“We
Were Locked Up in One Country and Released Into Another”: Horror and Hope as
Protests in Belarus Continue
By Masha Gessen
On Sunday, hundreds of thousands of Belarusians took to the streets of Minsk and other cities in the largest protest yet against the dictatorship of Alexander Lukashenka, and the largest demonstrations in the history of the country. Lukashenka’s regime cracked down on protesters immediately following a rigged election a week earlier. The brutality of the state’s response not only failed to scare people into staying home but united them in protest. In the last few days, accounts of people who had been detained and released have been circulating online, as have photographs of people injured by stun grenades, bullets, and batons wielded by Lukashenka’s forces. Some of those who attended Sunday’s rally held up gruesome photographs of injuries.
On the eve of Sunday’s protest, I spoke to a friend who had been released from prison the previous night. Svetlana Sugako, who is thirty-five, and her partner, Nadezhda Brodskaya, who is thirty-four, run the day-to-day operations of Belarus Free Theatre. The troupe, which has won acclaim in the West, performs in a secret location in Minsk when it’s not on tour; its founders have lived in exile for a decade. I got to know Svetlana and Nadezhda well when I was writing an essay about their life and work. We spent time together in Minsk, Melbourne, New York, Toronto, and Tampere, Finland. Now Svetlana was calling me from a relative’s apartment in Minsk.
On the night of the vote, Svetlana and Nadezhda went to a polling place in central Minsk to look at local results. About fifty people were milling around waiting for the numbers. The women were sitting on a low wall when a special-forces police van pulled up. “The doors opened and people in black gear poured out,” Svetlana told me. “Most people ran away, but Nadia and I just kept sitting on the wall. They were looking at us like they couldn’t figure out why we weren’t running away. Then they said, ‘What are you doing sitting there? Let’s go.’ They took us to the van. There were already two people there, who had been observers at another polling place.” The van drove around for several hours—they could not know how long, because their captors had taken their phones—and picked up several more people. They then drove to a jail on Akrescina Street, away from the center of town.
“There were fifteen or twenty of us by the time we got there,” Svetlana said. “They lined us up against the wall, facing the wall, hands behind your back. There was a lot of screaming and cursing. One by one, we had to go into a room where you had to strip completely, squat in that way you have to squat to show that you were not smuggling anything in, in front of a woman. Then there was a nurse who did a cursory checkup and wrote my name down on a register. I saw that I was around No. 40.” Once processed, twelve women captives were rushed down a hallway to their cell. “They were screaming, ‘Hands behind your back! Look down at the floor! Don’t you look at me, you bitch, you whore—faster, I said run faster.’ ” The twelve women were locked in an eight-person cell. Through the open window, they could hear prisoner transports arriving one after another. None of them slept that night, Svetlana said, because of the sounds of the jail. “The sound of nightsticks against bodies, screaming, the sound of sadists who have gained access to human flesh,” Svetlana said. “And then the sound of people being made to run up and down the stairs, the slamming of doors, the sound of people being thrown into cells.” She could hear men being beaten. Svetlana’s cellmates were terrified. They included a family—a woman in her early fifties and her two daughters, in their mid-twenties—who were arrested, along with the older woman’s husband, when they went to check the voting results at their local precinct; like all Belarusians, they had no internet connection that night. Their youngest cellmate was eighteen and the oldest was around seventy. Except for Svetlana, who had been arrested at a protest before, none had ever seen the inside of a jail.
