52 – Trauma and Solidarity while fighting dictatorship with Anarchist Black Cross Belarus

Posted on 12th November 2023

Content warning – explicit references to state violence, murder, torture, raids, imprisonment

This episode is an interview with Boris (he/him) from Anarchist Black Cross Belarus (ABC) about life under dictatorship, solidarity and resistance. We talk about what the reality of dictatorship means and how even under dictatorship, collective solidarity is impossible to destroy. Boris shares how ‘violence spread like a wildfire’ in response to the uprising in 2020 and the different forms of ongoing state violence people are experiencing. We talk about the horrific prison conditions in Belarus, intergenerational trauma from Soviet authoritarianism, and life in the diaspora. We talk about the importance of solidarity and how people can support the work of Belarus ABC, who have been supporting repressed, arrested and imprisoned anarchists, anti-fascists and social activists since 2009.

Links & resources from this episode

Find them all at solidarityapothecary.org/podcast/

Support the show

Music from Sole & DJ Pain – Battle of Humans | Plant illustrations by @amani_writes | In solidarity, please subscribe, rate & review this podcast wherever you listen.

Transcript
Nicole:

Welcome to the Frontline Herbalism podcast with your host Nicole Rose from the Solidarity Apothecary.

Nicole:

This is your place for all things plants and liberation.

Nicole:

Let's get started.

Nicole:

Hello, welcome back to the Frontline Herbalism podcast.

Nicole:

This is another episode in the series all about the politics

Nicole:

. I know you're probably thinking like, what the hell has this got to do with herbalism?

Nicole:

We don't actually talk about plants in the episode, sadly, not even, like, potatoes, which was so inevitable, but we didn't, we didn't talk about it.

Nicole:

Cause me and the comrade have a shared love of potato based products.

Nicole:

Yeah, this kind of series is trying to amplify the different, the different, you know, forces of state violence that shape people's lives, whether that's, you know, the occupation in Palestine or whether that's how capitalism is disabling and affects things like disability justice or trauma and addiction or trauma and chronic illness.

Nicole:

Like, I'm just trying to kind of bring, I guess, more political understanding to the conversations around trauma and therefore around things like you know, like healing and recovery and, you know, herbal support for PTSD.

Nicole:

I hope you listened to the last couple of episodes about herbal support for panic attacks and different kinds of nervines.

Nicole:

I'm going to be doing my best to have kind of more content like that because I know it's partly why people tune into the podcast.

Nicole:

Unfortunately, I'm still very nauseous.

Nicole:

With my pregnancy, I managed 48 hours without vomiting, which felt like a massive success.

Nicole:

And then sadly, I had a big vomiting session.

Nicole:

But yeah, I am.

Nicole:

I think I am moving in a better direction now.

Nicole:

But yeah, this episode, I just want to give a content warning that we talk about a lot of heavy things.

Nicole:

We talk about repression in Belarus, policing, torture, the conditions in the prison system there, which are just absolutely, like, mind blowingly, horrifically awful.

Nicole:

And we also talk about, you know, the importance of solidarity internationally.

Nicole:

Yeah, so I just, yeah, I just want to give a big content warning that it's not the easiest of listening, but it is really important listening and I hope You will learn about conditions in Belarus, and I hope that you will feel inspired to make a donation to the comrades from Anarchist Black Cross Belarus.

Nicole:

There's only a handful of them, and they do, like, such, like, fucking incredible work, like, seriously, like, so consistently for years, like, so much invisible labor, like, supporting prisoners and their families and people getting out of prison, all the while, kind of, You know, recovering from their own experiences of state violence and trauma in the dictatorship.

Nicole:

And yeah, I think they're amazing.

Nicole:

I think they're some of the most inspiring comrades I know.

Nicole:

So I hope you will feel inspired too.

Nicole:

And yeah, definitely drop them a donation if you can after listening to this.

Nicole:

And yeah.

Nicole:

Okay, let's crack on with the interview.

Nicole:

Okay welcome.

Nicole:

So yeah, please can you introduce yourself, your pronouns, like any kind of political affinities or projects you'd like to include?

Boris:

All right.

Boris:

So my name is Boris.

Boris:

He, him.

Boris:

I'm part of Anarchist Black Cross Belarus.

Boris:

And that's pretty much it.

Nicole:

Amazing.

Nicole:

Thank you.

Nicole:

So yeah, for folks who don't know much about Belarus, can you share a bit more about what it's like?

Nicole:

As like a place to, a place to live and a place to grow up.

Boris:

It's a very fascinating place to be, to, to, to grow.

Boris:

And I think it's, It can differ a lot depending on when you were born from one side from the other side.

Boris:

It doesn't differ so much.

Boris:

So generations of those who were born in Soviet Union, know, like the Soviet authoritarianism, the, the control of life, the way of life, like do not get involved in politics.

Boris:

Stay away from state business, so to say, and also know a certain type of the state violence from let's say soft power up to prosecution of political dissidents and direct violence of like against the normal people, like the police in Soviet Union was very violent.

Boris:

Even though some people think that it was not, and then you have like a short period when the Soviet Union collapsed and the new state appeared like Belarus as a state where there were several years of this kind of like a chaotic period where the state is not so strong and people can do a lot of different things.

Boris:

So there was a lot of freedom and I think people who were growing in that period or people who experienced that period do have a certain.

Boris:

Let's say attitude towards, okay, certain things can be done.

Boris:

You can, you can do things by like ignoring the state.

Boris:

And as long as the state is not interfering, the things are going to work.

Boris:

And then you have all the generations of the people who basically grew up in the dictatorship.

Boris:

So last.

Boris:

29 years.

Boris:

And that means like you have one generation and a half, depending how you count generations or whatever.

Boris:

So you have like people who are younger than 30, they would be born into dictatorship and would be living in the dictatorship.

Boris:

And of course that again, brings back this.

Boris:

Mentality of a constant control and mentality of like, there is everything is fine here, right?

Boris:

But as long as you are not interfering with the state business.

Boris:

And I think this is also building up a certain mentality among the people, which is.

Boris:

Again, changing as a roller coaster, depending on where Belarusians dictatorship find itself.

Boris:

So we had like between 2015 and 2020, a certain type of a spring where maybe you wouldn't be allowed to join like political life and so on, but there would be like NGOs popping up and there would be certain bars and like a street life appearing.

Boris:

So a lot of social interaction with each other which basically was an important.

Boris:

Set up for the people to understand the, the, the value of the social interaction in general in Belarusian society, because as you are living in the dictatorship with the experience from the Soviet times, and even though like the generations that were born after Soviet Union didn't experience Soviet system firsthand, they experienced that through their parents, through their relatives.

Boris:

So me growing up, for example, after this, mostly after the Soviet Union.

Boris:

I did get in touch with the Soviet mentality a lot through my parents who were like keeping me away from politics, who were trying to keep me away from troubles with police and so on and so forth, because they kind of had their own perspective on the things, and they had this policy of not talking about the politics and talking about the politic.

Boris:

Only with trusted people as thinking that they're always snitches.

Boris:

So this breaking up in 2000 from 2015 to 2020, I think was an important factor in bringing up people together.

Boris:

And in general, Belarusian society just to give you an impression is quite violent.

Boris:

It is not a society of like, well off people.

Boris:

It is quite poor.

Boris:

And Violence starts with family, continues into school, continues into your like education and then at work and then on the streets as well.

