Just days ago, Ales Bialiatski, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, was blindfolded, bundled into a car and driven from a notorious penal colony in his native Belarus to Lithuania’s border. There, his blindfold was untied.
Mr. Bialiatski had been serving a 10-year sentence on charges of “smuggling” and “financing public disorder,” charges widely seen as politically motivated. Suddenly, he was free.
“It is like jumping out of a room where there was no air,” the veteran human rights campaigner said in an interview Friday in Vilnius, six days after his release after having served nearly half his sentence. “You have such oxygen intoxication, your head starts spinning immediately.”
The organization Mr. Bialiatski founded, Viasna, tracks the conditions of political prisoners in Belarus, population 9.5 million. After he was freed last Saturday along with 122 other prisoners, it determined that 1,103 were still languishing in jail.
Mr. Bialiatski’s release came about after an envoy for President Trump met Belarus’s president, Aleksandr G. Lukashenko, and announced that the United States would lift sanctions on potash fertilizer, one of Belarus’s largest sources of cash. Also released were Maria Kolesnikova and Viktor Babariko, two of Belarus’s top opposition leaders.
Mr. Bialiatski, 63, expressed profuse gratitude for his freedom, but said he felt he had been “trafficked” as part of a transaction — released only when there was economic gain for Belarus.
“They just loaded me like a sack of flour and transported me across the border,” he said. “We are basically goods for sale.”
In prison, Mr. Bialiatski worked in a carpentry shop at Penal Colony No. 9, in the eastern Belarus city of Gorki, doing manual labor for eight hours a day.
He had to lift and move wood scraps from the workshop, which, according to reports from Viasna, produces pallets for the Russian military, among other things.
“It was physically hard for me, considering my age,” he said. “By the end of the workday, my tongue was on my shoulder” from exhaustion, he said.
For more than two years, he worked with a leg so swollen because of an issue with his veins, he said, that he had a hard time fitting into his boots. It took more than a year for the penal colony to arrange to have his leg operated on, he said, and he has a slew of medical appointments awaiting him now that he is free.
Because 50 percent of his meager salary was deducted by the prison to house him, and another 25 percent was deducted to pay a fine of about $82,000 slapped on him during sentencing, he received between $10 and $15 a month for his work.
Still, Mr. Bialiatski said, he preferred laboring in the workshop to stints in solitary confinement. He had spent six months in a solitary confinement cell that he described as a “prison within a prison.” While the cell was warm, the window was broken and covered with polyethylene that was growing fungus, making the room feel like an airless basement, he said.
During that half year, he was allowed only one 20-minute walk daily.
Separately, he was repeatedly sent to a different kind of punitive cell for petty violations that he said were often concocted by prison administrators, like being poorly shaven or walking alone. That cell was extremely cold, forcing him to exercise to keep warm.
“I could sleep for 15 minutes and then I would wake up because I was shivering” he said, estimating that the temperature was about 40 degrees Fahrenheit. “I needed to exercise to stay warm.”
At 5 a.m. the bed was strapped to the wall and he was forbidden from lying down during the day, leaving him to sit on a freezing iron bench.
While he believes his Nobel status likely protected him from direct physical beatings, he was frequently denied letters, family visits and care packages containing essential medicine. He was not allowed to see his wife, Natalia Pinchuk, for more than three years, and during the last year of imprisonment, he said prison censorship meant he only received one letter from her, while she never received his.
He said prisoners were forced to attend mandatory film screenings, usually about Russian imperialist ideas and the Russian Orthodox Church.
Mr. Bialiatski was speaking in Vilnius, just across the border from Belarus, which has become a hub for tens of thousands of its exiles. He spoke at a cultural center that is a hub for Belarusian language, culture and identity, which were suppressed during the Soviet period and increasingly viewed by Belarusian authorities as evidence of oppositional views.
Mr. Bialiatski, who is soft-spoken with twinkling eyes, began his life of activism in the late 1980s as the Soviet Union was collapsing and becoming more tolerant of political opposition.
He founded a literary society to try to counter decades of Soviet policy that sought to suppress the Belarusian language. He was also active in commemorating the victims of Stalin-era repressions, like the Russian group Memorial, with whom he shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022, along with the Ukrainian Center for Civil Liberties.
Mr. Lukashenko came to power in 1994. Two years later, its Parliament was dissolved by constitutional amendments that also allowed Mr. Lukashenko personally to appoint and dismiss judges at all levels. The authorities cracked down hard on dissenters, and Mr. Bialiatski founded Viasna to support those who were incarcerated, along with their families. It evolved into an organization that also documents torture and abuse of political prisoners.
In 2011, Mr. Bialiatski was arrested and sentenced to several years’ imprisonment for alleged tax evasion. He denied the accusations. He was freed early as part of a national amnesty.
Around that time, Mr. Lukashenko sought to improve economic ties with the West, and by early 2020, there was only one political prisoner behind bars.
That all changed in August that year, when tens of thousands of Belarusians protested what were widely seen as fraudulent elections. Mr. Lukashenko and his henchmen brutally cracked down on democratic protesters, leading to sanctions by Western countries.
Those sanctions were expanded in 2022 after Mr. Lukashenko allowed Russian troops to invade Ukraine from Belarusian territory. They particularly were aimed at pillars of Belarus’s economy, including potash, a major export.
Mr. Bialiatski said the sanctions had been a “powerful lever” because they had so damaged Belarus’s economy. While grateful for Washington’s engagement, he said the European Union, most of whose 27 member countries have had minimal engagement with Minsk since 2022, should not lift any sanctions until there were systemic changes inside Belarus.
Even as hundreds of political prisoners have been released in the past two years, people are still regularly being sentenced.
“What is the sense in releasing some if they are gathering others?” Mr. Bialiatski said.
He called for a total halt to political repressions, so that people were not imprisoned for their opinions, and the repeal of “draconian” legislation that classifies journalists and human rights defenders like him as “extremists.”
For now, Mr. Bialiatski said, he wanted to focus on getting reacquainted with his family and catching up on what had happened during the 1,613 days he was in prison. He had not even known about how much international support he had, he said. He said he expected to continue his work but said he was still figuring out his plans for the future.
Finally, he said, the European Union should continue to treat Mr. Lukashenko as illegitimate, and not give up hope that its efforts could bring change.
He pointed out that for five decades, Western countries refused to officially acknowledge the Soviet annexation of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Now, all three are in the European Union and NATO, and they are among Ukraine’s strongest supporters against Russia.
“No one can say how long the Lukashenko regime will last,” he said. “It could fall tomorrow, or not for a very long time.”
Valerie Hopkins covers the war in Ukraine and how the conflict is changing Russia, Ukraine, Europe and the United States. She is based in Moscow.
The post Freed From a Belarus Prison, a Nobel Peace Laureate Experiences ‘Oxygen Intoxication’ appeared first on New York Times.
