Aliaksandr Yarashuk and Hennadz Fiadynich : “Our Lives’ Main Cause is to make Belarus Free”

In their interview to “Salidarnast”, the two union leaders speak of what was most difficult for them in jail, why other prisoners would address by their patronymics, how they managed to survive punitive isolation cells, and why the Belarusian authorities have taken their passports away.

Aliaksandr Yarashuk

Among the recently released political prisoners were the President of the Belarusian Congress of Democratic Trade Unions, a Vice-President of the International Trade Union Confederation, and a member of the Governing Body of the International Labour Organization Aliaksandr Yarashuk and the long-standing President of the Belarusian Radio and Electronics Workers’ Union (REP) Hennadz Fiadynich.

Both were arrested in 2022 and convicted on trumped-up charges to different terms in prison: Yarashuk got 4 years, Fiadynich got 9. Currently, they are in Vilnius.

Today, “Salidarnast” talked with them.  

— How do you feel – physically, emotionally, psychologically? 

HF “They won’t live long enough to see us crushed!”

AY  “We are glad to be free, that’s the first thing. Secondly, we are now overwhelmed with information. As we were completely isolated from the informational space, we shall need some time to adapt. In fact, we are, essentially, making only our first step on the way back to normal life.”

Do you have any idea of what you are going to do from now on?

AY “We don’t have an answer to that yet. But you must understand that the most despicable thing that has occurred is that we have been deprived of our passports. Till the very last moment before we crossed the border we believed that everything was alright, that the passports were there. But it turned out they were not. And today we cannot go back to Belarus.

Obviously, the regime was very keen to take away the opportunity to return to the country from us. And this dramatically affected our mood, of course. But we’ve been there before and we shall deal with this problem. And, of course, we shall be thinking about what activities we’ll engage in the future.

“You see, there was one month and 20 days left before my prison term expired. I was prepared to be released on November 1, and in that case they wouldn’t take the risk of deporting me to Lithuania right away; as it is, they’ve killed two birds with one stone: they’ve got some bonuses from the United States and, at the same time, burned all bridges for us in terms of returning to Belarus.”

HF “Neither the EU, nor the US even suspected this trick with the passports. It was a complete shock for all.”

Hennadz Fiadynich

AY “Apart from the passport, they have taken away many of my things, most importantly, all letters from my near and dear.

“These letters are very important to me; receiving them was one of the main motivations sustaining me in jail, helping me survive it. But no, there’s no shabby trick they wouldn’t stoop to.”

“I do not know where the letters are now, of course. Maybe, they’ve thrown them away or, maybe, they will keep them or open some museum and give the people involved another reward for neutralizing such dangerous criminal like Gennady and I.”

While in jail, did you get any information about what was going on in the country?

HF “Only through Belarusian and Russian TV channels – all pro-Government, naturally, and also newspapers – there you could glimpse things, reading between the lines.”

AY “As for me, out of the three and a half years that I’ve spent behind bars, three were in prison and six months in a colony (a general-security penitentiary – S.). And a prison is the kind of place that sucks all your life energy out of you. And there is no access to information apart from the officially approved sources. So, yes, we had some inputs to mull them over and get an idea of what was going on.”

HF “Talking to the relatives would give you some information you could not read or hear otherwise. Or, sometimes, other convicts would share information they’ve heard from their family.”

AY “If we are to talk about correspondence with the family, the censors were raging at full blast: very often we would be given protocols concerning the destruction of letters from the family or your own letters – any words they thought they didn’t like were reason enough for them to do that. So, I made a conclusion to myself: I should position myself exclusively in a positive manner, as if I were not in prison at all; I tried to disengage myself completely from the prison setting. And I found that helpful.

“I advised this to other political prisoners, as well, particularly, the younger ones. And there were a lot of them. And while, early on, a political prisoner was supposed to be alone in his or her cell, the administration would not put other political prisoners there, later, there was not enough cells for all and today you will find two or three political prisoners sharing the same cell.”

HF “And another thing about access to information. At some point, the prison administrations started showing interest in what kind of books were popular with political prisoners, what they were reading.

“And those books simply started disappearing from the libraries. Moreover, they wouldn’t even know what those books were about, they would remove them simply by their names.”

