Alexander Nadsan came to Belarus for the first time after forty years of emigration. Minsk youth unexpectedly found in him what they hadn't seen in their own parents

Alexander Nadsan. Photo budzma.org

Many things about Alexander Nadsan surprised me. More precisely, looking at him, I was surprised by many things in myself, and discovered many things about myself. For example, that he was my father's peer, born in 1926.

Since the early 1980s, I was already familiar with Vilnian Belarusians, with Zoska Veras and primarily with her "Forest House" guide, Liavon Lutskievich, at whose place on Architektu Street in Vilnius we used to stay and with whom I actively corresponded. But all of this was still within the borders of the Soviet Union.

And then March 1990 happened, when a man from the West, Father Aliaksandr Nadsan, was due to arrive in Minsk with aid for the victims of the Chernobyl disaster. And then, still unfamiliar with him, I tried to compare him with my own father, a rather important official in the Soviet system. In the Ministry of Internal Affairs, my father was a colonel and headed the political and educational work department.

It was obvious to me that in Soviet Belarus, we simply had no chance of continued existence... Formally, both of them — my father and Nadsan — were front-line soldiers of the past war, and from ostensibly the same side, as they fought on the side of the victors. And it was hard to say what could have united them.

Precisely then, ideologically, I had already chosen my side — with Belarusian, and therefore non-Soviet Belarus, whereas my father, a Soviet Belarusian, had no connection whatsoever to a Belarusian Belarus; rather, he was against it. He shunned the Belarusian language, the historical truth about the Stalinist repressions, and such was his choice, made precisely in the Soviet army.

His rural mother was a pure Belarusian, and I would never have called her a Soviet Belarusian, which already separated her from her son, a complete Soviet careerist and communist. So, my father seemed to fall out of the generational tradition, though he believed that I was the one falling out.

In short, when my wife Tania Sapach announced that Aliaksandr Nadsan had arrived from London and she would be interviewing him for her show on "Albarosika" radio, I understood that this interview would definitely go into the next issue of the "Svaboda" newspaper, whose publication I had just started with a thematic issue called "Freedom Day," because it came out in March 1990, precisely on March 25, as if anticipating the arrival of our non-Soviet Belarusian from London.

"Freedom Day" was printed in Latvia and sold in Minsk on the railway square directly from a truck. I remember the circulation was 45 thousand. Uladzimir Arlou wrote an essay "Independence - this is..." for that issue, and Siarhei Khareuski drew a poster "Iron-Free Belarus," which itself explained what independence is - it's without militarism, without tanks, without monuments to Lenin... There were also texts of 3 Charter Statutes, and an introduction to the first figures of the BPR (Belarusian People's Republic).

And already in the first, subsequent issue of "Svaboda," the text itself spoke of the importance of this event: "On the night of March 10, the Hook of Holland – Moscow train crossed the Bug River. By the carriage window stood a man, carefully peering into the outer darkness. What did he feel at such a moment? Hard to say. Only his lips quietly whispered the words of Bahdanovich's 'Pahonia'... That passenger was the author of these lines, who was traveling to his Homeland for the first time after more than forty years..."

"Coming to my Homeland after such a long time was the fulfillment of my cherished dream, and I traveled there with great emotional excitement. However, the main purpose of my trip was not personal. It can be summed up in one word: Chernobyl."

Nadsan says that it seemed that over the years since the accident, passions had quieted down and the disaster itself wasn't so terrible, but this was not the case. He was particularly touched by children suffering from leukemia; simply, no one talked about their needs. But the scale of the needs was truly impressive.

Nadsan recounted how he conducted a service in Kurapaty, how he represents the Skaryna Library in London, which is open to everyone interested in Belarusian affairs, and also mentioned attacks on him by propagandists who reproach emigrants for the past war.

He writes: "News about my person is not hard to find, but it would be worthwhile to write everything now. I belong to the generation that grew up during the great military turmoil, amidst events whose significance we often could not understand. I think it's time to write the history of this generation, as well as those people who did not let us perish spiritually, striving to cultivate and preserve in us a sense of human and national dignity.

