From captivity to freedom

Mikola Dziadok (1988) is a Belarusian writer, anarchist activist, and former political prisoner whose name has become synonymous with resilience and the high cost of opposition in today’s Belarus. Not only is he a survivor, he is also a key witness to the inner workings of Belarusian authoritarian power. His story – a double one 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 World (published after his first period of detention), drawn from secret prison notes, offers an unprecedented, raw account of the psychological and physical torment designed to break the human spirit.

After being jailed five years ago, he was released on September 11th together with 51 more prisoners (most of them political prisoners, and some foreign citizens) as part of a broader “deal” between Belarus and the United States, with Washington lifting some sanctions against the state ruled by Lukashenka. All the people were “deported” to the American embassy in Vilnius, Lithuania, except for the leader of one 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 a primary source who provides firsthand testimony about the systematic use of torture and political repression in Belarus. He offers critical insights into the machinery of a regime 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 few 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 personal experience?

MIKOLA DZIADOK: Let’s start from the beginning. I was arrested on November 11th 2020 after being on the run for five months. I was searched by GUBOPiK, the department of Belarusian police which deals with so-called “extremists”, and, during the arrest and several hours after that, I was intensively tortured.

At first the situation was pretty 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 perform 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 five years of detentions the conditions differed, from extremely bad to more or less normal. In general, from the very beginning, the prison administration employed various strategies, including the exploitation of other inmates and informal prison subcultures to oppress not only myself but also all the political prisoners. They set criminal leaders and ordinary inmates on us, subjecting us to a range of tactics including moral torture, physical assault and intimidation.

Also, they used this mechanism called “low social status”, which is a specific 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 permit any improvement of status. In this system you can only move downwards, not upwards the hierarchy. And the lowest status, or a lowest caste, generally associated with homosexual people, is periodically harassed morally and physically and treated like outcasts. They cannot sit by the table with other inmates and they are systematically abused, harassed and mistreated both by other 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 a hard challenge and many people commit suicide. The prison administration is instructed by higher authorities such as the KGB and GUBOPiK, who were trying hard to attach this lower caste status 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 difficult to sleep either because it’s too cold. You have to wake up three or four times at night to do squats or push-ups in order to warm up.

According to the law you are not supposed 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 four months, but in total I spent one whole year in such a cell.

Of course, there are also other forms of pressure they put on you, for example, on the legal level: they prevent you from staying in touch with your relatives, often you are deprived of the right to send letters to your family or someone else.

We can legitimately say that in Belarusian prisons political prisoners represent a special 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 system 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 system of power to make things even harsher?

For sure, the conditions became way harsher compared to what I described in my book. When 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 really hard measures on prisoners, on political prisoners, to intimidate them as much as possible. And today we know the numbers: at least eight political prisoners have died since 2020.

And I should say that most probably only a smaller number of them died from direct violence. Most of them died because of not having medical help 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. After your release, how did your perception of political struggle change? How do you see the political prisoners’ situation today?

I should say that my perception of political struggle did not change radically. I mean, I’m still an anarchist. I still 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 directly influence as much as we want on the political situation in Belarus. And we are really 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 maintain our unity, try to push Belarusian issues in international organizations, in the diplomatic environment, among the foreign affairs offices, and try to raise up Belarusian issues, issues of human rights and of our struggle among the international community.

Maybe in comparison to my previous political views I do not believe as much in revolution or in violent struggle 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 finally come to the position of an idealist, you know, in this eternal discussion between idealists and materialists. I am completely idealist now because I believe that every political change, the changes of political institutions, are first born in people’s hearts and people’s minds, and the struggle of every person to make himself or herself better is not less important than the struggle 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 world 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 difficult conditions to a struggle for freedom in the context where Belarus is even more linked and subjugated by the Kremlin?

All wars today 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 so-called Russian world proxies through the information channels, you know. And that’s what we see now in Belarus. The Belarusian people are subjected to a continuous campaign of indoctrination that combines elements of Russian world propaganda with a distinct Belarusian style. This campaign 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 proper values. This importance is amplified in times of conflict.

Today we see that Lukashenka’s regime invested really great in propaganda after 2020. That year we completely won the information field from them, it took him a month to achieve a partial victory in the information field, during which time he imprisoned journalists, destroyed infrastructure, and resorted to torture and beatings.