Boris:

So like in the 90s, for example you should be like, you know, toughing up if you are growing up in capital or you're growing up in other cities, there is a very little chance that you wouldn't get into some brawl or some fights in the school or on the streets or something like that, out of nowhere.

Boris:

So yeah, this, this violence, I, I don't know.

Boris:

It's, it's hard to say if this violence is connected with the people, alienated from the social right.

Boris:

That they're not supposed to interact with each other.

Boris:

They're not supposed to uh, participate in any things that are defining their life, or it is.

Boris:

Connected with, I don't know, frustration and like there, there are for sure different reasons for this violence to be happening, but in general, it was like that.

Boris:

I think the level of violence dropped to the certain extent when we are looking at the Belarusian society right now, but in general, it stays as a very violent and you expect.

Boris:

To find yourself in the violent situations and you learn how to deal with that, or you don't learn how to deal with that, but you like learn to minimize the damage that comes from that violence.

Nicole:

Wow.

Nicole:

Yeah.

Nicole:

Like how, I mean, like you said, the country is under a dictatorship for nearly 30 years.

Nicole:

Like I think for people, say, for example, like I'm from England, like, I think people don't even understand like the concept of like dictatorship.

Nicole:

Like, could you kind of explain like what that means for people who are not aware?

Nicole:

Like, how does that kind of compare to like other places, for example?

Nicole:

Like, what does that look like if you have like a different political opinion to the person in power?

Nicole:

Like, what are the kind of consequences for those, you know, kind of dissident perspectives or actions?

Nicole:

Well, so

Boris:

I think one of the important factors of understanding dictatorship is this notion of consolidation of power, that the power is like very well consolidated, got together.

Boris:

You know, everybody's following the same line and everybody not in the sense of society, but.

Boris:

In the sense of people in power in different positions of power, starting up from very small, you know, like your local police officer up to I don't know, parliament and the dictator himself, or some, I don't know, local administration, city administration and so on and so forth.

Boris:

So everybody's following the same line and this line is defined.

Boris:

by the decisions of very few or even like one person.

Boris:

So living in the dictatorship means that you are not even thinking that you can affect the way you are living, right?

Boris:

You can get better financially.

Boris:

You can like get the degree, get a, go to university earn a little bit more money, but you can not.

Boris:

A fact in any way, the rules of the game, right?

Boris:

And that's what you were born with.

Boris:

Like this powerlessness and this understanding that whatever you think, whatever you want is not important.

Boris:

And you can go around the defenses and so on, as I was mentioning, but there is, there is like a certain, you know, big brother who defines Whatever you're doing and how you're doing things, right?

Boris:

The rules are created and you are just like, okay, yeah, from today to tomorrow, I will have to pay, you know, more money for public transport, or I will have to pay more taxes, or I will have to do things in certain way that I will have to do certain things in a way that the government wants me to do, right?

Boris:

So yeah, I think that's an important factor.

Boris:

So in general, like state is this massive power over the society in different countries.

Boris:

It has different level of power and when it becomes a dictatorship, it has like an quite an overwhelming power, the power that is destroying the society that is destroying the face of individuals, but also social into.

Boris:

In anything like in any definitive way of living right and i think if you are becoming if you are coming to the point of disagreeing with something you are like this you know inside of you you have this something is brewing and you think this is not right like i'm not going to stand on the side and watch this happens i cannot like.

Boris:

Go on with injustice.

Boris:

I cannot go on with me being treated like shit, but also quite often, it is about other people being treated like shit.

Boris:

So this kind of like collective solidarity is still impossible to destroy by the dictatorship.

Boris:

And we see that like generations and generations born into authoritarian regimes and descent still forming up.

Boris:

This was in Soviet Union under the like total control of the state, right?

Boris:

This is also in Belarusian dictatorship.

Boris:

So when this happens you get like from small amount of troubles, for example, you were in the school and you are becoming like a little bit positional and you think, okay, I don't want to deal with Lukashenko anymore.

Boris:

I want to like, try to change something in this society there.

Boris:

You can get like expelled from the school.

Boris:

You can get moved for this from one school to another.

Boris:

You can.

Boris:

get like troubles with other school kids and so on.

Boris:

So there is already pressure applied from that point.

Boris:

If you are like a well known troublemaker, let's say like that, and you are approaching the age of joining the university, most probably you will not be able to go to university.

Boris:

Or if you're a student in university and you are becoming like, let's say an oppositional activist.

Boris:

He will get expelled from university for your political views which will be not an official position.

Boris:

There are like a lot of different mechanisms that would be activated to create a conditions that are like not possible for you to study anymore.

Boris:

So they just kick you out and that's it.

Boris:

And inside of universities there are like ideological workers still present who would be checking out the degree of like political dissent inside of the university and those kids who would be like, or.

Boris:

The, the, the people who are studying in the universe or even teachers, you know those will be controlled by those ideological workers.

Boris:

And if they are going higher, like higher level of opposition or like showing a lot of dissent you would get like a KGB agent called on you or like not the police, but like certain.

Boris:

political police, let's say that to check up on you and see whether you should be kicked out from your working place or there should be another repression supplied and so on and so forth.

Boris:

And that's transfers even further into your working life.

Boris:

So if you're growing up on bigger enterprises, bigger state enterprises, like factories or maybe some, I don't know, office gigs that are not private, then the ideological workers are also there.

Boris:

And they are also working together with KGB to control the level of political dissent.

Boris:

Then there is still practice of KGB actually finding snitches among the workers who would be, you know, reporting on those who might be organizing.

Boris:

And I'm not talking about organizing, let's say a fucking revolution against Lukashenko, but even organizing like a union work.

Boris:

For just organizing, because at the end of the day, if you're organizing at the state enterprise then you are organizing against the state pretty much, or that's how the state sees it.

Boris:

That's how the state was seeing it in the Soviet times.

Boris:

That's how the state sees it today.

Boris:

And yeah, so that's, that's where you are like supposed to always control your.

Boris:

Your representation to the outside and you always control who you're talking to.

Boris:

If that person is going to report you, if that person is aware.

Boris:

So there are no people who are, or maybe there are a few people who are openly like anarchist in some places, not anymore, taking account of the situation of the 2020.

Boris:

But before that, there would be some people who would be saying to their fellow students, for example, yeah, I'm an anarchist and you can join me in our fun activities or whatever.

Boris:

Or I am like a liberal, you know, against Lukashenko.

Boris:

But this decreased a lot on the current wave of repressions.

Boris:

Yeah.

Boris:

So you're living under this constant pressure.

Boris:

And even if you're like after university or after school, you go working on the private enterprise, it is quite often that people will be pressured by their bosses into like, Political conformity.

Boris:

And it is, quite often you, you do not have that ideological workers in, let's say private companies that are working for the west or even for the east.

Boris:

But you would have a possibility for the state to apply pressure to get you kicked out from work for your political activism.

Boris:

And on top of that, if you are renting, for example, a flat or a house or something like that, it is quite common as another, you know, leverage on the political activists to get you kicked out from your.

Boris:

Apartments for your political engagement.

Boris:

And there are very few people who would be like standing up to the police and say, like, no, I'm going, I'm not going to kick them up.

Boris:

And normally actually like, this is the case that yeah, people are getting kicked out pretty easily from, from the rented flats.

Boris:

Yeah.

Boris:

And, and I think like, this is, this is very few things to mention.

Boris:

Yeah.

Boris:

Because there is way more to that.

Boris:

There is way more control over your life on different types.

Boris:

Of course, Belarusian dictatorship is not a full totalitarian regime where like every aspect of your life is controlled.

