BELARUS NEWS AND ANALYSIS

DATE:

Wednesday, December 28, 2005

Pen vs. Sword

Editor Iryna Vidanava Is Pushing Change in Belarus. The Government Is Pushing Back.

By Philip Kennicott

Washington Post Staff Writer

After more than a year in the United States, Iryna Vidanava says she doesn't feel like an idiot when she smiles on the street. In her homeland of Belarus, spontaneous good humor toward strangers just isn't done in public places. In the grimly efficient, Soviet-era subway and on the rattletrap buses that ply the drab streets of Minsk, almost every face is studiously expressionless. Even most young people put up a shell and stay nervously within it.

Changing that, in some ways, has become her life's work. And it may land her in prison.

Vidanava, a graduate student at Johns Hopkins University, holds down three jobs -- putting in long days including a commute between Washington, where she lives, and Baltimore, where she studies. She has two gigs with the university, where she works as a research assistant and a teaching assistant.

And then there's what she calls "my night job" -- as editor of Student Thought, perhaps the most edgy and professional publication left in Belarus, where the government has been ruthlessly shutting down all independent media. Although Minsk is almost 5,000 miles away, she still works -- with cell phone and e-mail -- to keep alive the magazine she has edited since 1998. But as Belarus, a landlocked country sandwiched between Poland and Russia, prepares for an election in March, things have never been more difficult.

Last month, the government seized all but a handful of copies of the magazine. And now Vidanava is under investigation for financial crimes and infractions against the country's draconian press laws.

If charged, the 27-year-old editor could face a huge fine and up to six years in prison. But it's hard to know exactly what's happening with her case in Belarus. One investigator is on vacation; another has given no word on where things stand..

As Vidanava faces the possibility of a long, shadowy journey through the sphinxlike world of justice in Belarus, her father, Aliksei Karol, has just emerged from the same nightmare. Like his daughter, he is an editor; he heads one of the country's last independent newspapers. And like his daughter, he has faced down the authorities. In October, the government fined him $1,200 for insulting the president, a charge based on some satirical cartoons found in his newspaper's office when government agents raided it last spring. In a country where $250 a month is a good salary, the fine is staggering; but at least it's not prison, which was a distinct possibility. "He paid it just to keep the newspaper alive," Vidanava says, with both affection and admiration.

As the country heads into elections, opponents of authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko are struggling to keep some measure of a democratic movement going. They don't expect to win outright. In a country where there's no opposition access to radio or television, no easy legal means of taking a simple poll, and where the KGB still monitors anyone not firmly loyal to the government, opponents of Lukashenko don't know how much support they have. But there's a mantra, among publishers and journalists, leaders of independent groups and clubs, and the beleaguered political opposition -- just stay alive through the election.

Vidanava, a short, energetic woman with a ready laugh, seems to have inherited a pretty evenhanded genetic mix of her parents' attributes. Her mother is irrepressibly good-natured and has supported her husband through three attempts at winning a seat in the country's parliament. "She's always in the front row at protests," Vidanava says.

Her father is more given to the soft chuckle than her mother's great gales of laughter. He is quiet, and often serious, and has played a large role in his country's intellectual life as Belarus emerged as an independent country after the breakup of the Soviet Union.

Iryna has both her mother's sparkling nature and her father's seriousness. Her magazine was, in some ways, a fusion of these attributes. When she took over editing it in 1998, it was a small, serious publication aimed at members of the Belarusian Students Association. Within a few years, she had transformed it into a broader, more appealing, more youth-oriented magazine, aimed at Belarusian kids who looked longingly to the West for music, fashion and a feeling of freedom they lacked at home. It had an edge, and though it was apolitical, it had a larger cultural agenda: to spark some life in what Belarusians call "the gray mass."

"We don't know why this issue became a target," Vidanava says, holding one of the few remaining copies of the magazine's most recent publication. The government claimed it was printed with "dangerous ink," she says, with a sardonic laugh. The cover story is about shoplifting and shows an attractive young woman with various purloined goods stuffed into the top of a pair of long, sexy stockings. It's a typical cover, and fairly racy for Belarus, where state media manage to be both dull and paranoid, and rarely deal with serious social issues. Vidanava assumes that the crackdown is election-related.

"Young people don't like Lukashenko," she says. "They want to travel. They want to have normal lives. He understands that he needs to control them. Young people will go to the streets -- they don't have that much to lose."

