Women who said the wrong thing or possessed the wrong magazine are among the thousands of Belarusians sent to prison for opposing the regime.
Anastasia Bulybenko is 23 years old. In November 2020, she and 11 others who took part in protests at universities were detained by the KGB in the so-called “student case.” Anastasia was a second-year student of the Belarusian National University. She was sentenced to two and a half years in a penal colony (the term for a prison where inmates do mandatory labor).
“I was tormented by severe anxiety and insomnia in November 2020. On the day I was arrested, I woke up to six unfamiliar men standing over me. One was shoving an ID in my face and another was reaching under my pillow to find my phone. When I recall it, I still shake with horror,” she says.
Almost 1,000 women have been convicted in Belarus in politically motivated criminal cases since 2020, according to Viasna, an organization that for many years has monitored human rights abuses in the country. The number currently in prison stands at 170.
They are just some of the thousands of Belarusians sent to prison since a mass protest movement erupted when the country’s authoritarian leader, Alyaksandr Lukashenka, claimed victory in the disputed 2020 presidential election.
Most often, Belarusian women in prison have been found guilty of participation in protests, insulting a representative of the authorities (mainly for comments on social media), or “hooliganism” (mainly for political graffiti). Some have been sentenced for more serious charges from incitement of social hatred to acts of terrorism or treason.
After being arrested and charged, female suspects are held in a detention center until trial. If convicted, the prisoner can be sent to a prison or, in many cases, ordered to serve their term in a less restrictive facility or house arrest.
Women sentenced to prison serve their time at one of the two women’s prison colonies. The Gomel prison is designated for first-time offenders and is divided into a general regime area and a strict regime area. Most female political prisoners are held here.
Nearby, the prison in the village of Zarechye is where political prisoners who violate the rules at Gomel are sent.
Both prisons have sewing workshops where inmates make uniforms for law enforcement personnel. Work is mandatory except for women who have reached the retirement age of 58.
More than 2,000 men and women have served time in prison after a politically motivated conviction since the 2020 protests. Many were released after serving their full terms, according to Viasna. (Viasna now carries on its work from exile; Ales Bialiatski, its co-founder and a 2022 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, is serving a 10-year prison sentence.)
A women’s protest march in Minsk on 12 August 2020. Reuters video.
Sentenced to “Chemistry”
Belarus also operates 29 open penal institutions, where 69 women political convicts (and 577 men) have been ordered to serve their terms.
Those sentenced to “chemistry” – prison slang from Soviet times, when such convicts often were put to work in chemical factories – live in housing units similar to dormitories. By law each prisoner is supposed to have at least three square meters of living space. Inmates are charged about $80 a month for this privilege. If they or their families can’t pay, the inmate can be put on trial for the unpaid debt. Inmates buy food at their own expense, and cook, wash, and clean for themselves. “Chemistry” prisoners are required to work, often in low-skilled and low-paid jobs. A number of women political prisoners have been sent to work as cleaners in factories or as sanitation workers in hospitals.
An unknown number of people have managed to escape this lighter form of punishment, taking advantage of the month-long delay between being officially notified of their sentence and the date assigned to arrive at the open prison to cross into Lithuania, where they request asylum.
Viasna’s information shows that a further 465 women and 688 men have been put under house arrest, or “home chemistry,” on politically motivated charges since the 2020 crackdown on dissent.
Although not in prison, these men and women live under highly regimented conditions. They have schedules for both work and personal activities, including going to the store or throwing out the trash. On weekends and holidays, the convict is not allowed to leave home. The police can come to check on them any day, at any time.
Anastasia’s Story and Others
Before her trial, Anastasia Bulybenko was kept in a detention center for seven months. Anastasia remembers that the first sensation when you open the cell is the stale air. There is little oxygen inside. The light in the cell is always on, day and night.
“It was smoky, there were a lot of things, [religious] icons there,” Anastasia recalls. “When the door closed, other political prisoners started asking what was going on ‘in freedom.’ I was placed in the same cell with a woman who had frozen her child. She was sentenced to 19 years. Her bed was just a few meters from me. I had only seen such things in movies before, but here I had to survive somehow. … The windows in our cell were boarded up. The humidity in the cell became terrible, the mattresses were wet, there was mold on them, as well as in the cell in general.”