Boris:

You can still pick up between, you know, like.

Boris:

Buying a water with gas or without in the supermarket, but like major decisions in your life are quite often not made by you made for you by the people in power.

Nicole:

Wow.

Nicole:

Yeah, like.

Nicole:

I know you said it isn't like a complete totalitarian regime, but from listening to you, like, it really sounds like it, like, and just from my perspective of always being really interested in people's bodies and their nervous systems, like, I can't imagine the kind of hyper vigilance and having to be like constantly aware of like who you're talking to and the consequences of like the smallest of comments, right.

Nicole:

And how that could, you know, lose you your place at uni or your job or your flat or.

Nicole:

Yeah, but that, like, does bring me to ask, like, how do people, like, resist the dictatorship?

Nicole:

And I know, like, in 2020, there was a really huge uprising which I think we'll probably return to a few times in the interview, but, um, can you give a kind of brief overview of what happened in 2020?

Boris:

So, how people resist.

Boris:

I think you can, like, there is a long history of resistance.

Boris:

Towards this kind of like towards the state and authoritarianism in general.

Boris:

And I don't know if it starts like the practices start from the Russian empire or like the beginning of the Soviet times, but for sure, a lot of people's learned this small moments of resistance from like, from our.

Boris:

Parents or like the, the, the generations before us, how people were resisting the Soviet Union.

Boris:

And there is a lot that you can say, okay, this is our political.

Boris:

So a lot of people are, for example, stealing from the working places.

Boris:

And this is considered normality.

Boris:

If you're working for the state, right?

Boris:

If you're working on the state factory people are just.

Boris:

Doing that.

Boris:

And it's quite common and it is considered like one of the ways of restoring justice by certain people.

Boris:

So for sure, like there is this individual resistance which never transforms for sure to destruction of the dictatorship.

Boris:

But there is a certain mentality that, that is forming up from that, right?

Boris:

That the state is not you like it is in many cases in the West, right?

Boris:

So, me experiencing like political atmospheres in the Western world, right?

Boris:

A lot of people do see the state as something they can affect from one side but from the other side, something that they are part off in Belarusian society, the alienation because of the dictatorship is very strong.

Boris:

So there is like very little perception of Belarusian state is something we are building, but rather Belarusian state is Lukashenko and his surrounding.

Boris:

Yeah.

Boris:

So this is, this mentality is very important.

Boris:

And as for like organized political resistance I think the more than wave of the political resistance is started after collapse of Soviet union.

Boris:

There was a lot of political organizing, or even before the collapse of Soviet union, when the state was like loosening the screws and people could start organizing and going on the streets and so on.

Boris:

So nineties were like very, or first part of the nineties was very volatile in political sense on the streets.

Boris:

And people were trying to affect politics, even after Lukashenko was elected in 1994.

Boris:

And so there is this like mythology from one side of resistance against the state against the.

Boris:

The injustice plus Belarusian state is built on the still like after collapse of Soviet Union, still celebrations of October revolution and blah, blah, blah.

Boris:

So this can play a certain role, which I think is not really big because people do not perceive it as like, okay, this is October revolution was something, first of all, good.

Boris:

And second of all, like it actually brought people up against the injustice.

Boris:

So this is not really a big narrative.

Boris:

And in general, I think.

Boris:

The, the, the role of, let's say, like liberal perspectives and just an abstract freedom played an important role in build up to 2020 protest.

Boris:

Because as I was mentioning, right, 2015, 2020, there was a little bit of more room to breathe, but also you have more access to the internet, more access to the information people are.

Boris:

From Belarus are way more mobile than you compare it to the other countries because of like a very tiny country.

Boris:

So people would be going quite often to Poland.

Boris:

People would be going to Lithuania to other neighboring countries and so on and see how people live and they start believing.

Boris:

Okay, maybe that's not so bad.

Boris:

And yeah.

Boris:

And I think in general, like dissatisfaction, like there were several things that brought people to to, to get together politically and COVID played an important role in that because Belarus and state abandoned people in, in the struggle against COVID.

Boris:

So there were a lot of like prerequisites that mobilized the society and showed that.

Boris:

You can be politically active, even though the state is like showing that it can control.

Boris:

And also we've seen in 2020 that the Belarusian state is not.

Boris:

As strong as it tries to pretend to be so you do have all this mechanism of control, right?

Boris:

But it crumbles when it starts scaling.

Boris:

And what I mean by that is that you can kick out from the factory, you know, 5 people who are politically active.

Boris:

But then if this number goes like 20, 100 and so on.

Boris:

You don't have enough resources to go to each factory and start kicking up people, kicking out people and masses and so on and so forth.

Boris:

The same for universities, the same for medical personnel, for example, who was very unhappy with a governmental handle of COVID during the 2020.

Boris:

So you, you do see like, okay, the state tries to be like a strong dictatorship, but at the end of the day, it is a very fragile structure that starts crumbling as soon as the people rise, like the, the mysterious, you know, the historical, the people.

Boris:

And in Belarusian case, that was also the case where people saw that, okay, this dictatorship that we've been living under for so many years, for so long.

Boris:

It is not as strong as it is.

Boris:

And this was shown in summer 2020, even before the day of elections, people went on the streets.

Boris:

There were fights with the cops that ended up with like complete destruction of the police or not complete destruction, but complete reputational destruction of the police that showed people like, okay, actually we can.

Boris:

Resist, we can fight back.

Boris:

And this formed up to the day of election and like a bigger riots all around the country and so on and so forth which turned into like months and months of what's so called peaceful protests that were not really only peaceful.

Boris:

So yeah, this, this was like 2020 in Belarus.

Boris:

And it also, unfortunately gave a possibility for the state to see the weak spots where they are not doing that well.

Boris:

So they trained their police officers and police forces.

Boris:

They trained they're like, say bureaucratic apparatus on how to deal with the dissent and slowly step by step, even though the protests were going on the Belarusian state was getting back together, getting it shit together and building up the apparatus that exists right now in a very effective way.

Boris:

Crashing the dissent among those who are still politically active in the country and on the same time giving space to those who are not politically engaged.

Boris:

So Belarus is like this bizarre world where from one side you can go to a hipster bar, you know, and drink a craft beer and see a football match between Manchester United and whatever shit is there, right?

Boris:

And at the same time, you would have situations where people are getting grabbed from the streets or people are getting grabbed from their working places, beaten up, tortured in the police stations and then recorded that on the video and then release that to the public through the public media and social networks, which the police is doing.

Boris:

So you do have like this um, basically push of the Belarusian state to say, Hey, you can live, you know, a normal.

Boris:

A life like people do also in Moscow, for example, right?

Boris:

You can live this normal life outside of politics and you will have certain benefits of that, or we can fucking torture you and maybe even kill you and hang you on the tree somewhere in the forest.

Boris:

So a lot of people prefer to stay out of politics and that's kind of like this policy of divide and conquer works pretty well with a lot of people in Belarus sticking to our political life.

Boris:

Even though.

Boris:

Some of them maybe have been politically interested, let's say like that in 2020.

Nicole:

How many people like sort of participated in the uprising?

Nicole:

And like, I guess the other question was, I know it was at the start of the pandemic, like, and I remember in a like previous talk listening to you about people had like started to really like self organize the way that people did kind of worldwide around, you know, organizing food and stuff for people who were shielding or you know, Organizing supplies like was this kind of self organization, like part of what led to the uprising or what's your perspective?