So Student Thought, to stay alive, will now go even more underground than it was before. The next issue, says Vidanava, will definitely come out, but she doesn't want to say exactly how. Meanwhile, she waits, in limbo, for news of her own future.

Lenin After Lenin

Last summer, before the government confiscated the October issue, the offices of Student Thought hummed with the controlled frenzy of magazine offices everywhere. With a picture of Iryna on the wall -- laughing -- the young journalists who manage the day-to-day editing while she is away explain how they hope their magazine can influence the country's youth. For them, Western music and fashion aren't just luxury goods; they're a statement, a refusal by young people to disappear in the country's "sovietized" society.

Designer jeans, chic glasses, colorful shoes, a haircut that isn't just another military brush cut, are all about standing out from the faceless, brutalized crowd. Bono is a hero to them for his mix of music and social consciousness. They want to be "Belarusian Europeans," not Belarusian Russians, the cultural identity that Lukashenko promotes through close ties to Vladimir Putin's leviathan state to the east.

"We are not political," says Max Aheeu, the pen name of one of the magazine's two main editors. Only Iryna has her real name on the masthead. The magazine's offices are in a nondescript, Khrushchev-era apartment flat. They've moved four times in the past three years. The KGB has tried to infiltrate the group, approaching one of the magazine's lead writers. When she realized she was being tracked, she quit her job and changed apartments. They apparently lost the scent.

Aheeu says the magazine isn't political, but it is certainly independent, and that's bad enough. Student Thought has published investigations into the rampant bribing of college professors during exam season -- the cover showed an exam book stuffed with cash. It has profiled music promoters and young political leaders. It has published a very popular guidebook to studying abroad, but that was before Lukashenko instituted new restrictions making it increasingly difficult for students to study outside of Belarus.

"For us, the most important thing is to stay alive and have access to young people," Aheeu says. "The major idea is you should stay active. You should not lose hope, you should not be like this gray mass."

Across town, in the offices of Iryna's father, the message was the same.

"The main thing is to live until the elections," Karol says. If the editors at Student Thought look to reform youth culture with European values, Karol looks to his country's past to explain his mission.

After the breakup of the Soviet Union, he says, Belarus was left a little lost. Other former Soviet republics embraced independence. There was a flourish of nationalist sentiment in the Baltic states to the north, and Ukraine to the south. But under Soviet rule, Belarusian national identity had been ruthlessly squelched. So while Belarusians became independent, they did so without a strong sense of who they were and what the future might be after communism. Unlike in most of the rest of the old Soviet Union, the statues of Lenin never came down, and many people still associate "democracy" with the turmoil and privation of the first few years of independence.

Karol struggled to change that.

"In the Brezhnev era, we intellectuals weren't satisfied," he says. "We understood that the current system was a vicious system and needed to be changed. As a historian, I had access to closed archives, and I was working to rehabilitate the people who had suffered from the regime in the 1920s."

Karol used his access to state archives to put together a better understanding of the Stalinist purges against Belarusian nationalists. With perestroika, he and other intellectuals started advocating for the revival of a distinct, Belarusian cultural life. And then they started forming political parties. Karol founded one, and also a newspaper in 1992. At one point his circulation was about 50,000, but now, he says, people are afraid to buy it, or be seen reading it. As of last summer, circulation was down to fewer than 6,000. The offices have been robbed, computers have been confiscated, and in September 2002, Karol was attacked in the street, by government agents, he assumes.

Iryna is close to her parents, communicating with them often by instant message over a cell phone. Her father has advised her over the years, and now she advises him as well.

"We are friends, partners," she says. "He brought me to the movement, and we discuss everything. I was lucky to be born there."

She describes a childhood in which her father wasn't a dissident, but "in our house we always had unusual books." Her mother has supported her family's often dangerous political activities. Her brother, a financial analyst living in the United States, sends financial advice stories home to his father's newspaper.

"In Belarus, people really know very little about how to manage their money," says Iryna. Or, she might well add, how to function in a free society. Both Iryna and her father are part of a wider movement to reform Belarusian values. Lukashenko's power is so absolute, his ability to steal elections so certain, they argue, that the opposition must work to change the basic culture before it can hope to change the government.

Even some politicians, including the opposition candidate Alexander Milinkevich, speak of a deeper "Belarusian" problem that must change if their country is to change.

"The main problem of Belarus is not Lukashenko himself but the mentality of each Belarusian," Milinkevich said one day last summer. "Unfortunately, Belarus as a country was sovietized in the strongest way, compared with other post-communist countries. The process of decommunization did not take place. And there are two major problems: The first is fear and the second is the absence of information."

