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Tag: Belarus

  • Postcards

    Postcards

    On International Day of Solidarity with Political Prisoners in Belarus, Nobel Laureate Ales Bialiatski on letters, solidarity, and compassion. Translated by Valzhyna Mort.

    PEN Transmissions is English PEN’s magazine for international and translated voices. PEN’s members are the backbone of our work, helping us to support international literature, campaign for writers at risk, and advocate for the freedom to write and read. If you are able, please consider becoming an English PEN member and joining our community of over 1,000 readers and writers. Join now.

    I always carefully study the images on the postcards. They are extremely diverse. Most often, the subjects relate to animals and birds, flowers and natural landscapes, visual art, and cityscapes. Postcards come from all over the world – from United States and Canada, from Australia and various parts of Europe. I sincerely wish to answer each one, to share with gratitude at least a little bit of the positive energy that enveloped me from head to toe.

    But it is impossible: different languages, unimaginable number of letters, limited time. We have no mutual contact. And although the absolute majority of those who write do not expect an answer, the impossibility of answering bothers me badly. I am like that battery, the black box with input terminals, accumulating positive vibes. Will I have enough space, memory, and depth to hold all this positive human energy?

    I wonder how worthy I am of such massive human support. An ordinary person with his share of weaknesses and shortcomings, who hardly wants to be a role model for anyone. Or maybe I really don’t understand something, and I underestimate all the significance and depth of the circumstances in which I find myself?

    The world has countless problems: war, oppression, violence, cruelty, and hatred. There are entire countries and regions where a human life is worth the price of a bullet from a Kalashnikov. Be it in such a harmless way, with a postcard or a letter, something incites people to send me moral support.

    Maybe this is how world solidarity manifests itself? Maybe through these letters of support, a protest against universal injustice is expressed? Maybe they emanate from an overflowing, irrational compassion towards all the offended and oppressed?

    Not so long ago, I read the memoirs of a woman of culture, from Moscow. She saw and remembered how, after the defeat of Paulus’s army near Stalingrad, German prisoners were driven in a long column through the central streets of Moscow. Heartbroken people threw bread into this column of captured enemies. Another writer mentioned how they, ‘enemies of the people,’ were given food by saleswomen at Siberian train stations. They came to the trains to sell their milk, cottage cheese, and baked rolls for a good price to feed their children, and they gave everything to the prisoners for free.

    Probably, I have become an object that gives other people the opportunity to express their civil position, to show compassion and humanity. Objectively speaking, apparently, there is nothing surprising in this. If people nurture, protect and stand up – often with risk and sacrifice to themselves – for animals, nature, the environment, then why not do the same, even with greater impetus, for our fellow human beings? What’s unusual is the fact that in this case the victim is a human rights defender, who himself tried to help other people.

    And yet it seems to me that there is an invisible connection between me and those who write to me without expecting a reply. In these letters and postcards, the victim, who I don’t consider myself to be, often turns into a hero, who I am not, but whom others would like to see in me. A victim and a hero in one person are actually neither a victim nor a hero.

    Ales Bialiatski, born on 25 September 1962, is a literary scholar, essayist, and human rights defender. He was a founding member of the Belarusian literary organisation Tutejshyja (The Locals) and formerly served as head of the Maxim Bahdanovich Literary Museum in Minsk. In April 1996, he founded the Viasna Human Rights Centre, an organisation that campaigns for opposition activists who are harassed and persecuted by the Belarusian authorities. Bialiatski was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in December 2022 alongside the Russian human rights organisation Memorial, and the Ukrainian human rights organisation Center for Civil Liberties. On 21 May 2023, to mark the International Day of Solidarity with Political Prisoners in Belarus, PEN International published a letter signed by 103 Nobel Laureates, expressing solidarity with Bialiatski. In May 2024, the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention found his detention to be arbitrary and called for his immediate release. 

