Mikola Dziadok (1988) is simply a Belarusian writer, anarchist activist, and erstwhile political prisoner whose name has become synonymous with resilience and the advanced cost of opposition in today’s Belarus. Not only is he a survivor, he is besides a key witness to the interior workings of Belarusian authoritarian power. His communicative – a double 1 as a prisoner – has already been written behind bars, documenting the brutal reality of the Belarusian penal system. His memoir, The Colours of the Parallel planet (published after his first period of detention), drawn from secret prison notes, offers an unprecedented, natural account of the intellectual and physical torment designed to break the human spirit.
After being jailed 5 years ago, he was released on September 11th together with 51 more prisoners (most of them political prisoners, and any abroad citizens) as part of a broader “deal” between Belarus and the United States, with Washington lifting any sanctions against the state ruled by Lukashenka. All the people were “deported” to the American embassy in Vilnius, Lithuania, but for the leader of 1 of the opposition political forces, Mikola Statkevich, who stopped at the border and came back to Belarus on a risky decision (and no news from him has been heard since).
Dziadok is simply a primary origin who provides firsthand evidence about the systematic usage of torture and political repression in Belarus. He offers critical insights into the machinery of a government that has become a key ally of Russia’s war in Ukraine and a persistent challenge to European security.
CLAUDIA BETTIOL AND FRANCESCO BRUSA: A fewer weeks ago, during your first press conference in Vilnius, just after your release, you spoke about prison conditions in Belarus. You actually said you were shocked by the scale of repression both in prisons and across Belarus. Can you tell us a bit more about your individual experience?
MIKOLA DZIADOK: Let’s start from the beginning. I was arrested on November 11th 2020 after being on the run for 5 months. I was searched by GUBOPiK, the department of Belarusian police which deals with alleged “extremists”, and, during the arrest and respective hours after that, I was intensively tortured.
At first the situation was beautiful intense, with prolonged beatings, pepper spraying, rape threats, handcuffing and suffocation. I was experiencing that for six hours since they wanted me to give them the passwords of my accounts and devices, and to execute a confession on camera.
As long as I could stand it, I abstained from that but then I surrendered and I said what they wanted. Then, I was transferred, I was tied and half-covered but the detention facility at first didn’t accept me and so I was brought back to the place where it all began. I stayed there six more days so that the evidence of beatings became not so visible, and my conditions got a bit better.
During my 5 years of detentions the conditions differed, from highly bad to more or little normal. In general, from the very beginning, the prison administration employed various strategies, including the exploitation of another inmates and informal prison subcultures to oppress not only myself but besides all the political prisoners. They set criminal leaders and average inmates on us, subjecting us to a scope of tactics including moral torture, physical assault and intimidation.
Also, they utilized this mechanics called “low social status”, which is simply a circumstantial feature of gulags and post-gulag prisons in post-Soviet penitentiary systems. Basically, within this system, inmates are divided in a number of castes, which don’t licence any improvement of status. In this strategy you can only decision downwards, not upwards the hierarchy. And the lowest status, or a lowest caste, mostly associated with homosexual people, is periodically harassed morally and physically and treated like outcasts. They cannot sit by the table with another inmates and they are systematically abused, harassed and mistreated both by another inmates and by prison administration. I have given a detailed description of the social phenomenon of “lowest caste” in post-Soviet prisons.
Being in this caste is simply a hard challenge and many people commit suicide. The prison administration is instructed by higher authorities specified as the KGB and GUBOPiK, who were trying hard to attach this lower caste position to political prisoners, including me.
Another common experience is isolation cells, where you sleep on a desk that snaps from the wall at given hours, so that during the day you can’t sleep. But at night it’s hard to sleep either due to the fact that it’s besides cold. You gotta wake up 3 or 4 times at night to do squats or push-ups in order to warm up.
According to the law you are not expected to stay in this cell more than 15 days but actually it happens that they make you stay for months, and political prisoners are systematically put there for very long terms. The longest period I’ve stayed is 4 months, but in full I spent 1 full year in specified a cell.
Of course, there are besides another forms of force they put on you, for example, on the legal level: they prevent you from staying in contact with your relatives, frequently you are deprived of the right to send letters to your household or individual else.
We can legitimately say that in Belarusian prisons political prisoners represent a peculiar category, they are even labelled with yellow signs on their jackets and they are systematically harassed and mistreated.
You’ve already described the Belarusian prison strategy in your book, The Colours of the Parallel World, written between 2010 and 2015 during your first imprisonment, and published in 2016. Would you say that it has worsened compared to that period, and that 2020’s protests pushed Lukashenka and the strategy of power to make things even harsher?
For sure, the conditions became way harsher compared to what I described in my book. erstwhile I was writing, most of us, political prisoners, were just kind of dissidents and local activists, and we did not pose an immediate and deadly threat to the regime. In 2020 there was an absolutely evident revolutionary situation that pushed the state to impose truly hard measures on prisoners, on political prisoners, to intimidate them as much as possible. And present we know the numbers: at least 8 political prisoners have died since 2020.