Leaf through any of the official, state-sponsored newspapers and you see the depth of the problem. "Economic crisis in Ukraine goes hand in hand with political crisis," began a typical article one Sunday, suggesting that Ukraine's Orange Revolution, which unseated another post-Soviet authoritarian government, had brought nothing but chaos. "Dead at Disneyworld" screamed another story about accidents and heart attacks at the American theme park. And then there was the almost comical discovery, early last summer, of a shadowy new group called the "Belarusian National Liberation Army," a terrorist group threatening mayhem. Independent journalists just laughed at what they said was a government hoax.

The Beautiful Land

"It is an essential part of the justice dispensed here that you should be condemned not only in innocence but also in ignorance," said a bitter Joseph K., the frustrated hero of Franz Kafka's "The Trial." This might be Iryna's motto, as she awaits word on her legal status.

Belarus today is somewhere between Kafka's dark fantasy of opaque and authoritarian bureaucracy and the brutal Big Brother of George Orwell's "1984." Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has called Belarus "the last true dictatorship in Central Europe." Europe and the United States shun Lukashenko and his government, especially those top officials implicated in the 1999 disappearances of opposition figures. To intellectuals and opposition figures in Belarus, Lukashenko is just a thug, and a rather ridiculous one, given to rantings about spies and terrorists and American agents determined to overthrow the government.

But Lukashenko's steady campaign against publications such as Iryna's Student Thought, and her father's newspaper, has created a vast, dead, negative space within the country. It's a society in which even the mood of the people is a mystery.

Vidanava hopes her magazine will bring something new, something independent and questioning into the lives of young people, "who lead very sad, gray lives." But Belarus is also relatively prosperous, and it's not clear how many young people are, in fact, unhappy with their existence. It's an unknowable fact in a land of silence.

One morning last summer, Vidanava got up early to make a telephone call home. Her parents were serving lunch to a reporter in their small dacha on the outskirts of Minsk. She called to remind her mother, an unsinkably good-humored woman, not to talk too much. The call prompted a chuckle from her father and hearty laughter from the kitchen, where Olga Karol was bustling about a meal of prunes stuffed with garlic, Georgian cheese pie and potato-and-pork pancakes. There seemed a mutual agreement among all three, even though they live on different continents, that these daughter-mother calls were obligatory whenever guests came by -- and that the calls never did any good. Nor did anyone care very much, because her mother's burbling stream of conversation was as relaxing as the crickets and late afternoon sun.

A bottle of Georgian red wine was produced, the thick grass and fruit-laden trees seemed to hum, and for a moment it was hard not to think of a Belarusian proverb, a proverb with currency in other countries that have suffered in the orbit of Russia over the centuries. God made the land so beautiful, they say, that He felt obliged to compensate by giving the people bad rulers. It was the sort of afternoon that Turgenev described in "On the Eve," a novel about a country pregnant with revolution: It was an afternoon of "radiant haze," when "it was pleasant to sit in the cool shade and hear that hot sound of life."

In Minsk, a half-hour away by car, the parks were filling with young people, some of them cocooned in the spell of MP3 players, other sharing bottles of beer and -- perhaps it was the brew or the summer sun -- laughing . At least a little.

"Isn't it a selfish word," asked one of Turgenev's characters, about the idea of happiness, about the kind of feeling one has on a radiant summer afternoon. "I mean, a word that keeps people apart."

After centuries of suffering at the hands of the Russians, and especially the Germans, the country is at peace. Many of its younger people know no other leadership than that of Lukashenko; many of its older people have known much worse. Many, it seems, are content to leave democracy to others and spin out passably decent lives. Not Vidanava, or her father, or her mother.

She will go back, she says, if charges are filed. The Belarusian government generally tends to be very bad at things people wish governments would do well. It can take an hour simply to mail a package in the government post office. And it tends to be very efficient at things that people wish it would do less well, like keep tabs on its citizens. But, just like the silent bureaucracy that threatened Joseph K. with The Trial, the government of Belarus is also capricious and hard to predict. Vidanava thinks she can mount a defense, if need be, even on the government's own terms.

But it's not really a question of whether she can win her case. Returning isn't a question at all.

"I am Belarusian," she says. "That's the most important thing, and I love my country. I feel comfortable there despite all the problems. And I want it to be better."

Source:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/27/AR2005122701325.html