    Valzhyna Mort was born in Minsk in 1981 and moved to the USA in 2005. Her most recent book, Music for the Dead and Resurrected, came out with FSG in 2020 and was the winner of the International Griffin Poetry Prize and the UNT Rilke Prize. Her earlier collections of poetry are Factory of Tears and Collected Body, both published by Copper Canyon Press. Mort has been honored with fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy in Rome, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Lannan Foundation and the Amy Clampitt Foundation. Currently, she is the Director of the Creative Writing Program at Cornell University. Mort writes and publishes in English and in Belarusian.

    Photo credit: Viasna Human Rights Centre.

    PEN Belarus protects writers and other creators, cultural and civil rights and freedoms, humanistic values, and identity by creating and providing space for the development of Belarusian culture, creativity, and intercultural dialogue.

    PEN Belarus delivers literary awards, festivals, creative residencies and educational projects, systematic monitoring of the cultural sphere, advocacy and support for repressed cultural figures, and the development of cultural rights and human rights in Belarus.


    PEN Belarus operates thanks to donations. By supporting PEN Belarus, you:

    • become an ally of repressed creators and join in defending courageous and free-spirited writers, poets, essayists, and translators;
    • support the documentation of repression, persecution, and torture – crimes against cultural figures will not be hidden or silenced, repressed individuals will receive support, and perpetrators will be brought to justice;
    • help translate masterpieces of world literature into Belarusian. Literary translation is a form of smuggling freedom, democracy, and human rights – a way for Belarusian readers to touch the world of freedom while still living under unfree conditions.

    Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/penbelarus/posts 
    One-time donation: https://buy.stripe.com/14k7vK1Ij9890nefYY 

  • Painful Encounters with Bureaucracy

    Painful Encounters with Bureaucracy

    Hanna Komar on visas, Belarus, and sunsets on Peckham Rye.

    PEN Transmissions is English PEN’s magazine for international and translated voices. PEN’s members are the backbone of our work, helping us to support international literature, campaign for writers at risk, and advocate for the freedom to write and read. If you are able, please consider becoming an English PEN member and joining our community of over 1,000 readers and writers. Join now.

    No one, not even the exile himself, wants to hear a story about painful encounters with bureaucracy, or consider whether Walter Benjamin might have killed himself just because he did not get his papers.

    – Dubravka Ugrešic

    A presidential decree was issued in Belarus on 4 September 2023. It banned Belarusian embassies and consulates from renewing passports or processing other documents for Belarusian citizens living abroad. Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya – the exiled national leader who independent observers agree won the 2020 presidential election – responded:

    We’re working with host countries to solve the situation & preparing the New Belarus passport. While the state abandons its duty to care for its citizens, we won’t!

    That evening, I meet with a Belarusian friend in London to watch the sunset in Peckham Rye. ‘We aren’t going to discuss the passports,’ he tells me right away. ‘Sure,’ I reply, knowing it’s hopeless. As if it isn’t everything we do – discussing passports, visas, permits, travel documents. 

    The international reaction followed. The UN Human Rights Office tweeted:

    Decree banning issuance or renewal of passports abroad risks violating rights of thousands of Belarusians in exile, including their freedom of movement. No one should feel pressured to return & risk persecution.  We urge review of decree in line with int’l standards.’

    The EU ‘strongly condemned’ Lukashenko’s ban. The US Embassy in Belarus called it ‘the latest in a long line of cynical rejections by the regime of its basic obligations to its people.’ Lithuania promised to issue special passports to Belarusian citizens with the legal right to reside in Lithuania, like Poland had in January.

    I am a Belarusian writer in exile. I am likely to be arrested if I cross the Belarusian border.

    I have a Belarusian passport that expires in June 2028. It has one blank page left for stamps. In it, I have a Schengen visa, valid for as long as the passport is. Every time I leave the UK and return, my passport is stamped. Easy maths: soon, there won’t be enough space for stamps. Someone told me that if a border control officer doesn’t find space for a stamp, I may be refused entry to the country. I spend sleepless nights thinking through the short text I will recite to the officers in every airport I pass through, asking them to put the stamps very close to each other, to be efficient with the precious space.