The following day was marked by absences. There was no food or water, and no formal charges or grounds for arrest presented to the inmates. More than twenty-four hours after they were detained, the women were taken out of their cell and told to sign a document that purported to describe the circumstances under which they were detained. “We heard people saying, ‘I was at a polling place,’ or ‘I was walking the dog,’ or ‘I was with my kids,’ and immediately the sound of blows, and you could hear that they are using their batons and, from their comments, that they are trying to impress each other with how hard they are hitting.” Svetlana couldn’t read what she was being asked to sign, because an officer covered the top part of the sheet with her hand. “I could see that the address and time of arrest were false,” she said. “So I wrote, ‘I do not certify.’ The woman officer started twisting my arms behind my back and made me kneel. She had some trouble getting me down to the floor, so she put me in a choke hold. I said, ‘You are going to strangle me now and will have to live with it on your conscience,’ and she loosened her grip. She then forced me to stand facing the wall, legs spread super-far apart. Then I was put back in a cell.”
Later that day they were moved to a different cell. Svetlana, Nadezhda, their original cellmates, and twenty-four other women were now placed in a room meant for four people. It had a single window, which was open just a crack. There were two bunk beds and two tables, and women sat three to a bunk and six to a table—three on each side, with their backs to one another. The rest sat on the floor, some of them under the beds. One woman, who suffered from claustrophobia, kept battling panic attacks. Another, who was diabetic, kept asking for her medication, to no avail. A third fainted and was revived by an injection and a piece of bread. No one else had eaten. “We kept asking the guards to at least open the bean slot,” Svetlana said. “They’d open it for a few minutes and then shut it again. People started throwing up. After two women vomited one right after the other, I started screaming into the bean hole, ‘We are all going to croak here, and all you’ll have in the morning is a cell full of dead bodies!’ In response, they opened the door and threw a bucketful of cold water on us. This made things worse, because people’s clothes were now wet, as was the floor and some of the mattresses.”
By the following morning, the inmates still had not had any food, and the only water available came from the tap in the cell; it smelled foul. They were once again taken out of their cell and marched up a flight of stairs, to a floor of offices where judges were conducting hasty hearings. “They lined us up against the wall again, then led me into an office,” Svetlana said. “The judge asked me, ‘Are you repentant?’ I said, ‘What am I supposed to repent for? I haven’t done anything, and I haven’t even read my booking document.’ She opened it and read it out loud, but I could tell that this was now a different document. It said that I’d taken part in an illegal mass protest and that I’d shouted ‘Stop the cockroach!’ and ‘Long live Belarus!’ And that I did all of this during the time when in fact I was already in a cell at this jail.” Svetlana told the judge what had really happened, and the judge appeared to listen sympathetically. Then she announced Svetlana’s sentence: ten days of arrest.
Nadezhda got a different judge, who sentenced her to thirteen days. Then, in the confusion of screaming, stomping, and rubber-stamping, Nadezhda was led into another office, where another judge pulled another cookie-cutter case for her and sentenced her to six days.
Following their appointments with judges, all thirty-six women were returned to their tiny cell. Several of them had told the judges about the conditions in which they were kept; Svetlana suspected that this was why, after around forty-eight hours in detention, the guards finally gave the women some yogurt and biscuits brought by supporters. (They had spent two days outside the jail trying to give food to inmates.) Otherwise, their third night was not much different from their second night: sleepless in an airless cell.
The following morning, some of the women were taken out to the prison yard and lined up in rows facing along the wall, hands behind their backs. “Some girls thought that we’d been led out to be shot, and they appeared about to faint,” Svetlana said. “These women were allowed to sit down on the ground, as long as they kept their hands behind their backs and faced the wall.” Once the guards had lined up the female inmates—Svetlana estimated that they numbered between fifty and seventy-five—they started bringing male captives into the yard. “They were made to kneel, head down, face on the floor,” Svetlana said. Finally, all inmates were rushed into prisoner transports, twenty-four people in each. Svetlana and Nadezhda were now in separate vehicles.
