42 THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER13, 2021
English, in an experimental program
that used American textbooks, and
the language inspired curiosity about
the world. “I knew there was some-
thing more than what we were living,”
she said. In 1996, when she was thir-
teen, a charity called Chernobyl Life-
line invited a group of Belarusian chil-
dren to spend the summer in Roscrea,
Ireland, an ancient market town in
County Tipperary. The children were
selected because fallout had left them
frail. Tsikhanouskaya was healthy, but
her English teacher added her to the
group anyway, because she was her
star student.
Henry Deane, one of the organiz-
ers of Chernobyl Lifeline, told me that
the Belarusian children were fed hero-
ically, taken to doctors and dentists, and
celebrated throughout Roscrea; when
he organized garden parties for them,
hundreds of locals came. On drives
through the countryside, Deane put
Sviatlana in the front seat, so that she
could translate for the other kids. The
conversations ranged broadly, across
such contested subjects as God and pol-
itics. “Sveta was curious about every-
thing,” Deane said.
Tsikhanouskaya returned to Ireland
for three more summers, and was struck
by how open and cheerful the citizens
seemed. “I saw that people can be happy
and polite every day—it’s not normal
for Belarusians,” she said. “When I went
home, I tried to be polite. I smiled. Peo-
ple thought I was strange.”
After high school, Tsikhanouskaya
enrolled in college in Mazyr, a small city
two hours’ drive from her home town,
and began training as an English teacher.
As it happened, Siarhei Tsikhanouski
owned a night club in Mazyr—one of
a series of ventures, which also included
organizing concerts and producing music
videos. He and Sviatlana met at the club,
in 2003. They were married a year later,
and soon had two children.
When their son, Korney, was born
deaf, things changed. “I put my ambi-
tions aside,” Tsikhanouskaya said. The
family moved to Minsk when Korney
was two so that he could be given a co-
chlear implant. By then, though, he was
behind his peers in speaking and com-
prehension. Tsikhanouskaya spent the
next eight years teaching him, often
working ten hours a day. “He had missed
a critical window, when children learn
how to talk, so progress was very slow,”
she said. She recalled an existence that
was “half isolated.”
By 2020, Korney had caught up and
was enrolled in a regular school. For
the first time in years, Tsikhanouskaya
had a measure of freedom. Then the
coronavirus swept through Belarus. Al-
though the government insisted that
the case numbers were low, the virus
was ravaging the country. Vladimir Mar-
tov, an anesthesiologist in Vitebsk, told
me that covid-19 patients flooded the
city’s hospitals, overwhelming the stock
of beds and oxygen.
When Martov asked the Ministry
of Health for help, he was reprimanded.
“As a matter of policy, the coronavirus
did not exist,” he told me. “Their slo-
gan was ‘Just wait, and it will go away.’”
Last March, Martov gave an interview
about the situation to Tut.by, the coun-
try’s most aggressive online newspaper.
He was fired soon afterward, and, when
his colleagues protested, they were told
that nothing could be done. “It was in
the hands of the President,” Martov told
me. A few weeks later, Tut.by was shut
down and its editor-in-chief arrested.
In public appearances, Lukashenka
derided his citizens for being afraid of
COVID-19, suggesting that a hardy Slavic
constitution could easily overcome the
virus. “You should not only wash your
hands with vodka but probably also
drink forty to fifty grams of pure alco-
hol per day to poison the virus,” he said
in a televised meeting. “It’s nice to watch
on TV—people working on their trac-
tors, no one talking about the virus.
There! The tractor will heal everyone!”
The government’s assurances did not
relieve Tsikhanouskaya’s fears. Though
the schools stayed open, she pulled her
children out; though Lukashenka didn’t
wear a mask, she and her family did.
“We were misinformed,” she said. In
February, Lukashenka himself seemed
to have contracted the virus. During a
speech before the Belarusian People’s
Congress, he lapsed into fits of cough-
ing, as the cameras for state television
jerked away to pan the audience. “This
infection has come to me again,” he
said, between coughs.
Many Belarusians told me the epi-
demic made them realize that Lukashenka
and his ministers held ordinary peoplein contempt. An English tutor in Minsk,
who asked to be identified only as Dmi-
try, said the virus killed so many of his
peers that he drafted his own obituary.
“Lukashenka started humiliating people,
laughing at doctors, laughing at the dead,”
he said. “In my opinion, that was when
everything started.”A
s the pandemic raged, Siarhei
Tsikhanouski was making a name
for himself as an independent video
journalist, with a show called “Coun-
try for Life”—a mocking reference to
one of Lukashenka’s favorite sayings.
Tsikhanouski was charismatic, and he
was doing what no official in the re-
gime had done: travelling the country
and talking to people about their lives.
In the town of Hlybokaye, he inter-
viewed a woman who identified her-
self as Lyudmila. She wore a medical
mask, which both announced her po-
sition on the COVID-19 epidemic and
disguised her face. While Tsikhanouski
held the microphone, Lyudmila deliv-
ered a ten-minute tirade; she com-
plained of pitted roads, substandard
health care, scarce opportunities, high
food prices, the lack of a coherent re-
sponse to the virus. Barely pausing for
breath, she spoke directly to Lukashenka
and his inner circle. “You are not mas-
ters—you are servants of the people,”
she said. Then she addressed the audi-
ence. “All of the officials, they live like
kings. They prosper, while you live in
poverty.” She went on, “People, rise!...If
we do nothing, you will all just die.”
Moments like this one exhilarated
Tsikhanouski’s viewers. Normally, the
government would not tolerate such
overt criticism. But the show was dis-
tributed by an encrypted messaging
app, Telegram, which was nearly im-
possible to block without entirely shut-
ting down both cell-phone and Inter-
net service. Across the country, Telegram
hosted an explosion of activity: news
channels, some funded from abroad;
independent local reporters; citizens
discussing the country’s direction.
Many young Belarusians were also
energized by travel to Europe; each year,
the European Union granted about
seven hundred thousand visas to Bela-
rusians. Among them was Oksana Za-
retskaya. In 2007, she was a young mother
in Minsk when her husband was trans-