At 100 years old, the daughter of the woman who allegedly embroidered the ornament for the BSSR flag passed away. Her father died during the Stalinist repressions

Zinaida Pashkevich

Alexei Markevich was first convicted in 1932 for one year of imprisonment for refusing to join a collective farm. The next time NKVD officers came for him was on October 10, 1937. His daughter recalled:

«When they came for him, he wanted to escape — to climb onto the roof through the chimney and jump down. But the NKVD officers were standing around the house. So they took him. And we ran after him. He said: "Children, don't run." And they pushed him – on the shoulders, on the shoulders. Then they tied him to a saddle and forced him to run behind the horse. And they shot upwards to scare us».

After the arrest of the sole breadwinner, Alexei Markevich's wife Matrona and their children fled their home and hid with relatives. They lived in poverty. They were treated as the family of an "enemy of the people". The mother was sent to dig ditches and work in the forest. They were paid nothing for their work. Two of their six children died of starvation.

The persecution of the Markevich family ended only after the war. Their neighbor Savka, who wrote denunciations, was convicted. He was given 8 years for picking ears of grain in a collective farm field.

The communist authorities carefully concealed information about the true fate of Alexei Markevich. For almost 60 years, the family was convinced that their father had been exiled to Siberia.

«We thought he was exiled far away. And so, my father died for his hands, for his labor,» Zinaida Pashkevich recalled.

The family learned the truth only in the late 1990s, when their son Arkady (who died in 2017) received a certificate from the KGB about his father's execution in Orsha.

Matrona Markevich, Alexei Markevich's wife and Zinaida Pashkevich's mother, is considered the author of the ornament that later became part of the BSSR flag. It was her brother, the scientist Mikhail Katsar, who promoted this pattern and attributed its authorship to his sister, although current scholars strongly doubt that she was actually involved in it.

In 2015, a monument to Matrona was unveiled in the center of Senno. A separate stand was dedicated to the woman in the local history museum, and propaganda channels filmed pompous reports about her. At the same time, her husband's story is carefully softened or avoided.

In 2018, Zinaida Pashkevich appealed to the Orsha District Executive Committee with a request to allow the erection of a monument to her father at one of the alleged execution sites in Orsha — Kobylyatskaya Hill.

«The flag with my mother, Matrona Sergeevna Markevich's ornament, has been in space, and her husband lies in the weeds,» she wrote in her appeal. In the same year, the woman visited Kobylyatskaya Hill for the first time.

The descendants of the executed Alexei Markevich also faced state terror. His great-granddaughter also fell victim to political repression by the Lukashenka regime and was forced to leave Belarus.

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