    What could help me is a UK travel document. This can be issued to a non-British citizen legally residing in the UK who is unable to receive a passport from their authorities. It can be issued, but is it? The main requirement: you must prove that you can’t receive a passport or a travel document from your national government. You must prove they have rejected you. They must send you a rejection in written form. A political activist can’t count on this, of course, but the Home Office doesn’t care.

    Before the September decree, I had applied to the Belarusian Embassy in the UK for a new passport. On 14 October 2022, in their office in London, they accepted my documents and my payment of €100 and told me to wait for a call. Three or four months – that’s how long it usually takes. The passports are made in Belarus and delivered to the UK by a legal representative of the Embassy. There aren’t direct flights to Belarus anymore, and so getting there and back is challenging even for governmental officials. Delivering documents does take time. But not ten months. That’s how long I’d waited before I called them the third time. The officer who picked up the phone said, ‘Anna’ – that’s what they call me in Russian – ‘you support sanctions with such vigour that we won’t be providing you a service. Your new passport is ready and is waiting for you in Belarus. You can go and collect it there, if you have nothing to be afraid of. We haven’t rejected your passport. We just aren’t going to bring it to the UK.’

    I wasn’t the only one in that situation. Other activists in the UK – and in Lithuania, Poland, Germany, Slovenia, and several other countries – were facing the same problem. Some governments are more understanding – more humane – than others.

    The refusal letter for a travel document from the UK Home Office said this: ‘What you have submitted as evidence is not expectable evidence that an application for a national passport was made and you have been formally and unreasonably refused.’ That arrived before this new Belarusian law, which gives me hope that the evidence would be sufficient now. But I don’t feel I can rely on that.

    I watch the sun setting over Peckham Rye and discuss with my friend the applications we are both preparing for Global Talent visas. If we receive the Exceptional Talent version, we’ll be able to apply for indefinite leave to remain after three years; if it’s the Exceptional Promise one, it’ll be five years. My Belarusian passport is expiring in less than five years. Do they issue indefinite leave to remain if your passport has expired?

    When I came to London to do my master’s in September 2021, I was determined to return to Belarus the following year. I was certain that things would improve in that time. Two years later, in September 2023, I’m wondering if, in five years, I’ll have the New Belarus passport that Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya’s office is working on; whether I’ll have an expired, non-functional Belarusian passport; whether I’ll be stateless (the regime threatens to take away citizenship of particularly active citizens); whether I’ll jump into the Exceptional Talent carriage. Is that a lack of hope? I’d say it’s the knowledge, from the perspective of history and other countries’ examples, of what totalitarian governments are capable of. 

    Dubravka Ugrešic, in her essay The Writer in Exile, writes, ‘A love story ends with marriage, the exile’s when he acquires a passport from another country.’ With this new law, I wouldn’t be able to get married here, either. I would need a certificate from Belarus saying that I’m not already married, and Belarusian embassies are banned from issuing them. I can’t get married. At least you don’t have to be afraid of that.

    Hanna Komar is a Belarusian poet, translator, writer. She has published five poetry collections: Страх вышыні (Fear of Heights), a collection of docu-poetry Мы вернемся (We’ll Return) and Вызвалі або бяжы (Set Me Free or Run) in Belarusian, as well as a bilingual collections Recycled and Ribwort.

    Hanna is a member of PEN Belarus and an honorary member of English PEN, and the 2020 Freedom of Speech Prize laureate of the Norwegian Authors’ Union. She has an MA in Creative Writing: Writing the City from the University of Westminster, and is taking a PhD at the University of Brighton, exploring how poetry can support Belarusian women to share experiences of gender-based violence and patriarchy.

    Photo credit: Dmitri Kotjuh.

  • Another Unknown Person Ringing at My Door: A Statement from Svetlana Alexievich

    Another Unknown Person Ringing at My Door: A Statement from Svetlana Alexievich

    A statement from Svetlana Alexievich, Nobel Laureate and Chair of Belarusian PEN.