And I should say that most most likely only a smaller number of them died from direct violence. Most of them died due to not having medical aid in time. They died of curable diseases.
This year marked the fifth anniversary since the 2020 protests against Lukashenka’s regime and, obviously, something has changed since then.
, how did your perception of political conflict change? How do you see the political prisoners’ situation today?
I should say that my perception of political conflict did not change radically. I mean, I’m inactive an anarchist. I inactive believe in a society of no exploitation, no violence, in a society without an authority of human beings over human beings. At the same time, I see the real conditions. I see that we are all immigrants now. We cannot straight influence as much as we want on the political situation in Belarus. And we are truly much dependent on our western allies from the countries that let us in.
In these conditions, I think we should do everything we can, first of all, to keep our unity, effort to push Belarusian issues in global organizations, in the diplomatic environment, among the abroad affairs offices, and effort to rise up Belarusian issues, issues of human rights and of our conflict among the global community.
Maybe in comparison to my erstwhile political views I do not believe as much in revolution or in violent conflict as the major way to change in society. I do not believe in changing political institutions as much as I believe in changing people’s minds. In philosophical terms, I have yet come to the position of an idealist, you know, in this eternal discussion between idealists and materialists. I am completely idealist now due to the fact that I believe that all political change, the changes of political institutions, are first born in people’s hearts and people’s minds, and the conflict of all individual to make himself or herself better is not little crucial than the conflict of changing political institutions.
I want to concentrate on doing cultural work, on maintaining and developing progressive moral values, humanistic values, values of the free planet in contradiction to barbaric, authoritarian, fascist values that are continually pushed on us from the East.
With the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine, and Belarus serving as a staging ground for Russian operations, how would you approach the pursuit of a “cultural revolution” in this context? How do you perceive the hard conditions to a conflict for freedom in the context where Belarus is even more linked and subjugated by the Kremlin?
All wars present are hybrid wars, way before the Russian invasion in Ukraine started. It has been a long, long-term cultural invasion, colonial invasion, the brainwashing of Russian imperialist forces, of Russian tv channels and alleged Russian planet proxies through the information channels, you know. And that’s what we see now in Belarus. The Belarusian people are subjected to a continuous run of indoctrination that combines elements of Russian planet propaganda with a distinct Belarusian style. This run is characterized by a blend of Russian imperialist rhetoric and a localized approach.
Even during wartime, the dissemination of information remains crucial, as does the support of individuals who uphold appropriate values. This importance is amplified in times of conflict.
Today we see that Lukashenka’s government invested truly large in propaganda after 2020. That year we completely won the information field from them, it took him a period to accomplish a partial triumph in the information field, during which time he imprisoned journalists, destroyed infrastructure, and resorted to torture and beatings.
My mission is to proceed to talk the truth, invest in humanist values, and produce political analysis that promotes appropriate views on geopolitical and local issues, as well as decolonization. I am committed to the decolonization of the Belarusian information field and the mindsets of Belarusians.
We know that the government is targeting political prisoners, especially journalists, bloggers, and human rights defenders, fabricating criminal cases based on nothing, especially after the invasion of Ukraine. What human rights violations do you consider most serious and systematic in the Belarusian system?
In my opinion, the most severe and crucial human rights violations in Belarus are torture and isolation.
Since 2020, in Belarusian prisons beatings have become a kind of mandatory procedure for a certain category of detainees. According to my observations, if you are an anarchist, a football fan, a individual someway associated with Ukraine, right-wing or a neo-Nazi, or a individual associated with violent protests, you will be beaten for certain and forced to confess everything on camera and say any words of excuses on camera.
At the minute there are around 1300 political prisoners in Belarus, which is simply a large number in itself for a country of 9 million people, but we should keep in head that the number is surely higher and there are quite a few people in prison who are afraid of identify themselves as political activists due to the fact that the KGB and GUBOPiK (and this is something new) made clear that if you pass certain information to your relatives and then your relatives contact any human rights association, then they will arrest your relatives. And it’s something they actually do.
That’s the reason we inactive don’t know the exact number of political prisoners. Plus, any political prisoners might not have relatives or their relatives are not brave adequate to sustain them.
And what can the global community do about that?
The global community should endeavour to do everything in its power, but I am uncertain as to whether this is feasible in the given situation. It is evident that the scope is limited. However, there are inactive any possibilities: firstly, to talk about the subject and rise it in diplomatic talks; secondly, for journalists to rise the issue whenever possible, and not only erstwhile political prisoners are released, otherwise they will be forgotten very soon.
Going back to your release. In your opinion, why did Lukashenka agree to free 52 political prisoners, what is your explanation of this move, and was there a general consensus among people who were released?