After a couple of hours, the transport arrived at a prison in the city of Žodzina, about thirty-five miles northeast of Minsk. The twenty-four inmates were taken to a courtyard, about twenty by twelve feet, covered with fencing, with a guard watching from above. “As was now our habit, we lined up, facing the wall, our hands behind our backs,” Svetlana said. “After a few minutes, a voice from behind the door said, ‘This is a courtyard for walks. Walk.’ We turned toward one another, and this was the moment we understood what had happened to us over the course of three days. Then the guard asked if we’d used the bathroom, and then they brought in a bucket that they set down in the corner so we’d have the option of peeing right there, in front of everyone, and this was pretty good, because we hadn’t had a chance to use the bathroom in a long time. Then they took us for processing, the strip search with the squatting again, and, as they were leading us out, we are running, head down, hands behind our backs, and the guard says, ‘Don’t rush, girls—you’ll all make it.’ ” Svetlana choked up. “It’s triggering,” she said. “This was the first time we were addressed like human beings.”
After processing, the women were led through an underground labyrinth that, Svetlana said, “would have looked beautiful in a movie”—dirty yellow walls, rusted pipes, wet floor—to a large room with open shower stalls. Soon after, another twenty-four women entered, and Nadezhda was among them. “A lot of women were sure that they were going to open the gas now,” Svetlana said, referring to the use of shower heads in gas chambers in Nazi death camps. Svetlana and Nadezhda had barely had a chance to tell each other that they were all right before they were taken to separate cells. This time Svetlana was one of seventeen women in a ten-person cell. “And this was super comfortable,” she said. “There were pillows and blankets, and, when we entered, there were two large loaves of bread on the table. There were two windows. In the morning, they brought us oatmeal, and it was the best oatmeal I’ve ever eaten in my life. All we did there was eat and sleep.”
After two days and two nights in Žodzina, Svetlana and Nadezhda were released, but not before they signed a piece of paper saying that they regretted what they had done, whatever that was. As they left the jail, they saw that volunteers had set up tents with food, water, and first-aid stations. There were counsellors available, and rides on offer to anywhere in Belarus. “I’d never seen anything like this,” Svetlana said. Colleagues from Belarus Free Theatre were also there waiting for Svetlana and Nadezhda.
They spent much of the following day in line at Akrescina, the first place they were held, waiting to get their cell phones and other personal possessions. Again, Svetlana was amazed: “People were bringing hot food, ice cream; there are medical doctors there, counsellors, clergy. Nothing like this has ever existed in Belarus, ever.”
I talked to one of the people who helped organize medical and mental-health help outside of jails. Khalid Rustamov, a thirty-three-year-old plastic surgeon, went to a protest with a friend on Sunday, August 9th. The following day, he found out that the friend, who is also a doctor, had been detained. Rustamov spent the day riding around on his motorcycle, observing the police crushing protests all over Minsk. He then rode to a large hospital where he had once interned at an emergency room: from the way he had seen police treating protesters, he assumed that the hospital would be overwhelmed with trauma patients, and he wanted to volunteer. To his surprise, there were few patients. Over the next day or so, Rustamov realized that the police were taking badly injured protesters to military hospitals rather than civilian ones, presumably in an attempt to conceal the extent of casualties from the public.
Doctors, however, were exchanging information in closed online chats. Physicians from military hospitals uploaded pictures of injuries they were seeing: severed limbs; a torso that looked like its front had been ripped off; holes blown through bodies. Most of these injuries, Rustamov suspected, resulted from stun grenades exploding at close range. (Rustamov sent me some of these pictures in self-destruct mode over a secure channel; when I saw the first one, I didn’t realize at first that I was looking at a human body.) “I started organizing physicians and psychologists to wait for people right outside the jails at Akrescina and Žodzina,” Rustamov said. He assumed that a lot of people would be released with physical and mental trauma–an assumption that was confirmed when he picked up his friend from Žodzina two days after his arrest, and the friend told him about abuse he had suffered. Rustamov also drafted a letter to the interior minister on behalf of Belarusian doctors, asking that they be allowed to treat people in detention. At least thirteen hundred medical professionals signed, but the ministry has not responded. Finally, Rustamov decided to start connecting doctors with journalists, to try to draw attention to the violence inflicted on protesters.