Boris:

Yeah, I think I think for sure, because it shows the power of the people like so you you had, uh, the understanding back again.

Boris:

That you do not have, you do not need to have like a huge corporations or a state to organize healthcare.

Boris:

And actually like people can get together and do shit way better than what the state promises them.

Boris:

And there was not only for example, the COVID crisis, there was like a, a smaller crisis in Minsk with the water get it not poisoned, but like getting dirty for.

Boris:

I think half of the city and the other half of the city was organizing, like bottled water and bringing water while the state was saying, yeah, we are, we are doing it.

Boris:

And then it took them a week or something like that to start bringing water to the people while the society was already delivering, and that was the point where the first social network started building up and the social networks.

Boris:

I don't mean like Facebook, Twitter, whatever, like the physical social networks where people started to get to know each other from the neighborhoods from the clinics from the hospitals and this, created an important factor in mobilizing red so it's not only you who ride like a desperate message in twitter let's go and fucking destroy the dictatorship but rather you get together you talk to the people and you figure out all there are so many angry people who are unhappy.

Boris:

So let's fucking go and do something and people were doing, and that's how this, you know, work against COVID, I think at least partly transformed to work against the Belarusian dictatorship.

Boris:

And I know quite a bunch of medical workers who, who were like, okay, I don't care about politics before 2020, but in 2020, they got so angry that they became like I think a stronger version of, of, of struggle against Lukashenko than most of the opposition was before 2020.

Boris:

Yeah.

Boris:

So this was like a huge, I think, energy inside of the protests.

Boris:

And on the other side, Belarusian state and Lukashenko himself, they underestimated the threat.

Boris:

Of that dissatisfaction underestimated the threat of let's say self organizing against COVID.

Boris:

And while people were organizing and getting angrier, he was like giving this pearls of yeah, drink some vodka or drive tractor and just continue fucking working and you will be fine.

Boris:

And this would, would be also, you know, like throwing wood into fire.

Boris:

And then.

Boris:

When the political campaign for election started, he was also feeling quite self secure in this situation.

Boris:

So like the first attempts to organize were not smashed as they would be before.

Boris:

And for him, it was from one side underestimation, but from the other side an important factor in moving further to the European union and away from Russia, what was happening between from So for him, it was important to show that he is not keeping power with power, right?

Boris:

But rather he's keeping power through popular support, which was destroyed by the masses pretty well.

Boris:

And there were estimation that at the biggest like protest, there were half a million people participating all around the country and half a million people in the country of 9.

Boris:

5 million people.

Boris:

So this is massive, this is like 5 percent of the population or even a little bit more on the streets.

Boris:

And that means that you still have quite a bunch of people who are organizing the infrastructure around those people who do not go to the demonstrations.

Boris:

So you do have like I don't know, like millions and millions of people from that society who are against the dictatorship, maybe not in a let's say weapons in the hands conditions, but in general, like politically dissatisfied way against Lukashenko.

Boris:

Yeah.

Boris:

And this later on transformed into like hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people live in the country and so on.

Boris:

And in the current political crisis.

Boris:

Yeah.

Nicole:

Yeah, and I will I will definitely ask about that.

Nicole:

Yeah, I think it's, I think it's interesting that health, healthcare workers were sort of like at the front of a lot of that resistance.

Nicole:

So yeah, so in terms of this podcast series, like I've generally been focusing on like the politics of trauma and looking at like the different forces in society that shape people's lives, whether that's disability or addiction or class.

Nicole:

And you know, like, people often think things like PTSD, like post traumatic stress, are from, like, you know, a one time event, like a car accident or something, and not from this, like, ongoing oppression and repression you know, through state violence.

Nicole:

And like, you know, I, like, kind of focus everything, not everything, but I focus my work around the impacts of state violence.

Nicole:

And yeah, I just, I think people aren't aware of the extent of state violence in Belarus and what happens like when people resist, like, I just wondered, like, what, you know, what kinds of conditions are people experiencing, like what happened to people arrested in the uprising, for example, and how are you kind of finding that this trauma is like affecting people?

Boris:

I think what would be important for me to mention here is that trauma is not like a thing that happens to one person or two, let's say generation of society.

Boris:

And that's it.

Boris:

But rather for Belarusian society some of us still experience trauma.

Boris:

From, from the times before, right?

Boris:

So for, to, to give you an example, that an example that came to us as an understanding pretty late, that we are still like generations of people who were in contact with those who were at war and in the second world war and Belarusian society experienced that in a way, different way.

Boris:

In a way, different order than many other regions.

Boris:

And I think it's incomparable for sure to different social groups.

Boris:

But for us, for example the violence that comes from our grandparents towards us, right?

Boris:

Or the violence that comes from our parents that came from their grandparents is partly directed by that trauma.

Boris:

So we are like, basically the kids of the trauma still of the, of the Soviet Union and the second world war and all those things, the trauma that was never like spoken through, like my grandmother didn't talk about the second world war just several years before she died.

Boris:

Like her kids were also not asking those questions.

Boris:

And that's a, quite a typical situation where okay.

Boris:

like our grandparents who experienced like horrible things that would never be talking about it just before like ending their life.

Boris:

They start opening it up.

Boris:

Yeah, so that, that's kind of like present in the society quite a lot.

Boris:

And I think the traumas that were inflicted on the people in the Soviet union are still going to be there for quite some time.

Boris:

Like my parents don't talk about their life in Soviet Union so much.

Boris:

They just talk about basic things like very, you know, practical things, how they were living and so on.

Boris:

But do not open up further on.

Boris:

And you can see a lot of people are drinking.

Boris:

A lot of people are like basically destroyed by the way they were living or the way they were oppressed in.

Boris:

Soviet times in the nineties and now in the belarusian dictatorship and talking about the state violence right now.

Boris:

Right.

Boris:

Or in 2020.

Boris:

And after 2020, we are talking about like full scale carte blanche for the police to do whatever they feel like.

Boris:

And the violence start from like invasion in a constant invasion in your personal life from like checkpoints in the, in the metro up to like, for example, at your working places.

Boris:

They would be having police officers or like local guards who would be checking your phones on like, let's say politically problematic content from like signing up to some oppositional telegram channels or reading some oppositional news up to the pictures from the protest or the pictures with the people who are searched and so on and so forth.

Boris:

So this is like indirect violence and direct violence is of course, like beating up torture death, like basically murdering people.

Boris:

That violence happens to let's say limited amount of people mostly right now to the people who are in prison.

Boris:

Although they continue raiding the flats, there are still three years later.

Boris:

There are still courts happening for the people that were participating in the protest in 2020, and there are still people detained for participation in the protest three years ago.

Boris:

So this kind of like a mill of repressions continues to produce more and more violence, and those raids are very violent, like normally not only being thrown at the ground, but rather like beaten up again.

Boris:

And if you are like more.

Boris:

Let's say politically involved, or they figure out like you're an anti fascist, you are an anarchist this will be meaning a lot of violence that will not stop just because, you know, they got what they want, but rather like a revenge violence and things like that.

Boris:

So in 2020, that was the case.

Boris:

And there was also like thousands and thousands of people who were detained in the first days just randomly on the streets.

Boris:

Quite often who were severely beaten up in the police stations in the prisons later on, many of them didn't get prosecuted.

Boris:

They were just, you know, like arrested because they were in the middle of the street in the night coming from their night shift from work, and that would be enough for the police to say, Oh, they're most probably protesters.

Boris:

So we're going to grab them and we're going to torture them as a revenge for the clashes and like the, the, the suffering that the police or the state was experiencing from the protesters.

