46 THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER13, 2021
voted for Alexander Lukashenka? No-
body gets hurt.” A couple of executives
raised their hands. Then the worker
asked, “Who voted for Tsikhanouskaya?”
A sea of hands went up, as the crowd
roared.
Maryia Maroz believed that in the
days around the election Lukashenka’s
regime was close to collapse. “The sys-
tem was shaking,” she said. When she
was in prison, she told me, her guards
brought her coffee and let her listen to
the radio. “I think we were close.”
Even after the demonstrations sub-
sided, residents of Minsk’s Central Dis-
trict continued to tend a small court-
yard that they had decorated with art
work and white and red ribbons. The
locals called it Change Square. Resi-
dents congregated, singing protest an-
thems and discussing how to make their
communities better. “Before the pro-
tests, people had never been active in
their neighborhoods. People did not
even talk to each other,” a resident named
Olga Kucherenko told me. “For the first
time, people were talking about how to
fix things in their lives, like how to im-
prove a playground. And the govern-
ment was opposing it.”
One night in early November, sev-
eral agents of the regime appeared at
Change Square, wearing civilian clothes
and masks, and started to cut down the
ribbons. Residents asked them to stop.
Kucherenko’s cousin, an Army veteran
and aspiring artist named Raman Ban-
darenka, came down from his apart-
ment to join his neighbors. A confron-
tation ensued, and the masked men
pulled him into a van and sped away.
Five hours later, Bandarenka’s mother,
Elena, heard her doorbell ring. It was a
group of officials, saying that her son
had been taken to a nearby hospital.
When she arrived, he was in a coma,
brain-dead. A doctor told her that Ra-
man had been beaten, and that the back
of his head had been crushed. “The doc-
tor told us it was a professional job,”
Kucherenko told me.
Bandarenka was one of at least six
civilians killed by security forces; hun-
dreds, perhaps thousands, had been hos-
pitalized for injuries. Thousands more
were beaten, and some were raped with
nightsticks and tortured as well. No one
in the police was arrested or charged.
In September, as Maria Kalesnikava,
Tsikhanouski’s campaign partner, was
walking near her home, masked men
forced her into a van. They took her and
two other campaign officials to the bor-
der with Ukraine, handed them their
passports, and told them to cross. In-
stead, Kalesnikava ripped up her pass-port and climbed out the car window.
“I won’t leave the country,” she declared.
The agents, rattled, dragged her back
to Minsk, where they put her in jail and
charged her with trying to overthrow
the government. She was sentenced to
eleven years in prison. Maxim Znak, the
lawyer who had accompanied Tsikha-
nouskaya to the election commission,
was given ten.
As the upheaval continued, the spec-
tre of Russian intervention loomed. Lu-
kashenka and Putin spoke regularly, with
Putin hinting that he would invade if
necessary to keep Belarus from slipping
out of the Russian orbit. In late August,
he raised the possibility of sending Rus-
sian forces in to help the government.
“For now, there is no such necessity, and
I hope there won’t be,” he said.B
y the time of my visit to Minsk, this
past July, Lukashenka had reasserted
control. The remaining members of the
opposition were presumed to be under
surveillance. One night, I met a West-
ern diplomat, one of a few left in the
country, at a public park, where we sat
on a bench and talked. After about
twenty minutes, the diplomat suggested
we get up: “There’s a guy on the other
side of the park who has been watching
us the whole time.”
The country’s journalists were even
more embattled. One of them told me
during my visit that she left home every
morning carrying a “prison pack,” a
knapsack with provisions in case she
was arrested: a toothbrush, socks, un-
derwear. As I was arranging to meet
Yahor Martsinovich, the editor of Nasha
Niva, one of the country’s leading news-
papers, he disappeared into police cus-
tody. Most of the journalists I spoke to
believed that it was only a matter of
time before they were taken in, but none
seemed willing to censor themselves—
or were even necessarily convinced that
it would make them safer if they did.
“As a journalist in Belarus, your free-
dom no longer depends on what you
publish. It depends only on whether
they want to take you,” Pavel Sviardlou,
the editor of the independent broad-
caster Euroradio, told me. “This situa-
tion makes us free.”
One target of the regime was an or-
ganization called Viasna, which for
years has documented violations of civil“Sorry, y’all—no locals. This is a tourists-only bar.”