Belarusian Patriots Told About Resistance To Stalinist System

The Voices of the Century project has been launched in Belarus.

The Voices of the Century project got underway on the Youtube channel. This is a series of mini-interviews with participants of Belarusian national organizations that operated after the Second World War on the territory of the BSSR.

In their young days, the heroes of this project were participants of the Union of Belarusian Patriots (acted in 1945-1947 in Hlubokaye and Pastavy), the Union of Liberation of Belarus (acted in 1946-1947 in Baranavichy region), the Seagulls (acted during that period in Slonim region and in Pinsk region) and other organizations.

Belarusian teenagers, who studied during the occupation in the Belarusian language, came across complete disregard for the national culture, as well as with repressive policies towards the whole Belarusian, after the arrival of the Soviet authorities. The aim of the organizations’ participants was to spread the national culture, and in the future – the independence of Belarus.

The organization was quickly detected by the NKVD. The teenagers were sent to the Gulag (they were sentenced to 10, 15 or 25 years of camps). In the late 1980s and early 1990s, they were rehabilitated.

As film director Viktar Korzun told tut.by, back in the mid-1990s, he recorded the memories of former members of the Union of Belarusian Patriots, but those records, unfortunately, did not survive.

In the beginning of 2010, Viktar got on with that topic. A meeting of former participants of the underground organizations, who had not seen each other for several decades, was organized with his participation. The takeaway from that meeting acted as a fillip for Viktar Korzun to return to the topic of national underground organizations.

Singer Kasia Kamotskaya, who acted as an interviewer (Viktar was the director), recorded about a dozen people in total. They selected ten, the most successful in quality records out of the received ones.

"We got large interviews – for an hour and a half to three hours. Obviously, no one will watch such long videos, except for researchers, therefore, we made shorter stories for 15-20 minutes on the basis of the records," – Viktar Korzun explains.

The goal of the project is not only to fix the memories of Belarusian patriots and their living voices. "Now there is a glorification of the Soviet past, its decoration. It is necessary to balance the general background," – the director says.

So far, an interview with Maria Babich, a member of the Union of Belarusian Patriots, has been presented on the Halasy youtube channel. Later, other videos will appear on the channel.