Boris:

so called suffering, right?

Boris:

Yeah.

Boris:

And this violence spilled like the Belarusian state, as I was mentioning, was violent before.

Boris:

So like getting beaten up in the police stations was happening before 2020.

Boris:

And this is like quite a common setup for political activists.

Boris:

But in 2020, it spilled like to the masses.

Boris:

So you had 6, 000 people in the first three days detained by the police.

Boris:

Many of them experienced police violence in one way or another being beaten up to the extent like that, that their legs were completely blue and so on and so forth.

Boris:

And that experience, like you have 6, 000 people, they have maybe, I don't know, 20, 30 peer people in their surrounding that would be indirectly experiencing that violence, but also traumatized by that and also like.

Boris:

Getting, you know, a tick in their head that you shouldn't mess around with the state.

Boris:

So that, like, the violence basically spreads like a fucking wildfire even though it is not affecting people directly.

Boris:

And then people who did experience that violence, I mean some friends of mine are still doing Therapy three years later, and they're still fucked.

Boris:

And this is not something you can deal easily because you know, you might be a person who got out of that violent situation and your trauma is like somehow or traumatizing experience is somehow over.

Boris:

So you're in safety of Western country in one way or another.

Boris:

Plus minus safety, right?

Boris:

But the, the, the the experience, right?

Boris:

The, the triggers of that trauma they are very hard to lock, taking account that there is so much happening on the, on the regular basis.

Boris:

And starting with the trauma in Belarus in prisons and trauma with people on the streets inside of Belarus, we are still no ending up with a trauma of the war in Ukraine that like reignites the violence of the state for a lot of people.

Boris:

And that like another actually trauma for a lot of Belarusians came up in since 2020 full scale invasion.

Boris:

So like you basically have a situation from 2020 where people went into this distress mode.

Boris:

Experiencing trauma on quite a regular basis because the violence was not stopping, you know, like you get arrested once you get released or you get into the prison and that's it.

Boris:

But rather you get released and then one or two weeks later, you get detained again and you experience again, violence.

Boris:

Some of you might experience again and again, COVID in the prison because Belarusian state was using COVID.

Boris:

Inside of the prison to let's say attack the prison population is like a, in a, in a bad way, biological weapons.

Boris:

So they would take like sick people and just rotate them through the prison cells to spread covered.

Boris:

So the protesters would go home completely sick with covered and so on.

Boris:

So you have that on top, like.

Boris:

I had at least one friend who had long COVID for, I think, a year or something like that, plus psychological distress, plus all these things.

Boris:

So it's like, it makes it very hard to go through like an experience that is breaking to the certain extent.

Boris:

Yeah.

Boris:

And as I said, it doesn't fucking stop.

Boris:

It feels like there is this barrel, you know, of a, of a shed that is poured on the shoulders of the people.

Boris:

And it's just, it doesn't have a, an ending for now.

Nicole:

Thank you for sharing all of that.

Nicole:

Like it's, yeah, it's really yeah, it's really intense to listen to.

Nicole:

And I'm sure people listening to this podcast will be feeling the kind of same like goosebumps of the kind of like horror of it all.

Nicole:

I know your group like particularly focuses on supporting people in prison and both of us know like the whole next level of kind of trauma and violence in prison.

Nicole:

But yeah, what are, what are kind of prison conditions like in Belarus?

Nicole:

Like what are people experiencing in there?

Boris:

I think it's important to mention here that Belarusian prison system is, is a result of the Soviet prison system.

Boris:

Let's say like that.

Boris:

Right.

Boris:

And a lot of lessons that were learned in the Soviet prison system were passed on to Belarusian prison system as well.

Boris:

And most of those are like negative for the prisoners and positive, let's say for the state.

Boris:

And one of the things was back then philosophically speaking or socially speaking, the idea of the prison was to break the person.

Boris:

To break any dissent that they show against the rules, against the law, against whatever concept the state has about their own power.

Boris:

And that's what continues into the modern life.

Boris:

So Belarusian prisons are made to break people and there are different approaches they take from very soft ones up to very harsh, direct violence.

Boris:

And there are at least from 2020.

Boris:

to now there are at least three prisoners who were participating in the process in one way or another who died inside of the prisons under unclear conditions.

Boris:

There was one case where most probably this was a direct violence from the police or prison guards.

Boris:

The other cases are just neglect of the physical conditions.

Boris:

So.

Boris:

It starts with the food, right?

Boris:

It starts with basic needs.

Boris:

Like you do not have quite often a toilet or you do have a toilet that is inside of the cell.

Boris:

If you are living in the in the fucking panel colony, the conditions are a little bit different, but in the prison cells.

Boris:

It is like that.

Boris:

The food in prisons in general is shit, right?

Boris:

It's, it's unbearable and it's rarely made to actually support the prisoners in the living manner.

Boris:

So you are actually dependent on your relatives to pass you food parcels, medicaments, vitamins, and so on and so forth.

Boris:

Yeah, so this is like the basic beginning of, let's say, your physical approach.

Boris:

You are not exercising so much.

Boris:

I mean, you can do exercise in yourself in the prison cell and so on.

Boris:

But as a political prisoner, for example, or a prisoner of like, let's say protests or uprising, there is an extra layer applied on how the prison guards can treat you.

Boris:

So there are several rules that would be applied on you starting with social isolation.

Boris:

So no prisoners are allowed to talk to you and you are not allowed to talk to other prisoners This is quite common in some penal colonies up to like being transferred from penal colonies and penal colonies to understand it's like this prison camp, right?

Boris:

Where you work, you go to work, you live in a barrack with a hundred people and so on.

Boris:

So you're transferred from those to prison houses with like a higher security regime where you don't go out for 23 hours and you have one hour.

Boris:

Of a so called walk where there is a cell somewhere in the building that has no roof.

Boris:

So you can go into like two by two or three by three room and you can see a little bit of a sky, but you do not actually have like a proper, you know, yard or something like that for a walk.

Boris:

And yeah, it's quite common that they would take it all away, right.

Boris:

All these privileges of going out to the, for a walk or quite often taking away the privilege of washing yourself or something like that, or The privilege of even talking to the people or the privilege of getting a lawyer or the privilege of getting visitations.

Boris:

Belarusian prisons allow very limited amount of visits per year with very strict.

Boris:

List of people who can visit you and that would be like your close relatives only.

Boris:

So people are quite often getting married to see their partners in prison.

Boris:

Just just like just because of that.

Boris:

Yeah.

Boris:

So this is basics.

Boris:

Then you also have the solitary confinement cells that are built as a continuation of that Soviet experience where they're also made to break you.

Boris:

But not only through like solitary confinement, but through conditions inside of it so quite often those cells are built up in such a way that they're extremely cold in winter and they don't have any heating and they're very hot in summer.

Boris:

So people are getting so desperate that they break windows, for example.

Boris:

In those or yeah, like.

Boris:

Go in there underpants the whole time.

Boris:

There is no bed inside of this place.

Boris:

There's just a wooden bench that is flipped to the, to the wall and you can slip on it only for eight hours in the night.

Boris:

And to understand how cold it gets a friend of ours who is now in prison.

Boris:

He wrote about it that, you know, you have to, you can sleep for 15 minutes in the night, and then you wake up and you do exercises for 30 minutes to warm up your body.

Boris:

And then you go to bed again for 15 minutes.

Boris:

And that's pretty much your, you know, like nightly routine not to freeze to death.

