People take part in the Dziady opposition march at Kurapaty. The annual march is held by the Belarusian opposition from central Minsk to Kurapaty, a mass burial site of victims of Stalinist repression.Stringer/Getty Images
Judith McCormack is a writer whose most recent novel, The Singing Forest, begins in Belarus. She is also a former assistant dean of the University of Toronto’s school of law graduate program.
In a quiet forest in Belarus, a mass grave with up to 250,000 bodies has become a flashpoint for civil unrest.
The dead may continue to sleep beneath these trees, but their ghosts are haunting this former Soviet republic.
The grave holds victims of Joseph Stalin’s secret police, murdered between 1937 and 1941, often for little more than being the wrong people in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Now the site is alive with controversy again, a symbol of protest against the hardline regime of President Alexander Lukashenko. As November approaches, the stage may be set for a stormy confrontation between dissidents and the President, a man often called “the last dictator in Europe.”
The place is Kurapaty, a drowsy, sunlit wood on the outskirts of Minsk. Here, Stalin’s NKVD executed hundreds of thousands of his imagined foes, including members of the Polish and Jewish communities, workers, land-owning peasants, writers and intellectuals. Tortured to extract confessions, they were then taken to the forest, lined up and shot, often after being forced to dig wide burial pits.
In recent years, protesters have used the mass grave to signal their opposition to the government, marching to it on Dziady, a day in early November when Belarusians traditionally honour the dead. As the day approaches again, the possibility of a clash at the site looms ahead.
Dziady is usually celebrated by inviting the spirits of the dead to dinner, and offering them honey, barley porridge and eggs. The meal is respectful, but more companionable than frightening – these are dead relatives, after all. And if some of these mischievous souls refuse to leave at the end of the evening? They can be swept out with a broom.
But the discovery of the Kurapaty mass grave added a new element to the holiday. When the first official revelations emerged in the late 1980s, they sent shock waves through the country. Activists began marching to the site on Dziady to signal their defiance of a government they considered too cozy with Russia.
What better way to say this than by honouring the dead killed by Russians? So the day of the dead became a day of activism, and a major irritant for Mr. Lukashenko.
But the autocratic President is not someone who takes dissent well. Among other things, this is the man who forced down a Ryanair plane so that he could arrest an opposition journalist and his partner.
So perhaps it is not surprising that he has used Kurapaty to send his own messages. In the past few years, he has allowed a restaurant to be built uncomfortably close to the grave, something his opponents have described as “dancing on the bones.”
And more recently, he went after the wooden memorial crosses that people have erected in the forest, using bulldozers to take down 70 of them. Restoring order, he said, but the event provoked comment from such diverse critics as Belarusian writer Svetlana Alexievich, winner of the Nobel Prize for literature, and the Belarusian Catholic Church.
The broader picture involves the current wave of unrest in Belarus, sometimes dubbed “the Slipper Revolution.” Hundreds of thousands of demonstrators took to the streets after the 2020 presidential elections in which Mr. Lukashenko claimed a landslide victory.
But fraud and vote-rigging allegations have been widespread, and even the European Union rejected the results, calling the election “neither free nor fair.” Since then, Human Rights Watch says thousands of dissidents, journalists and demonstrators have been arbitrarily detained, beaten and tortured, including with the use of electric shocks.
There is a certain irony here, since detainees report that much of this has taken place at the hands of the Belarusian KGB – successors to the NKVD who tortured and shot the prisoners at Kurapaty.
This last bout of repression has fuelled further unrest, with a shaky economy and COVID-19 added to the mix. In a moment that might be considered black comedy if it were not so potentially deadly, Mr. Lukashenko prescribed a combination of vodka and saunas to ward off the virus, then later contracted it himself.
However, the brutal crackdowns have continued, this summer targeting human-rights groups that were documenting the abuses. And although the relationship between Mr. Lukashenko and Russian President Vladimir Putin has been testy at times, there is no doubt Mr. Putin is his biggest backer, recently announcing the second US$500-million installment of a $1.5-billion loan.
According to Sviatlana Tikhanovskaya, Mr. Lukashenko’s main rival in the last election, the activists will not give up. As Dziady rolls around again, whether the fight will shift back to Kurapaty is an urgent question.
For the dead dreaming beneath its overhanging pines, resting in peace is apparently not an option.
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