Svetlana Alexievich at her home in Berlin on December 10. / PILAR BONET
The appointment with Svetlana Alexievich is in Berlin, on the floor as huge as it is soulless where the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) welcomed the writer in autumn 2020, when the 2015 Nobel Prize winner for Literature had to hastily leave Belarus in the face of danger of repression still real.
"I do not know when I will be able to return to my country", he affirms in this interview carried out on December 10 last.
The 73-year-old Belarusian Alexievich has just had her residence permit extended, one more year, which she would prefer to spend in a small and cozy home. "I was not included in the German exchange program when I left Belarus, so I was accommodated in this apartment that was available at the time," she says as we walk through the halls whose ceilings are more than ten feet above our heads. Svetlana stands by the Gulliver-worthy reading lamp that was just sent to her and smiles, even though her health (recurrent trigeminal inflammation) haunts her these days.
The writer was a member of the coordinating council of the protests against the gruesome presidential elections in Belarus, which on August 8, 2020 proclaimed Aleksandr Lukashenko (in power since 1994) the winner.
During the crackdown that followed, Alexievich was questioned by the Belarusian investigation committee.
According to her account, the foreign diplomats and international officials, who for several weeks had stood guard at her home in Minsk, accompanied her to the airport at the end of September to raise the alarm if the writer was hit with her to leave.
They did not put them on.
In Belarus you already live as in the Solzhenitsyn books, with a backpack prepared with the essentials for the first times in prison
Alexievich feels comfortable in Germany, where she was already in exile in the first decade of this century when she received threats for her book
The Zinc Boys, Soviet voices of the war in Afghanistan.
"My living conditions are very good, but enduring exile is much more difficult for me now than the first time, because I was younger then," he explains.
In Berlin the writer has started a new book and, for the moment, has interrupted the work on love and old age, to which she dedicated so much time and effort. Instead of investigating personal happiness outside of politics, he is now concentrating on a new choral work, whose protagonists are his own fellow citizens, the Belarusians who — for daring to demand a fair election — have perished, are tortured or seized. consume in sinister dungeons. “I would like to finish it in a year, but we'll see how it turns out for me. I don't have a date, but you can't give birth before nine months. I do not dedicate myself to picking up only horrors, but I am looking for a new look that makes us reflect ”, he points out.
From Berlin, Alexievich travels to other cities, to other European countries to hear the voices coming from that “new“ Gulag ”that, according to her, the country led by Lukashenko has become. “Today we have a 'Gulag archipelago' on the scale of Belarus. What happens there today is absolutely comparable to the world of Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, "he says. "People are afraid, because at any time and place, in cities or towns, they can break into your house to stop you," he says. And he continues: "In Belarus one lives as in the Solzhenitsyn books, with an emergency briefcase prepared, a backpack with the essentials, a toothbrush, a change of clothes, for the first times in prison." "When leaving prison, the best gift a prisoner can give to his cellmates is to leave them his underwear",points out.
More information
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: discovering the gulag
There are differences in scale and depth between the Soviet and Belarusian Gulag.
Stalin had ideas.
Now there are no ideas, only the desire to maintain power.
Lukashenko has managed to stain blood and put policemen and jailers in a dead end, whom he scares by saying that they will be retaliated if something happens to him ”.
In Belarus, the guardians of the regime "hit and do not know in the name of what."
"They are the new masters, they have good salaries and they can arrest anyone," he adds.
The writer warns: “The repression has not yet reached the level of Solovkí [the harsh labor camp of the Gulag in the White Sea], but that is the trend. Can you turn a person into a piece of meat just because you want free elections, which is what is written in the constitution? Alexievich says he felt bad when looking at the photos with which a doctor documented the condition of the wounded admitted to the emergency service after the demonstrations. The police wanted to erase the tracks and the doctors were forbidden to write parts about those patients ”. Later, he recounted a testimony: “The head of a medical service complained to a police chief about the conditions of the wounded. The policeman, in turn,He rebuked the doctor for sending crying and hypersensitive doctors (to the places where the police had acted against the protesters) and then hung up the phone. A young doctor warned those who came to the hospital with traumas and signs of violence that he was obliged to report them and recommended that they go the further the better ”.
Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania or Germany have been the main destinations of those who followed those recommendations. All the public members of the coordinating council of the Belarusian opposition are today in exile or in prison. "Among the exiles there are those who prefer to remain anonymous, to protect the members of their families residing in Belarus," he says. In his country, Alexiévch would not have been able to write the book in which he works now, because "he would have lived in constant shock with the danger of being arrested and the manuscripts being confiscated". The author wants to go beyond a compilation of testimonies about brutality, and inquires about the origin of evil and the roots of sadism. As sources he uses interviews, letters and published documents,such as the “last allegations” of the defendants before the judicial verdict.
A person who leaves the concentration camp where his life was spent cannot be free overnight.
Only now is it understood that we are facing a long road
Alexievich admits that he was quick to end the era of the Soviet man.
"Not only was it not over but it is reproduced in uniformed youth and remains in a part of the population," he says.
“In the nineties we took to the streets demanding freedom, we demolished the monument to Felix Dzerzhinsky [the founder of
the Czech
or Soviet political police], but later it became clear that those were only words and now, thirty years later, they open museums dedicated to Stalin, it is claimed that the demolition of Dzerzhinsky was illegal and they want to ban the Memorial organization.
That means that democracy goes backwards, ”he says.
