Artist Ales Pushkin Held Performance Against Russification Of Belarus

The Evraopt shop, where they refused to serve the artist in Belarusian, has become the protest platform.

On the 220th anniversary of the birth of the Russian poet Alexander Pushkin, his Belarusian namesake, artist Ales Pushkin, staged a performance against discrimination of the Belarusian language and Russification, Radio Svaboda reports.

The protest platform was the Evraopt shop in the town of Krupki, Minsk region, where Pushkin had an unpleasant incident on the linguistic grounds on May 8, when they refused to serve him in Belarusian.

The language incident in the Krupki Evraopt store

Artist Ales Pushkin, who lives in the village of Bobr in Krupki district, is known for his active advocacy of the rights of the Belarusian-speaking people. Pushkin often draws attention to the actions of civil servants, postal workers, shop assistants, village council employees, ideologists, Orthodox priests, who neglect the Belarusian language and culture. He has repeatedly written letters to the authorities in defense of the Belarusian language, after which the violators were punished from time to time. In May, they wanted to punish him for his insistent demand to serve in Belarusian. On June 6, Ales Pushkin made a performance in front of the shop of the Evraopt chain in the center of Krupki, where a month ago he had a conflict on linguistic grounds. The date was not chosen by chance: June 6 is the birthday of the Russian poet Alexander Pushkin.

"Everything happened on May 8, – Ales Pushkin says about the incident that caused his protest. – There is not a single inscription in Belarusian in the Krupki Evraopt, so one has to guess where what lies. I asked the employee about the champignons, she showed me. I'm moving forward and see a guy in the branded clothes of this network. Where, I said, is instant coffee here, show me the shelf. And it was followed by: "What? What kind of cocoa? Naff off..., ask normally..." Naturally, it grabbed me: "My hat, who are you, why don't you have a badge?" And I was sent even further, and I started to call the staff to kick him out." Despite the degree of tension, at first the conflict was smothered up – Deputy Director Maryna Zahrabalnaya apologized for the breadth of her employee Pavel Chyrkou. As Ales Pushkin says, he did not write anything in the book of complaints at that time and went on shopping. He came across the same employee again. "As if nothing had happened so far, I asked: where is your instant coffee? I heard it again: "Oh, f..., are you still here? Let's go..." He called the guard, Vadzim Babkou. They took me under the cameras and started provoking me, "Do you want languages? Now you will get ..." They provoked me to make me feel angry, throw my arms, and then they would round me up and call the police. And then there would be not an artist Pushkin, but a hooligan "who fights with the staff, hinders the work." I managed to withstand it, but I warned them that they would have serious problems. On that occasion Pushkin left a record in the book of complaints, found instant coffee, waved with his check in the video camera and went home to Bobr.

In the evening, Ales Pushkin was visited by district policeman Andrei Beliakou, who said that Pavel Chyrkou, a Evraopt employee, had filed a complaint against the "aggressive client." A week later, the head of the ideology department of the Krupki District Executive Committee, Alena Damaronak, called and invited Ales Pushkin for a preventive talk. "I said hello: I know you very well. You're the one who closed the dances here. You didn't want to give Belarusian textbooks to my son Mikola until I threatened to knock over the monument to Lenin. It is not even the point, I said. You call me in Russian. I do not understand. Say it in Belarusian, maybe I will agree. "We have "bilingualism"," she says. Well, you amaze me: you want me to come to you, and you refuse to speak the same language with me? And got off the phone. Then she wrote that I "categorically refused to meet her."

But the administrative case against Pushkin was closed a couple of days later.

"They send a sheet of paper: you can read the inspection results. I watched how the video footage from the cameras was examined, how the saleswomen were interviewed, how they took statements from my abusers. And everything came to its proper place: "I'm a Russian (capitalized), why should I know Belarusian?" - Pavel Chirkov wrote in his explanations. Excuse me, why does a person who neglects us works in Belarus? Does Evraopt really not care? It became the last straw!"

Ales Pushkin says that after Vitebsk in 1997, when he returned to his homeland in Bobr, the language situation in the town was much better. But from the beginning of the 2000s, Russification began to take on a rapid pace.

"When I arrived and hung a white-red-white flag over the house, Janochka ( his wife) and I started a cultural life: we were arranging Kupalje, Kaliady, exhibitions," – he recollects. – When the children were born, we brought them to a speech therapist, a psychologist, and the doctors easily switched to the Belarusian language. And in the zero years the situation changed: "Speak normally, come on, don't mess…." And in 2019, I can say that the aggression is just evil. This is a very revealing thing for the east of Belarus. What will happen if such people are promised Russian passports," – the artist asks a question.