    PEN Transmissions is English PEN’s magazine for international and translated voices. PEN’s members are the backbone of our work, helping us to support international literature, campaign for writers at risk, and advocate for the freedom to write and read. If you are able, please consider becoming an English PEN member and joining our community of over 1,000 readers and writers. Join now.

    There is no one left of my friends and associates in the opposition’s Coordination Council. They are all in prison, or they have been thrown out of the country. The last, Maksim Znak, was taken today.

    First they seized our country, and now they are seizing the best of us. But hundreds of others will come and fill the places of those who have been taken from our ranks. It is the whole country which has risen up, not just the Coordination Council. I want to say again what I have always said: that we were not attempting to start a coup. We did not want to split the country. We wanted to start a dialogue in society. Lukashenko has said he won’t speak ‘with the street’ – but the streets are filled with hundreds of thousands of people who come out to protest every Sunday, and every day. It isn’t the street, it is the nation. 

    People are coming out to protest with their small children because they believe they will win. 

    I also want to address the Russian intelligentsia, to call it by its old name. Why have you remained silent? We hear very few voices supporting us. Why don’t you speak when you can see this proud little nation is being crushed? We are still your brothers. 

    To my own people, I want to say this: I love you and I am proud of you. 

    And now there is another unknown person ringing at my door.

    This statement was originally published in Russian by Belarusian PEN.

    Translated by Sasha Dugdale.

  • PEN Atlas presents: Svetlana Alexievich in conversation with James Meek

    This event was one of Svetlana Alexievich’s few UK public appearances in 2016. She discussed her new book Second-hand Time, translated by Bela Shayevich (Fitzcarraldo Editions, May 2016), and the new edition of Chernobyl Prayer, translated by Anna Gunin and Arch Tait (Penguin Classics, April 2016), to mark the 30th anniversary of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster.

    Themes of memory, trust, family secrets and of course the disintegration of the Soviet Union emerged over the course of a fascinating discussion between Svetlana Alexievich and James Meek, interpreted beautifully by Masha Karp.

    Listen to the audio recording

    https://www.flickr.com/apps/slideshow/show.swf?v=261948265

  • Death is like love

    Translated from Russian by Bela Shayevich.

    [From a conversation with Aleksander Laskovich, soldier, entrepreneur, emigrant, interviewed periodically between the ages of 21 and 30.]

    When I was little, we had a tree in our courtyard… this old maple… I’d talk to it, it was my friend. After Grandpa died, I cried for a long time. Bawled all day long. I was five, and it had made me realize that I was going to die and everyone I knew was going to die, too. I was seized by terror: everyone is going to die before me, and I will be left all alone. Savagely lonely. My mother felt sorry for me, but my father came up to me and barked: ‘Wipe those tears away. You’re a man. Men don’t cry.’ But I didn’t even know what I was yet. I’d never liked being a boy, I didn’t like playing war. But no one ever asked me what I wanted… Everyone made the decisions for me… My mother had dreamed of having a girl and my father, in typical fashion, had wanted her to get an abortion.

    The first time I ever wanted to hang myself, I was seven… The incident with the Chinese bowl… My mother had made jam in this Chinese bowl we had and put it on a stool to cool; meanwhile, my brother and I had been chasing our cat all over the house. Muska managed to fly over the bowl like a shadow, but not us… My mother was still very young, my father was in military training. And there it was: a puddle of jam all over the floor… My mother cursed her fate as an officer’s wife who was forced to live out in the back of the beyond, on Sakhalin*, where there were ten metres of snow in the winter and in the summer, the burdock grew taller than she was. She grabbed my father’s belt and chased us out into the street: ‘But Mama, it’s raining and the ants in the barn bite.’ ‘Shoo! Get out of here! Beat it!!!’ My brother ran to our neighbour’s house, and I decided to hang myself. I clambered into the barn, found a rope in a basket. They’ll come looking for me in the morning and find me dangling from the rafters – happy now, fuckers? Right then, Muska squeezed through the door… meow, meow… Sweet Muska! You’ve come to take pity on me. I hugged her, squeezed her, and that’s how the two of us stayed until morning.