“A person who leaves the concentration camp where he spent his life cannot be free overnight. Only now is it understood that we are facing a long road ”, he says. “When I was writing
The End of 'Homo Sovieticus'
and came to Moscow from the Russian provinces, my interlocutors did not believe me if I told them that the free people they were talking about did not exist, that young people had to still grow up. They [the Muscovites] assured me that their process [that of Russia] was irreversible and without turning back, unlike ours [that of the Belarusians], which we were still in the
kolkhoz
[a form of Soviet agricultural exploitation]. And what do we see now? ”Explains Alexievich.
“In Russia the opposition to the dictatorship was a very thin layer. In Belarus last year half a million people took to the streets and I remember the feeling of a party we had and that I have never seen so many beautiful people together. We looked at each other and we were happy to be so many and not to be alone. It seemed that, seeing how many of us there were, Lukashenko would get scared and leave. It was a total naivety. In the coordinating council we insisted that blood should not be spilled and the peaceful action was the credit of the women. On every corner of Minsk there was a tank, but we were against violence. Today, half a million people, the most energetic, are abroad, because in Belarus they are threatened with jail ”, he explains.
Alexievich, on September 9, 2020, speaking to journalists outside his apartment in Minsk.
TUT.BY (Reuters)
How can the Lukashenko regime be ended?
“It is a difficult question.
Svetlana Tijonovskaia [the wife of jailed presidential candidate Sergei Tijonovski who many recognize as the real winner of the 2020 election] has grown up.
Everyone has to do what they can.
Those who have stayed in Belarus must be careful, as going out can cost them five or six years in prison.
The coordinating council is maintained and has many new members, whose names are secret.
Those of us outside make appeals, write letters, but people who can work underground in Belarus do much more.
For me the main thing today is to write my book ”.
The letter continues: “At least two different countries coexist in Belarus. One leaves the door open and provides refuge for those fleeing terror; the other denounces the fugitives and indicates to the police the direction from which they have fled ”. The tensions between the countryside and the city are reflected in the relations between the two “Belarusians”, explains Alexievich, and quotes another testimony: “A prison official beat a detainee and rebuked him: 'What was missing from you? You have a five-room apartment and I live with my wife in a collective residence. You have a Mercedes and I came from the country and I have nothing ”.
Alexievich relates that a relative of his gave up buying a comfortable apartment in Minsk when he learned that its owner was an officer in the riot control forces. “The officer and his family moved out of that building because the neighbors did not greet them and the children on the stairs did not want to play with theirs. 'What is he guilty of? What do they have against them? 'Exclaimed the officer's mother. Arrival from the field to take care of the grandchildren. That woman not only did not understand why the neighbors were emptiness, but she was aggressive about it. "
In Lukashenko's service are male policemen and jailers who rape detainees (according to Alexievich's testimony, with a preference for men).
Women also participate in abuses.
"They have told me about a captain named Cristina, who likes to hit men on the genitals," he says.
Lukashenko has his propagandists, like Grigory Azarionov, a decorated 26-year-old television journalist, endowed with a vicious verbal aggressiveness far superior to that of his Russian colleagues with similar propaganda functions in the service of the Kremlin.
They have told me about a captain named Cristina, who likes to hit men on the genitals
According to the lists drawn up by human rights associations, in Belarus the number of political prisoners is close to a thousand. Among them are Víktor Babarijo, the respected banker and fine patron, who wanted to compete with Lukashenko for the presidency. Babarijo has been sentenced to 14 years in prison by a court that found him guilty of money laundering and bribery. Among the prisoners is María Kolésnikova, Babarijo's campaign manager, sentenced to 11 years for “conspiring” against the regime and for “founding an extremist organization”. Sergei Tijonovsky was sentenced to 18 years in prison shortly after this interview.
Prison conditions in Belarus seem tailored to the sensitivity of prisoners, according to the writer.
An active member of the discussion club that Alexievich regularly met in Minsk, Babarijo, a fat man, now watches (with the windows closed) the bread oven in the harsh regime prison colony where he is serving his sentence.
Kolésnikova, a German-trained musicologist and international cultural manager, is held in a four-square-meter cell.
When the jailers take her out for a walk in a nine-square-meter space, the other inmates are forced to hide, says Alexievich, citing the testimony of a freed inmate who heard how Maria shouted: "I want to see people!"
Missing opponents
Prisoners in Belarus are Alexandr Feduta, a political scientist, philologist and literary critic, arrested in Moscow in April 2021 and extradited to Belarus, where he is accused of an attempted coup. And there is also Guennadi Mozheiko, the Belarusian correspondent for the Russian newspaper
Komsomólskaya Pravda,
who was forced to leave Moscow, where he had taken refuge, and return to Minsk, where he disappeared. Also imprisoned is the Russian citizen Sofía Sapega, who was accompanying the blogger Román Protasevich on the Ryanair plane forced to land in Minsk last May. “Russia has supported Lukashenko from the beginning. It is understandable, since democratizing revolutions are contagious, ”says the writer.
As we speak, Alexievich receives calls from Belarus.
Through her cell phone comes the voice of her friend, the writer María Vaitziashonak, who continues to reside in Silichy, in that bucolic dacha 40 kilometers from Minsk where Svetlana intended to write while looking at the wheat fields and the hills when we visited her in the summer of 2019. The apartment that the author bought in Minsk after receiving the Nobel was left empty.
From that magnificent vantage point over the widening of the Svislach River, the writer was moved by watching the flood of protesters displaying huge red-and-white flags.
Then the armored cars took over that space and she realized that the Soviet world was not over.