AY “Well, it was a kind of a witch hunt. Since Anglo-Saxons were Belarus’ enemy number one, the languages they spoke were, by extension, hostile, too. So, books in English would be removed.

“A comrade of mine studied German but his textbook was removed, as well. So he told me – It’s a good thing I’ve managed to copy half of it by hand; at least, that’s enough for me to go on with my studies.”

And what were your relations with people who have committed real crimes?

 AY “There were some attempts to provoke us but, largely, they were drawn to us, they distinguished us from all other prisoners and tried in every possible way to build some kind of relationships with us.

“And we valued that because how we lived and what we did had an influence on the consciousness of these people who had made some conclusions from their tragic experiences and wanted to leave the prison as normal human beings.”

HF “After some time, they started address me and Aliaksandr, using our patronymics, and that had to be deserved; in those places patronymics are never used lightly. When they call you by your patronymic alone, this means that you are not just another man, makes you somewhat out of the ordinary, so to say.

“One day, I was even summoned by the head of the prison’s operations department who wanted to meet me. And he asked me what I was going to do while serving my time. I tell him, give me the task and I can build a trade union organization here. He started waving he hands me like are you bonkers! I told him it was a joke.

AY “And, by the way, this also works as some kind of psychological support when they address you politely and by your patronymic. And if there was a dispute between them, they would say – Ilyich, you go and settle it.”

And what was the most difficult thing for you behind bars? I understand that everything there is difficult but, maybe, at some point in time it was especially hard?

HF  “For me, this moment came when I stopped receiving letters from my grand-daughter. They would stop them on purpose, simply to put more pressure on me psychologically.

“I lived with it for some time, then I went to the administrations and told them that should I receive no more ;letters from my grand-daughter, my relatives will turn to the prosecutor’s office and some of you will have to answer for that. And it worked.”

AY “When I arrived at the colony in Shklov where Vitold Ashurok had died not long before – and we cannot rule out that he was killed – I found myself in the punitive isolation cell.

“It is difficult for me to put in words what that place does to you. I thought I would not survive my first night there: it was so cold that you could only lie down for some 15 minutes. And there was no blanket, they wouldn’t give you one.

“So, you lie down for a quarter of an hour, then you get up and do squats and push-ups for 10 minutes in order to get warm, then you lie down for another 15 minutes – and this the whole night through. You run to relieve yourself 20 times a night. In the morning, I started bleeding and some of the blood stained the floor, for this I was reported as I was for not sleeping at night.

“And then I thought to myself, Ah, to hell with all of you, and I just started singing songs in the cell. And they said nothing to me.”

Have you already had time to talk to some of your family?

HF  “Yes, we have. We talked, calmed them down.”

Will you have a chance of seeing them?

HF “Hardly, at the moment. A part of my family is in Belarus and how can I get there without the passport? My grand-daughter has grown up, and she always writes to me at the end of her letters: Grandpa, I love you, you are strong, you will get through all this. This is something worth living for.

AY “One of my sons will soon come to Vilnius (several hours after the interview the long-awaited meeting did take place — S.), and my second son lives with his family in America.”

Aliaksandr Yarashuk with his son Yurii

“I also have the grand-daughter Milana whom I miss a lot. I hope to see her.

Was you release a complete surprise for you or have some rumors reached you?

HF “We’ve heard some rumors, yes, but still it was unexpected. They told me in prison that I carried most weight among the political inmates, so I could be among the first to be released.”

AY “Last July a prosecutor from Minsk came to see me and we spoke for four hours. He was urging me in every possible way to sign a suit for pardon.

I asked him if he was seriously offering me to sign a paper where I recognize Lukashenka as President, if he wanted me to cross out my whole life?

He was dumbfounded and then he said that there’d be no deal in that case. I told him I was not asking him for anything at all.

“I was fully aware that I was making things difficult for me, but that was my position and I voiced it. Like many other things I voiced during those four hours of talk. 

“So, when a couple of days ago I was given 15 minutes to pack my things, I assumed they would deport me from the country. Which is exactly what happened.”

HF “In any case, we’ve remained human and we are still citizens of our country.”

AY “And today we can say that we shall by all means return. For the sake of the main cause of our lives which is to make our Belarus free!”

Victoria Leontyeva

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