their livelihoods, their prospects and the foundations of their lives.
This goes for opponents inside the regime too. On 9 August 2021, Lukashenka threatened his subordinates, saying, ‘Yes, I realize there are a few still hiding behind the skirting board. Even now. But we will get them. I have spoken honestly and openly about this: we will have no traitors working in the machinery of state.’ In the meantime, surveillance and monitoring are being prolonged even additional. In an interview with the web portal Zerkalo, Polish journalist and former dissident Adam Michnik in contrast the Jaruzelski regime with Lukashenka’s rule: ‘We had totalitarianism with a human face, so to speak. In Belarus, they have totalitarianism with Lukashenka’s bestial grin … It’s now -80°C in Belarus. With us, it was -40°C. That’s chilly, however not as chilly as they’ve it.’
All this reminds Belarusian society of one of many darkest chapters in its historical past: Stalinism, one other regime that rampaged by Belarus with unimaginable cruelty. The Nice Terror disadvantaged Belarusians of the cultural and scientific elite that had emerged underneath its coverage of korenizatsiia, of help for minorities and their integration into the Soviet system. The Belarusians’ sense of nationwide identification, the promise of a future as a nation state, was worn out by mass shootings like at Kurapaty.
The woods on the outskirts of Minsk have come to represent a historical past of violence that the system has not addressed. The state clings to Soviet myths, retains KGB recordsdata underneath lock and key, and resists any try to return to phrases with the previous. It makes this clear by repeatedly destroying the crosses erected by activists in Kurapaty in reminiscence of the murdered. It has fallen to brave students and activists to make sure that Soviet crimes are correctly investigated, and to foster a brand new tradition of remembrance. They know that violent crimes have to be introduced into the sunshine; that they have to not be forgotten; and that in any other case, the victims will return as stressed spirits and proceed to wreak havoc. The revolution of 2020 has introduced the 2 reverse forces in Belarusian historical past – violence and freedom – into head-on collision.
When the numerous cases of torture and ill-treatment turned identified, human rights organizations based The Worldwide Committee for the Investigation of Torture in Belarus. This initiative lobbies the UN and different worldwide organizations to make sure that perpetrators of torture are someday held to account. In the summertime and autumn of 2020, the Investigative Committee of the Republic of Belarus acquired 5,000 complaints from individuals who had been mistreated or tortured in detention. It refused to open even a single investigation. The Lukashenka state considers itself untouchable. 5 years after the revolution, there’s nonetheless no indication that these in energy would possibly reduce and even curb the repression. Quite the opposite: within the run-up to the so-called ‘presidential elections’ in late January 2025 – the primary elections for the reason that outbreak of the revolution – the regime ramped up the strain but additional. Over 100 individuals had been detained in the middle of two days. And there’s no assure that, with regards to the brutality and scale of repression, the boundaries of the unthinkable won’t be pushed additional nonetheless.
‘Repression behaves like a gas’, wrote political analyst Artyom Shraibman in an article for the Russian on-line portal Meduza. ‘If there is space for it to expand into, it will permeate every corner until the ruling elites or society offer resistance.’ However such resistance is presently to not be anticipated. The course has been set by authorities hardliners, who profit from it. Since 2020, there was a big improve in state spending on the navy, secret providers, judiciary and legislation enforcement companies. For the regime, this implies full transformation: whereas for a very long time the touchstone for Lukashenka was the individuals, now it’s the nomenklatura, the elite. They’re changing into the only custodians of the political sphere. For everybody else, politics is strictly taboo.
Opposite to some predictions, the regime is mastering the stress take a look at of working a everlasting equipment of repression, with out displaying any apparent indicators of damage and tear. The warfare being waged each day by the regime in opposition to its personal inhabitants is so complete, far-reaching and monstrous that it’s barely potential to explain it in its entirety. It’s much more tough to completely grasp the magnitude of human struggling behind every particular person case. However the message is obvious: no-one can really feel secure anymore. The worry of the knock on the door when the KGB flip up at your residence is a continuing companion.
The Belarusian artist and activist Jana Shostak gave highly effective expression to the insanity, despair and helplessness outdoors the Consultant Workplace of the European Fee in Warsaw in July 2021. Evoking the atrocities going down in her dwelling nation, she screamed and screamed and screamed.
It is a translated excerpt from Ingo Petz’s guide Rasender Stillstand: Belarus – eine Revolution und die Folgen, printed by version.fotoTAPETA (2025). The interpretation was supported by the S. Fischer Basis.
