A reply to a reader from Tomsk about why your "brilliant director" is unacceptable to us

Belarusian Minister of Culture Ruslan Charnecki and the new artistic director of the Yanka Kupala Theater, Dzmitry Akimau. Photo by the Ministry of Culture

The reader praises Akimau as a director:

"Dzmitry Akimau was appointed chief director of the Tomsk Youth Theater in 2020 and managed to stage several brilliant performances in a season and a half, including a little-known play by Alexander Ostrovsky "Not of This World" and stories by Alexander Tsypkin. Akimau's performances were noted by critics and received awards at the regional theater festival "Mask". We are personally acquainted. As chief director, he was not afraid to invite other interesting directors to stage performances at his theater and rejoiced in their success. Unfortunately, in the midst of the second "Akimau" season, a fire broke out in the theater, damaging the roof over the main hall. This put an end to the chief director's creative plans, and he was forced to leave the theater in the summer of 2021. The people of Tomsk hope that Dzmitry Akimau will succeed in the Belarusian theater, and that one day he will return to Tomsk with a grand tour of Belarus's oldest theater. After all, such a creative Russian-Belarusian exchange has been a tradition since the Great Patriotic War."

The reader reminds that it was to Tomsk that the Yanka Kupala Theater was evacuated during the Second World War.

Yes, People's Artist of Belarus Stefania Stanyuta recalled how, while in Tomsk, she cried from the Sovinformburo reports: "Soviet planes bombed Minsk." Her family, a small son, remained there in Minsk (Stanyuta was caught at the beginning of the war on tour in Odesa). The family themselves lived near the station, and Stanyuta understood: what was being bombed? The railway hub was being bombed. Tomsk was a city of longing for home for that generation of Kupala actors.

Dear reader from Tomsk! Belarusians view the situation with Akimau's appointment differently – as a new stage of colonization, as the erasure of national identity. There are many talented directors and cultural managers in Belarus, but almost all of them are on blacklists; they are forbidden to work. And instead of them, a person from Russia is brought in who knows absolutely nothing about our national tradition, about Central European influences. For whom " The Locals," " Two Souls," " King Lear" in the Belarusian tradition, or the Kupala's janitor Andrus Horvat – are just empty sounds.

Lukashenka's regime has turned Belarus into a cultural desert, where in most cultural centers there is no room for reflection, and only platitudes, hymns, or reinterpretations are allowed. Only Russian theaters, mostly low-quality, tour in Belarus. Concerts are given only by Russian stars — politically loyal (read here how Shaman is imposed). Music on the radio is strictly permitted. Hundreds of Belarusian artists are banned and silenced. Even school curricula are emasculated; they lack the best children's literature. Three weeks before the appointment of the Tomsk director, the last independent book publishers in Belarus were arrested.

Russification and "de-humanization" of Belarusians have been going on for a long time, but the destruction of the Yanka Kupala Theater stands as a special point, because it was an academic theater, one of the last venues where the national language was spoken, and an unbroken tradition, accumulated since the times of Yanka Kupala and Ihnat Bujnicki, was passed on.

Therefore, for us, this is not a "creative Russian-Belarusian exchange," but the eradication of our culture under the guise of exchange; it is conscious debilization under the guise of "ideological concern." We, Belarusians, will not accept this.

Now is a time when most manifestations of Belarusian culture are created underground and semi-underground, in a struggle against fear and as a response to oppression; a time when important plays are read at apartment gatherings. Great works are now conceived in prisons and pre-trial detention centers or through the pain of forced silence, but not in the sanctuaries of Belarusian culture desecrated by Lukashenka's regime, among which is the Yanka Kupala Theater. We, Belarusians, are doing everything so that someday these sanctuaries will be reconsecrated and revived for free creativity.

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