I’m going to tell you how the people in charge of my country made the truth a crime.
Alexander Lukashenko, Belarus’s longtime president, has spent about three decades destroying our country’s fragile democratic institutions: elections, the judiciary, political opposition and independent media. Many critics have been imprisoned; others, fearful, have left the country or stayed but kept quiet; some have simply disappeared. In January, Mr. Lukashenko secured his seventh term in elections widely seen as a sham.
It didn’t have to be this way. In the early 1990s, after the fall of the U.S.S.R., there was a window in which my country could have democratized and moved closer to Europe and the West. Instead, the pro-Russia Mr. Lukashenko came to power in 1994 promising to drain the swamp. He never left.
Belarusians tried to fight back. In the 2020 election, a stay-at-home mother, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, unexpectedly ran for president after her husband, a popular blogger, was arrested (he was only very recently released). When it was announced that Mr. Lukashenko would again be president, with official results awarding him more than 80 percent of the vote, there were massive protests.
In hindsight, 2020 was a turning point. The regime sensed the danger of the moment and the ensuing crackdown was violent and swift. Tens of thousands of people were arrested, a local human rights group estimates that there are more than 1,000 political prisoners, and, according to U.N. estimates, more than 300,000 people have left the country in the time since.
I am one of them. I had been a commercial photographer, mostly weddings, until 2020. But in 2020 I decided to start documenting the election campaign and, after the elections, the protests. I don’t think I missed a single major Sunday protest in 2020. By the end of that year there was the sense that things were closing in. The following July I was detained, which felt like a warning. I left soon after for an artist’s residency in Poland and have been postponing my return ever since.
But even in exile, I and others have not given up on Belarus. People keep fighting by organizing protests, speaking out and supporting our neighbor Ukraine. And we keep telling the truth.
In this year’s election, with all of the state media supporting Mr. Lukashenko and all of the credible opposition either in jail, in exile or staying silent, Mr. Lukashenko was awarded more than 80 percent of the vote. There was little chance of protest — anyone who remains has learned how dangerous it can be to demand a future that looks different from the present.
Belarus is a warning that democracy is fragile and that authoritarianism is not a wrecking ball but a hatchet, which slowly chips away until everything is broken beyond recognition.
Pasha Kritchko is a Belarusian photojournalist who lives in Poland.
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