The trial lasted two months. During this time, Anastasia says that she and the other defendants were subjected to daily “naked” searches. If any of the women was wearing a menstrual pad, they had to tear it off and show what was underneath.
Anastasia, like many others, was found guilty of violating Article 342 of the criminal code (organizing or preparing a gross violation of public order, i.e., a protest event) and, after almost a year in pre-trial detention, served out her sentence in a women’s prison. There, she worked on an industrial iron, which aggravated her psoriasis, until she was transferred to work on a sewing machine. She now lives outside Belarus.
Alena Lazarchik, 49, a former activist for the opposition group European Belarus, is serving eight years in prison for “extremism,” taking part in protests, and insulting the president. In the eyes of the Belarusian authorities, all opposition materials qualify as “extremist.” Alena’s crime was to subscribe to online opposition news sites. She was arrested on New Year’s Eve in 2021. The following July, she learned that she had been deprived of parental rights over her five children.
Alena’s youngest child, Artem, is nine years old. Before the arrest that led to her prison sentence, Alena had been taken into custody in September 2020 for the administrative offense of participation in protests. At that time, Artem was taken by the guardianship service to an orphanage, and Alena’s friends and supporters demanded the return of the child to his mother. Alena was released and her son was returned to her care until, a year later, after being sentenced under the more serious charge of extremism, she lost her parental rights.
To prevent Artem from being sent to an orphanage, Alena’s eldest daughter Marina took full custody of the child. Her duties include not only looking after her younger brother, but also taking parcels to her mother in prison. According to Marina, her brother refused to enter his mother’s room for some time after her arrest. When Alena is released, Artem will be 15.
According to Viasna, 1,418 people were serving time on politically motivated charges in Belarusian prisons as of 26 January. (DissidentBy, another group that aids prisoners, gives the total as 1,611, including 185 women and six minors.) Their relatives and children are still waiting for them. For some children, both parents are jailed – like Paulina Losik, for example. Her father, Igor, a blogger and media consultant for Radio Liberty, is serving a 15-year term.
Paulina’s mother, Darya Losik, was sentenced to two years in prison in January 2023 for “promoting extremist activity.” According to the case materials, Darya gave an interview to the Polish TV channel Belsat, which the Belarusian authorities named as an “extremist formation” in 2021. The case materials state that Darya “positioned herself as the wife of a political prisoner, as well as giving a negative personal assessment of the state authorities … She urged relatives of other convicts to follow her example.” When police came to Darya’s home to detain her, her three-year-old daughter Paulina was with her.
Paulina is now four years old and living with her grandparents. She was only a year old when her father was detained and is already starting to forget him. Darya Losik will be released in August 2024.
Hazardous Volunteering
A handful of civil society organizations and initiatives work to help political prisoners in Belarus, among them DissidentBy, Bysol, and BY_help. All have been officially declared “extremist” and are based abroad, using volunteers inside Belarus to deliver packages or medicine to inmates or provide help to their families if they can.
Katsiaryna (not her real name) is one such volunteer. Every week for the last three years, she has delivered food, hygiene products, and other necessaries to prisoners.
“I live in Minsk not far from the detention center, so every week I bring a handout to political prisoners. I come together with another female volunteer to bring supplies to more people if possible,” she explains.
Volunteers have also been arrested and prosecuted. It’s unwise to say out loud that you cooperate with any unofficial initiative, or face the risk of being charged with participating in an extremist organization.
“I bring pads, food, vitamins, and clothes to women. In Belarus, having someone in prison means significant financial burdens for a family,” she says.
Prisoners are paid only about $5 to $10 a month for working while serving their sentences, so family support helps them survive in prison, whether it is parcels of food or clothes, or financial contributions into their prison account so they can buy things at the prison store.
The women in Belarusian prisons are aged from 18 to 75. Among them are mothers with children, women with disabilities, students, teachers, lawyers, human rights activists, journalists, doctors – all sentenced to prison for peacefully expressing their opposition to the ruling regime. Nine women have been convicted of terrorism on false grounds, according to Viasna. Seventeen women are serving terms from 10 to 20 years in prison.
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Evgeniya Dolgaya is a Belarusian journalist specializing in social issues. She is the creator of Politvyazynka, a platform for the stories of female political prisoners in Belarus.
This article was produced with the support of the International Visegrad Fund.