Rustamov introduced me, virtually, to a doctor who worked the night shift in a Minsk hospital on August 11th, two days after the vote. “I saw four patients who had been beaten,” Vera (not her real name) wrote to me over Telegram. “I saw bruises that covered their entire bodies. These bruises had particular shapes, which reflected the outline of objects used to inflict the blows—for example, batons. I was particularly struck by a bruise on the face of one of the patients. It had the shape of a boot sole. The patient had been kicked in the face. Neither I nor any of my colleagues had ever seen anything like this. I never could have imagined that I would see trauma such as this in peacetime.” Vera sent me the diagnoses she had written down for the patients she saw that night. They read like catalogues: “Closed craniocerebral injury: concussion from. Contusion of the right eye. Hematoma of the eyelid of the right eye. Contused wound of the right superciliary arch. Multiple hematomas, bruises, abrasions of the forehead, right parietal region, chest, lumbar region, right forearm, left hand, right and left gluteal regions, right and left knee joints, right and left lower leg.” That’s all one person.
Another doctor told me that August 11th was one of the worst nights. Nina (not her real name), a twenty-five-year-old emergency physician, said that she had seen many cracked skulls, crushed feet, fingers torn off by stun grenades. “The rubber bullets are particularly bad,” she said. “They fire them at point-blank range.” She said that she had treated a twenty-year-old man who had been shot through the lung, in the back, with a rubber bullet. “I was treating him right there, and I spent fifteen minutes asking the special-forces officers to call an ambulance, because I couldn’t use my phone.” They finally relented, and the young man survived. Nina said that she had also treated people who were suffering from exposure to a gas: their eyes were burning, and they were suffocating.
Nina does the work as a volunteer, with other emergency-room doctors but against the explicit orders of her hospital’s administration, which has banned the doctors from wearing their recognizable emergency uniforms to work at the protests. Many of Nina’s colleagues were arrested and held for three or four days. Nina herself has been beaten. “I was treating this officer, who had a head injury,” she told me by phone. “Suddenly, I feel a blow between my shoulder blades and I collapse. When I came to, it was to this officer screaming bloody murder, ‘Don’t touch her!’ But his boss still hit me and said, ‘If you are such a hero, wear this with pride.’ ” Nina said that she didn’t understand what the senior officer meant until she got home and undressed: on her hip, she had a bruise in the shape of a cross.
“Now they’ve become a little softer, but we doctors are still expecting the worst,” she told me when we spoke on the morning of Monday, August 17th, around eleven, Minsk time. She had just got home from a shift at the hospital, following a day’s volunteer shift at the protest, mostly treating people for heat stroke. I asked her when she had last slept. “A week ago,” she said. “I mean, I grab half an hour here and there.” She wasn’t planning to sleep now, either. She was going to eat, change, and go to work at the first-aid station at Akrescina, before reporting for work at the hospital
Last Monday night, Aleksei Nesterenko, a thirty-two-year-old physician, didn’t come home from work. His wife, Olga, also a doctor, spent the next two days calling the police, the hospitals, and the morgues. Then she got a phone call from a man who said that he had a list of people who were being held in a cell in Žodzina. On Thursday, Aleksei was released and told his wife what had happened. She told me the story over the phone while he listened and confirmed some details.
He was riding his bicycle home from work when he was arrested. He was beaten with a baton as he was thrown in a van that then drove around the city picking up more people: a man who was coming home from the store, another who had come outside to take out the garbage. Eventually, sixty people were stuffed into a prisoner transport with virtually no ventilation, so by the time the transport pulled into Žodzina, the men’s clothes were soaked with sweat. They were made to kneel on the ground in the prison yard, the crowns of their heads on the ground. Their hands were tied behind their backs with twine. Now, because their clothes were wet, they were freezing. Anyone who shifted position was beaten. After four hours in the yard, the men were transferred to a conference hall, where they sat until morning, now on chairs, with their heads hanging down between their knees. As they were processed, one by one, their captors beat them, demanding to know, “Who do you work for?” They also took selfies with their victims.