    Papa… What was Papa? He read the paper and smoked. He was a political commander† in an air regiment. We moved from one military town to the next, always living in dormitories. Long brick barracks, exactly the same wherever we went. Even the way they smelled was identical: like shoe polish and Chypre, the cheap cologne. That’s how my father always smelled, too. A typical scene: I’m eight, my brother is nine, and my father comes home from his shift. His belt squeaking, his calf boots creaking. In that moment, all my brother and I want is to become invisible, to fall off the face of the Earth! Papa takes Story of a Real Man by Boris Polevoy down from the shelf – in our house, it was like the Bible. ‘And what happened next?’ He starts in on my brother. ‘The plane crashed. And Alexey Maresyev crawled away from it… Wounded. He ate a hedgehog… and fell into a ditch…’ ‘What ditch?’ ‘It was the crater from a five-tonne bomb,’ I try to help him. ‘What? That was yesterday.’ We simultaneously shudder at the sound of my father’s commander tone. ‘So you didn’t read it today?’ The next scene: we’re running around the table like three clowns, one big one and two little ones; us with our trousers down and Papa clutching a belt. [A pause.] We all grew up on cinema, huh? The world in pictures… It wasn’t books that raised us, it was films. And music… The books my father brought home still give me a rash. My temperature rises whenever I see Story of a Real Man or The Young Guard on anyone’s bookshelf. Oh! How Papa dreamed of throwing us under a tank… He wanted us to hurry up and grow up so we could volunteer to fight in a war. He was incapable of imagining a world without war. He needed us to be heroes! And you can only become a hero at war. If one of us had lost our legs like that Alexey Maresyev of his, he would have only been happy. It would have meant that his life had not been in vain… Success! Everything had fallen into place! And he… I think he would have carried out the verdict with his own bare hands if I had broken my oath, if I had dared to waver in battle. A regular Taras Bulba! ‘I begat you, and I shall be the one to kill you!’ Papa belonged to the Idea, he wasn’t really a human. You must love the Motherland with your entire being. Unconditionally! That was all I ever heard, my entire childhood. The only reason we were alive was so that we could defend the Motherland… But despite all this, I simply could not be programmed for war, instilled with a puppy-like readiness to stick myself in a hole or a dike or throw myself on a landmine. I just never liked death… I’d crush ladybirds – on Sakhalin, in the summer, there are more ladybirds than sand – and I’d crush them like everyone else did. Then, one day, I had this terrifying realization: why have I made all these little red corpses? Another time, Muska had had kittens, but they were premature… I brought them water, tended to them. My mother saw what I was up to and asked: ‘Are they dead?’ And after she said that, they died. But no tears allowed! ‘Men don’t cry.’ Papa gave us army caps as presents. On weekends, he would put on his records with army songs, and my brother and I were forced to sit there and listen as a ‘modest manly tear’ made its way down our father’s cheek. Whenever he got drunk, he’d tell us the same story: the enemy had surrounded ‘the hero’, he valiantly defended himself, shooting at them until he was down to his last bullet, which he’d saved for shooting himself in the heart… At that point in the story, my father would fall over cinematically, catching the leg of the stool with his foot, which made it topple down with him. That was always really funny. Then, my father would suddenly sober up and turn stern: ‘There’s nothing funny about a hero dying.’

    * An island in the Pacific Sea that has alternated between Russian and Japanese rule since the nineteenth century. The USSR seized Sakhalin from the Japanese during World War II.

    †A political commander is a military political commissar responsible for the political education of the troops, lecturing on ideology and the Party line.

    Find out more about Second-Hand Time, published by Fitzcarraldo Editions here.

    Buy tickets to see Svetlana Alexievich in conversation with James Meek on Tuesday 31 May at the Cambridge Union.