For me, such people were the teachers of the Belarusian Teacher's Seminary in Nesvizh, where I studied from autumn 1942 to the end of May 1944, and which not only gave me thorough knowledge but also made me a convinced Belarusian for life. One must hope that the Union of Belarusian Youth, to which I belonged with many of my peers, will also await its objective historian. Attempts to forcibly turn us into German soldiers did not have great success. Already on the third day after arriving in France, most of us found ourselves in a French forest."

Павялічыць

Alexander Nadsan, 1950s. Photo from A. Nadsan's archive

Why did I include these lines of biography? Because no one made me a convinced Belarusian for life. I was made a Soviet person, but already during my lifetime, the Soviet person turned into nothing, like the Soviet passport, which my father, a Soviet person, taught me to respect...

The most important thing is that that government, and especially the current one, considered it seditious to cultivate a Belarusian in a person.

But then, in Chernobyl times, it was felt in the air that something had to happen to us and our history after the Soviet era. Belarus had to become itself — with all its thousand-year history, language, culture... In other words, Nadsan and I had plenty to talk about.

Chernobyl was not "ours" for us Belarusians to think about. "Not our problem." Our "own" was just beginning then. A privatized apartment, a car... We were just surprised by this, because we never had anything of our own. Not even ourselves. We belonged to the system, not to ourselves. How to deal with this? Aleh Ablazhei wrote: "I - is a word washed clean of 'we'," Siarhei Astrautsou opened the first issue of "Nasha Niva" with the story "Washed Apples" (meaning "We - those..."). One way or another, it was a statement or a protest - against understanding oneself as part of a system that was, in fact, Chernobyl. Some were more cautious, some burned in it, fused with it for eternity. But everyone was still together and gazed blankly at the sick bald children. In the village, no one complained about such things; such diseases simply didn't exist. So they died simply and blankly. And this ephemerality was emphasized by the ephemerality of radiation, which simply could not be seen, touched, or understood.

* * *

It seems it was 1998, a round anniversary of the BPR (Belarusian People's Republic) was being celebrated in London, Aliaksandr Nadsan invited me, and Vincuk Viachorka and I found ourselves at a gathering of "our people." The gathering was extremely representative, full of non-Soviet Belarusians and non-Belarusians, where one could see our entire "world." We befriended Liavon Shymanets — Simanek in the French manner, and I was called Dubavek, and we even persuaded the artist Navumovich to join this foolishness under the name Navumavek.

Nadsan, by the way, liked such things; he was clearly friends with humor. The student atmosphere in London surprised me. Freedom, those rows of mugs on the wall, and incredible vegetarian culinary fantasies...

And the next visit was private. My wife and I came for Trinity in 2005. I asked the priest to baptize me and marry us. Viera Rich, a translator, looked after us, gifted us a magnificent Trinity cross; Iryna Dubianetskaya and Ihar Labatsevich were the godparents. As a result, a collection of Tania's poetry in English, already revised in Vilnius, was published.

I told Father about our trips to the very Chernobyl exclusion zone, for which we managed to obtain permission. And I spoke about the village, of which little remained... We were there a second time, and everything looked like disorder and chaos: collapsed roofs, crumbling walls; in the village kitchen, a turtle was "ruling" – rattling utensils... And then, the next time, we no longer saw the village, but a uniform, young, clean forest, as if ready for études. That is, pure harmony was born from chaos and disorder. And the conclusion: harmony is not born from order.

It seems to me that he found my stories interesting. Sometimes he even uncorked a bottle of Italian grappa, and the conversation could last past midnight.

I think we prayed to the same gods, and the first of them was Larysa Hienijush. I saw that Nadsan lived by her life motto:

I will not renounce my sole purpose,
And my heart will not tremble.
If I am to live, then live for Belarus,
And without it, not live at all.

At least no one expressed this motto so precisely. Nadsan respectfully kept Hienijush's convict shirt from the Gulag.

I see a deep connection between people like Hienijush and Nadsan. "When it's hard, but not hopeless" - she wrote to me on her book. What did she mean? Nadsan would definitely have explained it with humor. He always used humor.

One day we will remember the Belarusian emigration of the war. The one that became a continuation of Nashanivism, the BPR, and the Belarusianization of the 1920s. And they carried this through to our days. And into tomorrow.

* * *

The text was written for the Nadsan Readings, which took place at the European Humanities University on April 14–15, 2026.

• 32
• 0
• 0
• 0
• 0
• 1
• 0
• 2