Ex-political prisoner and politician Mikola Statkevich announced on his Telegram channel that a collection of his prison essays and other texts, created or conceived during his incarceration over the past twenty years, will be released soon.
The book is based on a long essay, restored after his notes disappeared in the KGB pre-trial detention center (SIZO KGB) during an attempted illegal deportation from Belarus.
In the published foreword, Mikola Statkevich reflects on the nature of long-term resistance to a repressive regime:
"If a repressive regime is established in a country, people with democratic convictions have five years to restore freedom to the country. Then society gets tired, loses faith in change, and begins to adapt to the situation. Meanwhile, the regime strengthens its structures of suppression and control over society. Thus, the struggle enters a long-term stage, where everything is decided by the regime's resources for suppression and control, and society's moral strength for resistance."
The Belarusian regime, writes the politician, has provided itself with unlimited resources from Moscow, which pays for its existence for actions leading to Russia's absorption of Belarus.
"The threat to the country's existence transformed the struggle for democracy into a struggle for independence," writes Statkevich.
The politician emphasizes that in such conditions, the moral component and personal example remain paramount:
"For us, it was extremely important to 'hold the flag of freedom' — to constantly show people through public actions that freedom is worth fighting for, so as not to allow the nation to be turned into a submissive, indifferent herd, so that the fire of freedom would not be extinguished forever. Our strength and public support would have been enough to defeat the dictatorship, but they were not enough to defeat Moscow," writes the politician.
Statkevich, who has spent a total of about 14 years behind bars, explained that his texts became a response to the systematic psychological pressure from special services, who try to convince political prisoners "of the futility of their struggle and a life wasted in vain."
The upcoming collection will consist of two parts. The first part is dedicated to the ethical side of resistance and a person's moral choice in difficult situations. The second part is about the search for strategies for the preservation and development of a nation that found itself "caught between two warring and culturally antagonistic civilizations."
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