THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER13, 2021 45
ing inside you,” she told me. “Sviatlana,
and many Belarusians, are now in ex
actly this position, when the times and
the conditions demand the special qual
ities that we’ve been hiding.” Tsikha
nouskaya’s role in the campaign required
extraordinary resilience. Supporters of
the regime threatened to kill her, and
to harm her children. Terrified, she sent
the kids to Lithuania, where her mother
met them. Police arrested volunteers for
the campaign, and eventually its man
ager, Maryia Maroz. “Many times, she
told us, ‘I am quitting, I cannot do this,’”
one of her aides, Anton Radnyankou,
recalled.
As the election neared, Tsikhanou
skaya and her aides sensed that a nation
where civic engagement had been effec
tively outlawed was turning suddenly
political. Andrei Vaitovich, a reporter
who had been working abroad for French
media, returned home and was struck
by what had happened. “The only thing
anyone was talking about was the elec
tion,” he told me. “That’s when I knew
that the country was changing.”
After Lukashenka declared victory,
demonstrations spread from Minsk to
cities and towns across Belarus. The
government shut down the Internet
and deployed riot police, many of them
wearing large round helmets that hid
their faces; protesters called them “cos
monauts.” Luponosov, the former in
vestigator, told me that the Ministry of
the Interior ordered police to “beat and
maim” the protesters. (In the next twelve
months, they would make as many as
thirtyfive thousand arrests, carrying
detainees away in black vans.)
Tsikhanouskaya urged the authori
ties to show restraint, but she felt in
creasingly responsible for the people
who agitated on her behalf. With pro
tests roiling, reporters pressed her about
her plans to try to contain the violence.
“The situation is starting to get out of
control,” she snapped. “My appear
ance—would it strengthen the protests
or would it, on the contrary, calm them
down? I don’t know. I don’t know what
to do next.”
W
hen Tsikhanouskaya arrived in
Lithuania, she was met by bor
der guards and taken to a safe house in
Vilnius. She had nothing with her ex
cept her clothes and a small bag con
taining her son’s spare hearing aid. She
felt that she had abandoned the pro
testers and assumed that they would
shun her. “People believed in me,” she
told me. “I felt like I had betrayed them.”
But several of her aides followed her
across the border, and, when Tsikhanou
skaya saw that the demonstrations were
carrying on, she gathered herself. Within
days, she had declared herself the leader
of democratic Belarus. “I am ready to
take responsibility and act as a national
leader during this period so that the coun
try calms down and enters a normal
rhythm,” she said in a video message.
Tsikhanouskaya had no money, no
government, and almost no staff, but
sympathizers began showing up to help.
One of them was Valery Kavaleuski, a
former Belarusian diplomat who was
living in northern Virginia and work
ing for the World Bank. He told me
that, when Tsikhanouskaya arrived in
Vilnius, he decided to quit his job and
join her, living on his savings until money
for salaries could be raised.
Tsikhanouskaya began touring the
capitals of Europe, demanding that lead
ers withhold recognition of Lukashenka.
In Berlin, meeting Chancellor AngelaMerkel, she wore a navy suit, borrowed
at the last minute from a Belarusian styl
ist in Vilnius. “She didn’t have any
clothes,” the stylist, Tatiana Chaevskaya,
told me. “We had to tell her that a head
of state couldn’t wear the same outfit
every day.”
Her first weeks in exile amounted to
a triumph of appearance over reality. “It
was smoke and mirrors,” Kavaleuski said.
She created a stream of images—in Ber
lin with Merkel, in Brussels with top
E.U. officials, in Vilnius with the French
President, Emmanuel Macron—that
made her look like a European leader.
On September 8, 2020, she warned the
Council of Europe that “countries or
parties that make deals with Mr. Lu
kashenka do so at their own risk.” Ten
days later, the European Parliament voted
to deny recognition to Lukashenka’s gov
ernment after his term ended in Novem
ber, effectively declaring Tsikhanouskaya
the lawfully elected President of Belarus.S
oon after the election, at a construc
tion conglomerate in the city of
Hrodna, a worker called out to a gath
ering of several hundred colleagues,
“Don’t be shy, raise your hand—who“None of this research would have been possible without all
the bitter professional vendettas that kept me going...”