"My believing friends, please pray for my father's condition. Pyotra Sadouski, a loyal son of Belarus, is between life and death," his daughter Alina wrote on social media.
87-year-old Pyotra Sadouski is a prominent Belarusian linguist who became a Supreme Soviet deputy in the 1990s, and later the first ambassador of Belarus to Germany.
A native of Polotsk region, a child of war, he lost his partisan father in that war, who died before his eyes. Having studied at the Suvorov Military School, he later transitioned from a military career to linguistics – fortunately, at Suvorov, he was taught by the eminent translator and front-line officer Yazep Semezhon.
Pyotra Sadouski studied and taught foreign languages, worked at the Institute of Foreign Languages, the Academy of Sciences, and as a translator at various enterprises in Minsk.
The love of his life is the Belarusian language, and his personal paradise is the North Belarusian dialects, which inspired him and which he knows best of anyone in the world.
Sadouski was one of the signatories of the first letters in defense of the Belarusian language and culture – petitions that were still sent to Moscow. Later, he was one of the founders of the Popular Front and won triumphantly in Minsk's Zyalony Luh in the free elections of 1990. Sadouski was such an authoritative figure that in parliament, where the BPF was in the minority, he was elected chairman of the foreign affairs committee.
After Belarus gained independence, in 1992 he was appointed the first ambassador of our country to Germany in history. He built the embassy there from scratch.
In 2019, Sadouski, then 80 years old, was tried and fined for speaking out against integration with Russia, in defense of independence, on October Square in Minsk.
Piotr Sadouski in court for his speech on October Square, January 2020. Photo: Nasha Niva
His sometimes poignant, sometimes analytical memoirs, "My Shibboleth," were published in 2008. This is one of the most interesting books about what a person who "makes himself" experiences in his heart – about an orphan from under Vetryna, who with his own mind grew to great science and diplomatic heights, and at the same time about the sacredly personal, like childhood in a post-war village, among only grandmothers, because all the men were wiped out by the war. You can read "My Shibboleth" in the online library "Kamunikat."
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