The same reasons that applied in erstwhile situations. The mechanics with political prisoners is simply a recurring pattern in Belarus: all 5 years there are reports of repression during presidential elections, the West imposes sanctions, and the government holds prisoners as a bargaining chip for a period of time. However, there is simply a constant request on the part of the diplomatic, economical and political spheres to lift sanctions. At any point, Lukashenka will be compelled to turn to European countries and negotiate.
This has occurred in Belarusian modern past on 3 or 4 occasions, and it is evident that this is due to the sanctions. Lukashenka wants to push economical growth, possibly besides to be a small bit more independent from Putin. president Trump possibly was the first 1 who wanted this deal and he had his gains from the exchange, he wanted to change American-Belarusian relationships and so the usual strategy worked again.
The last question is about anarchism. Do you think there is inactive a place for anarchism, or possibly another alternate movements, as a political force in Belarus and east Europe? And do you think the anarchist movement has a circumstantial function that distinguishes it from another opposition forces? What lessons can another political movements learn from the Belarusian experience?
From my point of view the situation of anarchism in Belarus is rather circumstantial due to the fact that we didn’t have an anarchist tradition like in another European countries. Indeed, the anarchist movement was destroyed during the totalitarian russian times, and so anarchism in Belarus started its revival in the 90s. By present it is 35 years old, we can say.
We almost did not have any extra-parliamentary left in these 35 years, it was just a dictatorship. The anarchist movement started gaining momentum in 2008-2010, it separated from its subcultural features and it became more socio-political than subcultural. At that point all the revolutionary actions that we attempted, the subsequent repression we faced, and our endeavours to establish our own media platform, followed by our engagement with another Belarusian democratic political forces, all served to establish our legitimate participation in the civilian opposition and democratic movement.
And in this case the situation is beautiful unique. There is no another country in Europe, and possibly in the world, where the anarchist movement is so legitimized among civilian society and where the description anarchist doesn’t bring with it a negative connotation like in Belarus. Anarchists are integrated into civilian society structures, they work as human rights defenders, journalists, activists, volunteers, administrators without hiding their political values and speaking loudly about their ideological affiliations.
Of course, the kind of anarchism at the beginning of the 20th century, which was rooted in workers’ uprisings, seizing power in 3 days and dismantling the state to found a commune is not sound anymore, it’s not something that we are trying to accomplish but inactive we preserve our values, which are values of non-exploitation, non-violent communication, common aid and aid, and common respect and inclusion. And, I’d say, these values have spread beautiful broadly among Belarusian civilian society and among the most progressive part of Belarusians.
This is mostly our achievement. The anarchist movement in Belarus was never massive, it was always respective dozens of activists who were just doing well by being highly active. If you search in Belarusian or Russian “anarchists in Belarus” you will see 80 per cent of the news is about anarchists being beaten, arrested, tortured and so on and so forth. Thanks to this, we gained a beautiful good reputation among civilian society and democratically oriented Belarusians.
Because of this I would say that we – anarchists – we will have a bright future in Belarus and we could proceed to spread our values, to work with people straight through social institutions or possibly through political institutions. We will proceed to spread our agenda and to talk through our media about our values and our imagination for a better society.
I guess the Belarusian case can teach democratic countries a lesson about the importance of avoiding any kind of populism, right-wing populism or left-wing populism. Lukashenka is simply a typical left-wing populist, but in Europe right-wing populisms are most likely more popular due to the fact that they represent the shortest way to dictatorship.
When the state or any structure starts to deprive the people of any freedom it should ringing a bell and you should act as shortly as possible.
It is crucial not to be blind: in Belarus for a long time we had a broad encirclement of people, the urban middle-class who had a good income, and travelled in Europe and lived their privilege as petty bourgeois – mostly working as IT specialists or insignificant businessmen – who just closed their eyes erstwhile Lukashenka was repressing anarchists or human rights defenders or any “marginal” opposition activists. In 2020, they opened their eyes and protested. But it was a bit besides late. So, it is crucial to be aware and attentive.
Also, it’s highly crucial to support political prisoners even with simple gestures like writing letters to them. I did not anticipate to be liberated anytime shortly while I was in prison and I truly thought that I could spend half of my life there… It’s truly easy to lose hope. But knowing that outside there is individual who is reasoning about you and struggling for justice, including justice for your case, has been fundamental to last and to pass through all of that.
This article was originally published in Italian on the Meridiano 13 website and social media channels.
Mikola Dziadok is simply a Belarusian journalist, anarchist activist, blogger, and erstwhile political prisoner. He was released in 2015 and became active in the 2020 Belarusian protests. He was arrested by authorities again and was sentenced to 5 years in a general safety penal colony on November 10th 2021. Dziadok was released from prison and de facto deported to Lithuania in September 2025.
She is besides the co-founder of the media task Meridiano 13 and collaborates with another Italian outlets. In 2022, she translated from Ukrainian into Italian the reportage “Our others” by Olesja Jaremčuk, published by Bottega Errante.
New east Europe is simply a reader supported publication. delight support us and aid us scope our goal of $10,000! We are nearly there. Donate by clicking on the button below.