Boris:

And that's where you like start understanding that the only reason why those people are alive is actually their, you know, will to live and will to fight further on.

Boris:

And that's like, All the indirect violence that is used there.

Boris:

And of course, like beating up of people is quite common inside of the prisons.

Boris:

And quite often the the prison guards are not using themselves.

Boris:

Like they are not beating up people themselves, but rather they have prisoners who are working with them.

Boris:

And those prisoners would be like a tool to beat up and press the people into conformity and in general, like Belarusian prison.

Boris:

Population is built on, on a very strict subculture that came again from the Soviet times with a very strict hierarchies and those hierarchies are also allowing prisoners to apply violence against each other with the prison guards, like completely closing eyes again on that violence.

Boris:

Yeah, so this is.

Boris:

Another level of violence.

Boris:

And of course, like this, I dunno, the constant uncertainty because you don't fucking know what is going to happen to you next.

Boris:

It's not like you're, you know, coming to prison and you breathe out and you know, okay, you've got five years or you've got 10 years or you've got even fucking 20 years but you can breathe out.

Boris:

And you can breathe out, but rather like, you don't know what is going to happen to you in, in the next hour.

Boris:

So you don't, when you close your eyes, you don't know what the guards will decide in the morning to do with you.

Boris:

But I think this type of violence is also, you can experience in all the prisons around the world.

Boris:

Despite, you know, like liberal saying, Oh, our prisons are so humane and so on and so forth.

Boris:

Yeah.

Nicole:

Ooh, yeah.

Nicole:

Like how, like, how is it for people who are kind of.

Nicole:

you know, that don't die in prison, but are released from prison, like friends or comrades, like, how, how do you find these experiences are like affecting them longer term kind of, you know, like emotionally or with their physical health?

Nicole:

Like what are the, what are the impacts of this prison system?

Boris:

It's, it's hard to estimate because in general people try to toughen up and come out and.

Boris:

I mean most of the people who were in prison so far and got out where men that we are aware of.

Boris:

So they're trying to toughen up and say, like, everything's fine.

Boris:

But we do see that people are mentally broken and they're getting the flashbacks of their experience constantly.

Boris:

There were attempts to you know, work with psychiatrists and psychoanalysts to work through that experience and try to, you know, get it, get out of it.

Boris:

But again, like the modern school of quite often the modern, how would you say psychoanalysts are, are focused on this individual experiences.

Boris:

And quite often they alienate people from, from the groups that, that are like continuing the fight.

Boris:

Because like, you know, in general, it would be quite unwise to continue putting yourself in danger and re experiencing the same problem if you're trying to get out of that trauma.

Boris:

So we did have experience where people would be like completely locking out.

Boris:

With like going through the psychiatrist, not psychiatrist, sorry psychoanalysts, yeah, therapists help.

Boris:

Right.

Boris:

But then in some cases it helped a lot because for a lot of people, it is actually hard to process certain things on their own.

Boris:

And the therapists were fucking helping a lot to actually open up those people.

Boris:

And we like experienced our comrades in the way we never experienced them before.

Boris:

So this helps a lot, but in general, I think.

Boris:

This experience is like this experience is basically life defining in, in such a way that it breaks people, but it also shows the sides of the people that you'd never know about.

Boris:

Yeah.

Boris:

And.

Boris:

As for the people that are coming out right now, as I was mentioning, right, that there were comrades who were who were detained in 2020 and they serve like 15, maybe 20 days in prison or 30 days in prison.

Boris:

So those were like short term arrests.

Boris:

Many of them also got traumatized to the extent that they are continuing to do therapy.

Boris:

They are continuing, like there were some group therapies therapies among like the, the activists who were trying to deal through this collective experience.

Boris:

But I think a lot of that trauma is not getting processed in any way because people find themselves in exile.

Boris:

So they're outside of the country and they are finding themselves in social exile as well because We are, you know, like in 2020, most of us were living in Minsk after 2020, most of us are living all around the place.

Boris:

So you do not have the possibility of physical meetings of constant physical meetings and things like that to go through that experience to support each other.

Boris:

But I think like in general, there was a lot of and there is still a lot of collective support, not only like, you know ABC doing their, their stuff, but rather a lot of people are taking care of each other.

Boris:

And this solidarity and kind of support transcends a certain political borders.

Boris:

So it's not only, you know, like anarchists are helping anarchists, liberals are helping liberals, but rather like with certain political groups where you don't have so much of a conflict right now, you can actually say, Oh yeah, we have this same experience about that shit.

Boris:

We understand like.

Boris:

How the state is working and it's, it's, it's hard, for example, for them, other groups to say, Oh, no, the police is a great institute.

Boris:

We just need to reform it because everybody experienced police in one way or another, not only in Belarus, but in other countries.

Boris:

And they're way more radical towards the police than they were in 2020.

Boris:

So I think like this trauma is in some way uniting for us.

Boris:

And as I said, it is unstopping, like the, the traumatic experience is not stopping yet.

Boris:

So for us, it's kind of hard to breathe out.

Boris:

As for the physical.

Boris:

Aspect of it, I think most of the comrades would agree that it's, it's just fucking you up very hard.

Boris:

It's, it's fucking you up to such an extent that you need that you will never recover.

Boris:

Let's, let's say like that you will never recover from the consequences of being in prison.

Boris:

And of course, no prison will admit that they will say, no, you left a healthy person.

Boris:

But reality is you, you, you can get like, you know, lung conditions and skin conditions.

Boris:

From other prisoners up to because you're in constant stress, your body starts collapsing and stuff like that.

Boris:

Yeah, so I think, or from the fucking food, your, your stomach is not going to survive this for very long.

Boris:

And, and people come out, they recover to the certain extent.

Boris:

But this is some kind of experience that comes back again and again, you know, like Oh, the pain in the knee that comes from this, all the pain in the back.

Boris:

Oh, this is from that hit.

Boris:

And so so those things are from my experience, like in some cases, they never go back, go away.

Boris:

Right.

Boris:

And yeah, that that's, that's basically like where you can say that the state is fucking you up.

Boris:

It's basically killing you in a fast way or in the slow way, but in one way or another, it is doing its job in like destroying the lives.

Boris:

Physical mental of the people who are trying to make the world into a better place.

Nicole:

Yeah, for sure.

Nicole:

Like, I think one of my favorite quotes is I can't remember who said it, but it was someone from the IRA in Ireland who said, like, you can never really leave prison because prison never really leaves you.

Nicole:

And, like, I think.

Nicole:

anyone that's been inside will like know that effect of, yeah, this kind of like long term imprint, like you said.

Nicole:

And yeah, whether that's like, I mean, I don't separate like physical and mental, but like, yeah, there's all sorts of like wounds.

Nicole:

Right.

Nicole:

So you mentioned about people living in exile and I know that many people had to go on the run or flee to different countries after the uprising in 2020.

Nicole:

And I just wondered like, And you know, as well as before, right?

Nicole:

Like, I know ABC Belarus have been touring a lot talking about earlier waves of repression, but I just wondered, like, what is life like for people living in the diaspora?

Nicole:

Like, what are the kind of emotional effects of not being able to return home?

Nicole:

If that makes sense.

Boris:

Right.

Boris:

I think it depends when you were talking about like the, the period of time, the period of like the state of diaspora at different times from 2020, because there was a lot of hopefulness.

Boris:

In 2020, 2021, when people left and they thought, okay, we'll leave like for half a year, three months.

Boris:

And then we go back home.

