How a Belarusian crowdfunding initiative provides relief for the repressed

Photo: YES Market Media / Shutterstock

Activist Alaksiej Lavoncyk got a message from Andrei Stryzhak, a well-known human rights defender, saying they should launch a campaign to help those being arrested.

“We had done a fundraiser for Ukrainian hospitals before, but there had never been any successful cases of political fundraisers in our country,” Alaksiej recalls. “I felt so shitty about what was going on in Belarus, I went for a walk. It was pouring rain in London – I went to a bar and wrote a Facebook post about collecting money to help those arrested for political reasons.” He listed an account number, as well as the possibility of sending money through the Belarusian payment system ЕRIP.

By the time Alaksiej left the pub three hours later, people from various countries, including Belarus, had donated 8,000 US dollars. The total went up to 25,000 the next day, and eventually reached over 50,000, which shocked the organisers and prompted them to create a formal initiative called “By_Help”.

From one-off to longer-term

Since then, the By_Help civic campaign has become much better known, through its multi-million-dollar fundraisers to paying the fines, legal expenses and medical costs of those whom the authorities have persecuted, as well as to raise funds for independent media. Over 80,000 individuals and organisations have donated, benefiting over 18,000 people. The initiative has served as inspiration for BYSOL – a similar initiative that Stryzhak later co-founded – which has also raised millions to help those who face political repression, as well as other, more narrowly focused funds in the areas of sport, medical care, cultural solidarity and others.

The funds raised in that first call for help were enough to cover the fines of those detained on the eve of Freedom Day. People who were later detained and fined started contacting the initiative as well. “When we exhausted our resources, the criticism started [that we were not continuing]. But we sincerely stated: “We raised this amount of money, gave it away, and that was it,”” Alaksiej says. “We never had any intention of making it permanent. We thought at the time that it was pure luck to raise so much money.”

Events on the ground, however, pushed the group to resume the initiative in 2019 after the authorities accused Belarusian independent media of stealing information from the state news agency, fining them and seizing their equipment. By_Help launched a specific fundraiser for the media, collecting around 10,000 euros – the largest crowdfunding campaign for Belarusian media at the time. Again, however, By_Help went quiet – until the protests that spread through the country in the run-up to the 2020 presidential elections. As the August elections approached, the authoritarian government of Alyaksandr Lukashenka started arresting some of his main competitors and their supporters. On the first day after By_Help relaunched in late June 2020, the campaign collected about 70,000 euros, and by the time of the August elections, the figure had swelled to 200,000.

Back in 2017, the fund had relied on the Viasna Human Rights Centre to screen applicants seeking money to pay their fines. Founded in 1996 in response to an earlier wave of repression, Viasna provides financial and legal assistance to political prisoners and their families. Its founder, the Nobel Prize-winner Ales Bialiatski, recently received a ten-year sentence for various crimes, drawing international condemnation. In the early weeks of the 2020 crackdown, Viasna again took care of verifying the identities of those who received assistance, using its contacts and databases, but even before the elections – with the number of detainees skyrocketing and 300 people turning to By_Help – the task became too great for the organisation to handle on its own. By_Help then introduced its own system of verification, requiring victims to provide a ruling from the court about fines or proof of arrest from the prosecutor’s office.

“Then election day came around, and the internet was shut down throughout Belarus. After a couple of days, we got together and decided that we should raise more money for the injured who had been tortured,” says Alaksiej. “It made a big splash when we wrote a post that we were adding the injured [to the list of those receiving assistance, beyond just those arrested and fined]. Then we got about a million British pounds in one day.”

Delivering the money

This time, it was not only the diaspora and people still in Belarus who pitched in, but also companies and organisations abroad, such as the Lithuanian public broadcaster LRT, which raised over 250,000 pounds through its own fundraiser for By_Help, and Libereco, a German-Swiss NGO, which took in around 100,000. A Russian artist sold his work, while others held concerts or collected money at rallies. “We did not register the fund at the time because we thought that we would again raise some money, give it away, and go off into the sunset. No one thought it would last so long, and we would have to rearrange all our activities,” Alaksiej admits.

At first, the By_Help team transferred the victims’ money directly into their bank accounts, but in November 2020, the Belarusian authorities moved to freeze the accounts of those who had been fined (and allegedly even siphon off funds, though officials deny it). Then By_Help had to come up with new ways of transferring cash, including to foreign accounts and using cryptocurrencies.

The team also devised a third method. “There are people who need to take money out of Belarus, I need to bring it in. So we’ve come up with a scheme where the money doesn’t cross the border,” Alaksiej says. A trusted person inside Belarus will provide money for distribution to volunteers of the initiative inside the country. By_Help then puts the same amount into that individual’s account in a bank outside Belarus. The money does not physically flow abroad, which also benefits people who might want to send funds out of the country, but fear doing so because the authorities have also been known to monitor such transfers.

