Fyaduta: This was a massacre of a generation that the authorities did not hope to tame, and therefore tried to break

On the «Viasna» website, I read about the case of the «Black Nightingales» — the case of six schoolchildren and one 18-year-old boy. It turns out that a propaganda film about this story was shown on Belarusian state television as early as April 2025. But in the Mahilioŭ colony, I tried not to watch TV: I saved my nerves and heart — so I only learned about everything now.

They were accused of creating an anarchist group called «Black Nightingales,» whose alleged goal was to assist the Armed Forces of Ukraine by photographing military facilities, in an «act of terrorism,» and also in distributing «extremist» literature. These terrible state criminals, most of whom were minors, and two of them girls, were sentenced to prison terms ranging from 10 to 13 years.

You are 16 or 17 years old, and the state, scared of you, sentences you to 13 years, which seem like an eternity to you. I am not writing about the horror of the parents — but about the feeling of eternity, I must speak. To me, at 58 when my sentence took effect, 10 years seems like a perfectly bearable term (if I die, I die). But here — a true eternity.

And I remembered another process.

Forgive an old philologist who mentally lives in the nineteenth century, but I remembered the Vilnius «Philomaths' case.» There, too, everything began with the state's war against children.

A schoolboy wrote on a slate in class: «Long live the Constitution of May 3!» The gymnasium director read it, erased the inscription, and began to investigate. And then he reported to his superiors so as not to be accused of disloyalty. The superiors suspected something was amiss and ordered searches.

In the papers of student Jan Jankowski (18 years old), anti-government poems were found (of extremist content, in today's language). Nikolai Novosiltsev, the curator of all political secret services of the Kingdom of Poland, and also of the Lithuanian-Belarusian provinces detached from it, saw in this traces of a conspiracy capable of shaking the entire system of state power in the Russian Empire, and indeed throughout all of Europe.

About 600 people passed through the case, mostly minors (adulthood then began at 21). Some were bought out by their parents (corruption always gnawed at the secret services), some, surprisingly, had to be released due to the obvious absence of a crime.

But 14-year-old teenagers from the gymnasium in Krože (where literature was taught to them by the future professor of the Collège de France, Adam Mickiewicz), who were involved in the case of the so-called «Black Brothers» (color! color!), were conscripted into soldiers. Some were exiled deep into the Empire — the territory is vast, the Urals and Siberia could be developed.

Павялічыць

In the «Black Nightingales» case, teenagers were sentenced to terms from 10 to 13 years

True, Novosiltsev lacked imagination: names like «Black Nightingales» or «Silence Plan,» capable of scaring an ordinary person half to death, did not come to his mind. But, probably, Nikolai Nikolayevich did not bother with such trifles as propaganda films: cinema, in the words of Vladimir Lenin, «the most important of arts,» as we know, had not yet been invented.

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Wikimedia Commons

And I remembered the painting by the Polish artist Jacek Malczewski «Polish Students Exiled to Siberia,» from 1891. Boys, quite young, they sit by a wall on which hangs a map of the vast empire. Some are sitting, some are lying on the floor.

Sad faces of teenagers being forever exiled beyond their homeland. A living illustration of Michał Kleofas Ogiński's famous polonaise «Farewell to the Homeland.»

I studied the fates of those who were involved in the cases initiated by Novosiltsev. They became poets, university rectors, founders of museums and libraries, historians and publishers, honest officials (yes, that also happened), sometimes, like the «black brother» Jan Witkiewicz — why hide the sin here — outstanding intelligence officers. They were young, talented, and precisely because of that — dangerous.

This was a massacre of a generation that the authorities did not hope to tame, and therefore tried to break.

Not all were broken. But the memory of this attempt remained.

From this memory grew the uprising of 1830-1831. Novosiltsev had to flee Warsaw, hastily leaving part of his archive to the rebels, including a draft constitution. The head of political investigation, it turns out, understood a lot and proposed granting freedom without democracy to the peoples of the Empire. They didn't make it, it didn't work out.

But even if it had worked? Nicholas II tried to do this by signing the famous October 17 Manifesto. But the Empire could not be saved. It was not revolutionaries who blew it up — no — its own elites, given power by the emperor, along with his closest relatives, created a situation in which he had to abdicate. And the war, not very popular among the people, contributed.

True, then freedom without democracy came. And then freedom was taken away. But the boys who sat awaiting exile by the wall with a huge map of the Empire did not live to see this. They remained a legend. Still alive today.

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