Boris:

Some of the people believe that this short break will lead to a new uprising and we will go back and we'll continue our political struggle.

Boris:

The others believed that, okay, we will, you know, sit through this.

Boris:

Turbulence of state violence and state repressions, and they will go down and when they go down, we can go back home.

Boris:

But I think somewhere from the period of like full scale invasion of Ukraine, this hopefulness like completely disappeared.

Boris:

And now people started understanding.

Boris:

There is no way back home like right now and in nearest future because it looks all so fucking grim.

Boris:

There were like certain groups inside of the diaspora were saying, okay, yeah, like right now Ukraine is going to kick out asses of Russians and then Belarusian and Ukrainians will go and kick out ass of Lukashenko as well, which becomes also quite unrealistic.

Boris:

And with that, like the hopefulness of the.

Boris:

Inside of the diaspora inside of the like migrant circles of Belarusians is very low.

Boris:

And with that, like, understanding that, okay, there is no going back home.

Boris:

People are people are just adapting to the new reality.

Boris:

A lot of people are starting to live, like to settle right to settle the proper in the proper way.

Boris:

Finding a constant, like a permanent place to live or starting education for five, six years and things like that.

Boris:

So I think there is not so much of that hopefulness left.

Boris:

Even inside of the anarchist circles inside of like antifascist circles who were struggling, even when like some of our comrades are fighting right now in Ukraine, there is like very few people who are like completely enthusiastic and believe in the bright future for all of us.

Boris:

And talking about how this affects people in reality, I think it's very hard to estimate that because there are so many angles to that of like living in exile.

Boris:

And not being able to interact with your, with your surrounding, with your home, with everything that, you know, right.

Boris:

And this starts from, you know, constant contacts to your friends or to your family and ending up with experiencing certain again traumatic or certain life defining experiences, like, for example, your close relatives or your close friends die and you can't go and, you know be in the circle of people with whom you can mourn about that.

Boris:

So this is, quite often that people lose their relatives or loved ones in, in the country, and they are like on the long distance from that country.

Boris:

And this is, I think, fucking you up to such an extent that you will not understand for quite some time because you are not processing things.

Boris:

For, for you've not been processing things for a very long time.

Boris:

Yeah.

Boris:

So, yeah.

Boris:

And I think the other part is for a lot of people inside of the diaspora is the breakup with the Belarusian reality, because at the end of the day, the things are.

Boris:

Going on inside of Belarus and many of us are stuck in that, like, you know, reality of 2020 2021.

Boris:

So the longer the time passes, the harder it is actually to find common ground with the people who are still there and with your friends who are still there or with your relatives who are still there because they're starting to live in the reality.

Boris:

Many of us don't understand.

Boris:

And on top of that, it depends where people ended up in which country.

Boris:

And I think reality of the Belarusian diaspora in Ukraine right now is very different from the reality of the Belarusian diaspora in Poland or in Germany.

Boris:

As in Ukraine, you do have a certain mobilizing factor against the Russian invasion.

Boris:

So people do see.

Boris:

Russian invasion as a factor of like, not as a factor as a point in the continuation of the struggle against Lukashenko.

Boris:

And this is kind of like, gives you still a little bit of hopefulness, a little bit of like, okay, belief that you can affect the things in one way or another.

Boris:

But if you're like in Poland or in Lithuania, I think that hopefulness is, is, as I was mentioning, gone.

Boris:

And there is more like hopelessness.

Boris:

Came back with understanding that, I mean, we are like really powerless in the things that are happening.

Boris:

And a lot of people do find comfort in like a daily routine of their continuation of the projects that they were doing.

Boris:

So we do have like, let's say NGOs or some social projects that are continuing in exile.

Boris:

And there are in some way targeting still people inside of Belarus But reality is that they are like working outside of the country for very few inside of the country.

Boris:

And it still gives you a little bit of a comfort because you are like, you're helping at least someone in it.

Boris:

Yeah, I think that's one of the factors as well, but in general, like, People are spreading out.

Boris:

People have way less belief that the things can change.

Boris:

And I think people are like slowly sinking into that a mode of experience or processing what they experienced in last years and only now start figuring out which effect it has on their life now and which effect it will have on their life later on.

Nicole:

Yeah, for sure.

Nicole:

Like, and I think there's always that double edged sword, isn't there, with, with any sort of uprising because people get that feeling of like power and like we can change things and then there's always this wave of like state violence afterwards or during and then yeah, it's kind of hard for that despair and hopelessness to not, to not like really take its toll.

Nicole:

But yeah, moving on to kind of solidarity, like I know we both really value the role of solidarity and keeping our friends alive in prison and resisting state violence in general.

Nicole:

Like what difference does it make to people experiencing repression or surviving prison, for example, to experience solidarity?

Boris:

I think for me, it's, I can give you an ideological view of that where the belief in general is that if you have, like, even if not talking about the anarchist movement, right, but if you do have a community, you do have like a better chances of surviving certain things or getting out of shit in a better shape.

Boris:

Right.

Boris:

And even if we're not talking about prison, but we are talking about general traumatizing experience in general, like bad experiences in your life or like a hole where you ended up.

Boris:

And yeah.

Boris:

And I think like for me personally speaking, it's very warming and it's very encouraging to know that.

Boris:

Your struggle, your like life and goals and values are not only living in your heart, but rather like there are people outside of the person who are, you know, going to hold to you and going to help you to go through those hard times.

Boris:

And I think that's very important, at least for some people.

Boris:

I know some people who don't give a fuck at all about solidarity and about like the outcome from outside, but I know a lot of people who really value that and who really you know, like it's basically something that keeps their engine going inside of the prisons.

Boris:

And, and you can compare, you can compare for sure when you are in prison or you are like in, in, in Belarusian prisons, you can compare those people who are on their own.

Boris:

And those people who are supported, maybe not by the political movement or by their political comrades or by the anarchist, but just by their relatives and those who are not supported and left alone.

Boris:

The experiences of the person are very different.

Boris:

And I think, yeah, I think for me, every time I was getting like a small letter or an illegal message, you know, hidden somewhere you think, fuck, this is like, you just stick up to all the cops around you and you read this message that has like, I don't know, one sentence, but you think this is fucking amazing.

Boris:

Like somebody remembers about you and somebody cares about you and you just, you just keep on going.

Boris:

And.

Boris:

Yeah, and we got like a lot of positive feedback from comrades and things about the work that is done and also from their relatives that about the work that is done because it does create, you know, like a bigger community that is caring about carrying the people through this complicated experiences.

Boris:

And then when you're getting out, you also know you're not getting out into, you know, an empty field where nothing is going to happen, but rather you, you have a certain Yeah.

Boris:

security.

Boris:

And this is an important factor, I think, in your struggle through the prison, that you can rely on certain people and those people are not going to let go on you until you are in safety, until you're in a better place in this world.

Nicole:

Like, for people that don't know about Belarus Anarchist Black Cross, can you share a little bit about what you do?

Nicole:

Because podcast, I'm going to be really encouraging people to donate and order t shirts and all the things, but I just wondered, like, Yeah, if you can give us a synopsis of like all your kind of work in the world.

Boris:

It's hard.

Boris:

It's hard to go through all the things that we do because there's so much needs to be done still.

Boris:

But what we do on like a regular basis is we are collecting funds and money to support people inside of the prisons.

Boris:

Through like sending them lawyers or sending them food parcels.

Boris:

Sometimes if it is required, we do support the families of the prisoners because it can be a situation where the person inside of the prison was the only person who was working in the family and they do need support.