Such methods to counter the authorities’ repression carry risks, including questions about the transparency of By_Help, which receives complaints every few months. “We were approached by a group from Canada, where the people said that we must pass their audit; otherwise they will forbid all the members of the diaspora in the world to donate to us. This is ridiculous,” Alaksiej says, noting that LRT, in Lithuania, has had to prepare reports to their donors, and his team has always provided the necessary documentation. “We have paid out money to more than 18,000 people, and we work with every complaint if the money does not reach them. Some of the claims on the internet that By_Help had abandoned them were scammers,” he adds.

“There have also been scams during pay-out where we have been sent deepfakes,” says Alaksiej. “Yes, there have been cases where scammers have tried to get money for someone else’s torture.” To counter such fraud, By_Help has asked suspicious applicants to speak on video. Today, By_Help is back to its basic function: helping to pay fines. Although the authorities are arresting fewer people than in 2020, the verdicts that end with a fine have multiplied. In addition, the initiative, together with BYSOL, launched a programme to get victims of repression out of Belarus, though this is now on pause due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. With the focus of public attention now shifted to the war, it has become much more difficult to raise money for Belarusian causes, but the diaspora, especially previous donors, continue to help. Key to such support, says Alaksiej, is that he was trusted during the first wave of fundraisers and has managed to maintain that trust.

By_Help volunteers

At the peak of the crackdown the initiative was receiving up to 1,000 applications a week. Around 125 volunteers were working with this large number of victims, processing applications or redirecting people to other organisations if By_Help could not help them. The team only dealt with monetary payments, but when the situation dramatically worsened, they also worked in conjunction with other initiatives that were providing psychological, legal, medical and food assistance for the victims and their families. Through this cooperation, it was also possible to track down fraudsters who had submitted requests to different initiatives several times. Now, 30 people regularly cooperate with By_Help, and many have faced persecution themselves.

Polina joined By_Help in August 2020. She admits that she suffered greatly from survivor’s guilt at the time. “I was donating, but I felt like it wasn’t enough and needed to do something more. I saw Alaksiej’s post that they were looking for volunteers and since August 2020 I have been a part of By_Help. It was one of the main reasons why I had to leave Belarus, because they started to hunt us down around November 2020.”

Difficulties have arisen at every stage of the work, Polina says. “By the end of October 2020, the challenge was the number of applications – each Sunday protest march, another 700 new applications. There were a lot of volunteers and a lot of donations, but still not enough hands. Personally for me it was very difficult to communicate with the wounded. I am not a psychologist by training, and it seemed to me that after the horror that people had gone through, this communication was like touching a person whose skin had been flayed. I was scared, uncomfortable. How do we talk? We have to ask him for some kind of proof, documents, photos, history to prevent fraud. It seemed to me that because of this the person would go through all this horror again. The psychologist who worked with us on the topic of burnout and how we should behave with different types of victims was very helpful. She then said that if a person has already asked for help, it means they are more or less ready for dialogue.”

If, however, applicants were seeking psychological care, By_Help referred them to other initiatives. At first, people opposed to the regime were not too stressed about the fines, as they thought it would all soon be over. In November 2020, however, Polina saw a change in attitude – both protesters and volunteers had lost their strength.

“Our team began to shrink as some of them burned out. I burned out too, went away to catch my breath for a week and came back. I couldn’t and can’t give up until the goal is achieved. And people were counting on a sprint, volunteering around the clock. Not surprisingly, after two or three months, they were no longer physically able to work, but their contribution had been simply enormous by the time. Unfortunately, they left because the passion had passed and the situation was not getting any better. It was difficult until the summer of 2021, when we got into some kind of rhythm with work procedures, security issues and a stable team.”

Reflecting on her experience, Polina says she is proud of her fellow Belarusians and their courage and resilience. She has kept in touch with some of the victims for more than a year. Although BY_Help volunteers, for security reasons, do not give their own names or show their faces, they have such a level of trust with the aid recipients that these people turn to them for all sorts of issues and sometimes just to talk.

The victims

Olga had been detained at marches and fined twice (her name has been changed to protect her identity). The second time she turned to By_Help for assistance. “To be honest, it was embarrassing to write and ask. All the time the thought was throbbing in my head that it might be worse for someone else than for me. The first fine we paid ourselves. It seemed at the time that it [the repression] was about to end. But when the second [criminal] sentence came, my brother and some friends were already in prison, so I wanted to support them and another fine was a serious burden for me,” Olga recalls. “It was like angels taking care of you,” Olga admits. “I felt so warm inside that unknown Belarusians from other countries took care of me.”

Vitaly was badly beaten first on the street during the protests, and then in a police van and at the police station [his name has also been changed]. They finally left him at a hospital and when no one was looking he took off and found his way to a private clinic, where doctors diagnosed him with a fractured rib, a traumatic brain injury and numerous bruises.

“I don’t know if I can say it, but I was lucky,” Vitaly says. “There were so many injured that they just forgot about me and so I managed to escape. It didn’t occur to me to deal with the paperwork in the hospital at the time – I was glad I had survived. I had doubts about whether By_Help would help me. But yes, they did.”

Maryia Hryts is a Belarusian journalist who works with Belsat TV.