My mission is to continue to speak the truth, invest in humanist values, and produce political analysis that promotes proper 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 regime 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 important human rights violations in Belarus are torture and isolation.

Since 2020, in Belarusian prisons beatings have become a sort of mandatory procedure for a certain category of detainees. According to my observations, if you are an anarchist, a football fan, a person somehow associated with Ukraine, right-wing or a neo-Nazi, or a person associated with violent protests, you will be beaten for sure and forced to confess everything on camera and say some words of excuses on camera.

At the moment there are around 1300 political prisoners in Belarus, which is a great number in itself for a country of nine million people, but we should keep in mind that the number is certainly higher and there are a lot of people in prison who are afraid of identify themselves as political activists because 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 some human rights association, then they will arrest your relatives. And it’s something they actually do.

That’s the reason we still don’t know the exact number of political prisoners. Plus, some political prisoners might not have relatives or their relatives are not brave enough to sustain them.

And what can the international community do about that?

The international 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 still some possibilities: firstly, to speak about the topic and raise it in diplomatic talks; secondly, for journalists to raise the issue whenever possible, and not only when 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 interpretation of this move, and was there a general consensus among people who were released?

The same reasons that applied in previous situations. The mechanism with political prisoners is a recurring pattern in Belarus: every five 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 a constant need on the part of the diplomatic, economic and political spheres to lift sanctions. At some point, Lukashenka will be compelled to turn to European countries and negotiate.

This has occurred in Belarusian modern history on three or four occasions, and it is evident that this is due to the sanctions. Lukashenka wants to push economic growth, maybe also to be a little bit more independent from Putin. President Trump maybe was the first one who wanted this deal and he had his gains from the exchange, he wanted to change American-Belarusian relationships and so the usual scheme worked again.

The last question is about anarchism. Do you think there is still a place for anarchism, or maybe other alternative movements, as a political force in Belarus and Eastern Europe? And do you think the anarchist movement has a specific role that distinguishes it from other opposition forces? What lessons can other political movements learn from the Belarusian experience?

From my point of view the situation of anarchism in Belarus is quite specific because we didn’t have an anarchist tradition like in other European countries. Indeed, the anarchist movement was destroyed during the totalitarian Soviet times, and so anarchism in Belarus started its revival in the 90s. By today 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 other Belarusian democratic political forces, all served to establish our legitimate participation in the civil resistance and democratic movement.

And in this case the situation is pretty unique. There is no other country in Europe, and maybe in the world, where the anarchist movement is so legitimized among civil society and where the label anarchist doesn’t bring with it a negative connotation like in Belarus. Anarchists are integrated into civil 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 sort of anarchism at the beginning of the 20th century, which was rooted in workers’ uprisings, seizing power in three days and dismantling the state to found a commune is not sound anymore, it’s not something that we are trying to achieve but still we preserve our values, which are values of non-exploitation, non-violent communication, mutual help and aid, and mutual respect and inclusion. And, I’d say, these values have spread pretty broadly among Belarusian civil 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 several dozens of activists who were just doing well by being extremely 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 pretty good reputation among civil 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 continue to spread our values, to work with people directly through social institutions or maybe through political institutions. We will continue to spread our agenda and to speak through our media about our values and our vision 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 a typical left-wing populist, but in Europe right-wing populisms are probably more popular because they represent the shortest path to dictatorship.

When the state or any structure starts to deprive the people of any freedom it should ring a bell and you should act as soon as possible.

It is important 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 minor businessmen – who just closed their eyes when Lukashenka was repressing anarchists or human rights defenders or some “marginal” opposition activists. In 2020, they opened their eyes and protested. But it was a bit too late. So, it is important to be aware and attentive. 

Also, it’s extremely important to support political prisoners even with simple gestures like writing letters to them. I did not expect to be liberated anytime soon while I was in prison and I really thought that I could spend half of my life there… It’s really easy to lose hope. But knowing that outside there is someone who is thinking about you and struggling for justice, including justice for your case, has been fundamental to survive 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 a Belarusian journalist, anarchist activist, blogger, and former political prisoner. He was released in 2015 and became involved in the 2020 Belarusian protests. He was arrested by authorities again and was sentenced to five years in a general security penal colony on November 10th 2021. Dziadok was released from prison and de facto deported to Lithuania in September 2025.