Boris:

Yeah, so we, we go through that, you know, like, support of the people inside of the prison, but also when people get out of the prisons, we try to help them and work with them on recovering after the prison.

Boris:

And that's what I was talking about, the therapies and so on but also financially wise and so on.

Boris:

Belarusian prisons is not the place where like you get out and you can get a lot of money for working or you get out into Belarusian society.

Boris:

Where you don't get any social welfare or something like that.

Boris:

So people do rely on that kind of support.

Boris:

Yeah.

Boris:

And also what we do is we try to inform the spread, the information about the Belarus, inform people about what is happening in the country, as it is very essential in, in our struggle in general, right?

Boris:

The, the experience that we live through.

Boris:

the experience that we want to not like, you know, keep inside of us, but we want to pass it further to the people, to the comrades that they understand that this can happen.

Boris:

And this is not the end of the world.

Boris:

And I think that's one of the ways to, for us to deal with the trauma and to deal with the violence is that to show that we can live through it and we can actually fight through it in the collective manner, way more successfully than on the individual manner.

Boris:

So we're doing all of that.

Boris:

And.

Boris:

Yeah, a lot of other stuff beyond and so on.

Boris:

But mostly our focus is support of the prisoners, support of their families in this hard times.

Boris:

When he had way more people to do the work that we are doing and we had way less prisoners, we were also focusing on, for example the critical perspective on the prison system or like the criticism of the prison system and abolitionist perspectives inside of Belarus, which are not present at all in the society, right?

Boris:

Because it's considered a little bit of a, like a Western idea which was never in any way transported to the Soviet Union and post Soviet Union countries.

Boris:

But unfortunately right now, because of the amount of work that needs to be done and the amount of funds that needs to be raised to actually support people, even in basics all those people who are inside of the prisons is just like became our main work.

Nicole:

Amazing.

Nicole:

Like, and I know, I know what it's like to feel like a full time fundraiser.

Nicole:

So yeah, like I know you've mentioned before about people being able to kind of like sponsor a prisoner, like to kind of help cover that person's, some of those person's costs to kind of, yeah, support you while you have like so many people you're supporting in prison.

Nicole:

I just wondered like what You know, like if you could speak a little bit about that and like what kind of solidarity is like meaningful to support like ABC Belarus and like all your amazing, like really essential work.

Nicole:

What would you like people to do after this episode?

Nicole:

You know.

Boris:

All right, what I want you to do after this episode.

Boris:

Well, talking about the supporters program, it basically was based on this notion that we have a certain amount of money.

Boris:

That needs to be spent on on like all the needs of the prisoner, depending on the person because people are sitting in different regimes and those different regimes might have different amount of money that needs to be spent.

Boris:

So we encourage groups or rich individuals or not so rich individuals to get in touch and take over the responsibility of paying.

Boris:

for, I don't know, a food parcel for the person months on monthly basis and so on.

Boris:

And this would put a little bit of a pressure away from our shoulders because we do have this feeling of a responsibility, which is we try to spread on, you know, like an anarchist movement or a general social society, but quite often it doesn't work.

Boris:

So we are like breaking our asses off.

Boris:

So this would be very helpful if people become like this, long lasting supporters in one way or another.

Boris:

We don't expect you to do a lot.

Boris:

You just donate money.

Boris:

You can continue living your life in the way you're living it right now, but you just donate a little bit more money to a certain cause as for what people can do.

Boris:

Of course, the solidarity actions, like even the small solidarity action in front of like Belarusian embassy somewhere in the middle of nowhere is something that is.

Boris:

Helping out and I think in the moments when it's becoming quite desperate, it's also nice to see that it's not only you and maybe a couple of dozens of others who care about that, but rather it's there are comrades all around the world who remember about your struggle and who see themselves as part of that struggle and you see themselves.

Boris:

So you build up the small connections through small actions that do not require so much yeah.

Boris:

Energy and so much time and stuff like that.

Boris:

Yeah.

Boris:

And if you are like, really, you know, getting inspired and you think like, fucking hell, I need to do things.

Boris:

Then there is a lot that needs to be done in like figuring out the ways the Belarusian regime stays in touch with the Western countries.

Boris:

And there are a lot of Western businesses that are still working in Belarus and they're still making money out of it.

Boris:

And there was recently a huge scandal with Ikea that was producing furniture in Belarusian prisons and the Belarusian prisons I was talking to you about, right?

Boris:

Where the people are tortured, beaten up and so on and so forth.

Boris:

So an Ikea is like a big thing, but there are a lot of smaller things that are doing that.

Boris:

And I think.

Boris:

On top of that, of course, supporting the struggle of our comrades and general, the people in Ukraine against the Russian invasion is part of that struggle is part of the struggle against like the general authoritarianism of the regime.

Boris:

Of the region, sorry.

Boris:

And the, the attempt to push back through this, you know, like a general dictatorship building in Eastern Europe and fighting in your own places.

Boris:

I think the more fucked up UK gets, the more fucked up Belarus will get for sure.

Boris:

You know, like if you get a small little fascist country in your Island, there is a little hope for all of us around the world.

Boris:

So the local struggle also matters and your struggle for, you know, like a libertarian United Kingdom in a good sense.

Boris:

Sorry.

Boris:

I always forget that the, the English speakers think that libertarian is like an after communist anarchist capitalist in a good, you know, free way anarchist way, then the, the ideas of freedom are also, you know, like contagious.

Boris:

So your struggle for anarchist society is matter.

Boris:

It does matter.

Boris:

Even on your small island or where nobody goes to.

Boris:

Yeah.

Boris:

So.

Boris:

Do solidarity, continue the fight and don't forget about the people in the smaller islands in Europe, smaller than your island.

Nicole:

We have like many islands in our island um, some people, some comrades are trying to think of like a more like decolonial like, framing of the UK, like, obviously, cause like, you know, like England and Wales and Scotland and Ireland is like quite a mouthful.

Nicole:

And I can't remember what they said, but it was like something like the, like collection of islands in the Western Atlantic or something.

Nicole:

It was like fucking ridiculous, but it was quite funny.

Boris:

Yeah, archipelago.

Nicole:

Yeah, that's the word.

Nicole:

I can never pronounce it.

Nicole:

Okay.

Nicole:

So I just want to say thank you so much for sharing everything you've just shared.

Nicole:

Like I know the, I know the topic is really, really heavy.

Nicole:

Yeah.

Nicole:

Where can people learn more and get involved?

Nicole:

Like if you just give us your website and social media, I'll put everything in the show notes.

Nicole:

But yeah, I just want to say like, thank you so much again for your time.

Boris:

Thank you as well.

Boris:

Thanks for doing what you're doing.

Boris:

I wanted to say that people also can learn more by going to Belarus.

Boris:

You can still go there and also go to other countries in Eastern Europe.

Boris:

And just in general, I think breaking up with with the localist mentality of staying in one place and not knowing about the rest of the world is an important factor in like international solidarity.

Boris:

So I would encourage doing that.

Boris:

And we are like everywhere we are in social networks and fucking, we have a website, which is not common among anarchists recently.

Boris:

Thanks once again.

Nicole:

Okay, amazing.

Nicole:

I'll put those all in the show notes.

Nicole:

And yeah, thank you.

Nicole:

Thanks so much for listening to the Frontline Herbalism podcast.

Nicole:

You can find the transcripts, the links, all the resources from the show at solidarityapothecary.org/podcast.