“We were never political,” Olga told me. “But in this last week I’ve grown proud of my people: there is no leader—people organize everything themselves. This is true democracy.”
Svetlana said that she felt like Belarus had made a quantum leap while she and Nadezhda were behind bars. “We were locked up in one country and released into another,” she said. “We are free, and so is Belarus.” The day after they were released, Svetlana and Nadezhda went to a memorial for the first protester killed in Minsk, thirty-four-year-old Alexander Taraykouski. The authorities claimed that he died because an explosive device went off in his hands, but a video recording appears to show that he was shot. “I cried my eyes out at the memorial,” Svetlana told me. “People carrying red-and-white Belarusian flags, people who are free and happy—you can’t push them back in.” The red-and-white flag has been taken up by the anti-Lukashenka protesters and has been replacing the official red-and-green flag all over the country.
On Sunday, Svetlana and Nadezhda, Khalid, Nina, and others I interviewed attended the mass protest in Minsk. Olga and Aleksei Nesterenko stayed home and spent all day talking to journalists; Olga told me that going public was terrifying, but it was also, as she and Aleksei had decided, their civic duty. “I figure the people are coming out for us today, and we are coming out for them.” Most of their interlocutors were Belarusian journalists, including a couple who came from outlets that were loyal to the regime just days ago. The staff at Belarusian state television joined a nationwide strike: on Monday, the channel broadcast a live feed of an empty couch. Major industrial plants were on strike. On Monday morning, Lukashenka was booed when he visited the Minsk Wheel Tractor Plant. As the workers chanted, “Go away!,” the dictator swore that he would not leave his post or agree to a revote. Striking workers took to the streets as he left the plant, marching in the direction of the Minsk Automobile Plant.
On Monday and Tuesday, the protests continued and the strike spread to more industrial plants. Protesters gathered outside the jails to demand the release of detained protesters. On Tuesday the interior ministry said that forty-four people remained behind bars, out of about seven thousand arrested in the first days of the protests. About six hundred have filed official complaints about the treatment to which they were subjected in jail. Sviatlana Tsihanouskaya, Lukashenka’s electoral opponent, who went into exile last week, announced that she had formed a committee that will coordinate the transition of power. Composed of writers—including the Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich—artists, academics, entrepreneurs, and prominent professionals, the group claims no political agenda. On Tuesday evening, representatives of the Coordinating Council, as it is called, held a press briefing at which they announced that their singular goal is to facilitate free and fair elections.
Lukashenka has so far rejected the possibility of negotiating with the opposition. But he no longer has the resources to hold on to power. Shooting, beating, and teargassing protesters; torturing inmates; and terrorizing random citizens have served only to unite and inspire Belarusians. One of only two things could end the protests now: either Lukashenka’s resignation or overwhelming force of the kind that Russia could supply. Lukashenka has held two long telephone conversations with Putin, who has issued general reassurances. He is unlikely, however, to want to prop up Lukashenka, who has been an unreliable ally: after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014, Lukashenka cleaned up his human-rights act, released political prisoners, and started shoring up relations with the European Union, in the evident hope of having protection against Russia. In other words, it’s likely that the Kremlin would make its aid contingent on Lukashenka’s stepping down.
Alternatively, Moscow can just wait until the Belarusian people bring Lukashenka down themselves and then attack, much as Russia attacked Ukraine immediately after the uprising there toppled President Viktor Yanukovych. Russian independent media reported on Monday that trucks from the Russian Guard, Putin’s personal army, were headed in the direction of the Belarusian border.
Masha Gessen, a staff writer at The New Yorker,
is the author of eleven books, including “Surviving Autocracy” and “The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia,”
which won the National Book Award in 2017.
