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Larysa Heniyush Hid Belarusian People's Republic Archives And Outsmarted KGB

Larysa Heniyush Hid Belarusian People's Republic Archives And Outsmarted KGB

An unusual story of one of the greatest Belarusian poets.

Larysa Heniyush, the first Belarusian dissident and great poetess who went through Stalin's camps and didn't break down, is writing memoirs in her old age. The KGB is very interested in it, as they believe there is information about the BPR archives. Her son Yurka comes to visit her, but why doesn't our heroine trust him? Why does she see an agent in everyone? We will find out in the new series of Belsat.

Larysa Heniyush is one of the most prominent Belarusian poets. During World War II, her poetry collection "From the Native Fields" came out, in which she inspired Belarusians to be knights. In 1948, her husband Yanka Heniyush was arrested; they were in camps until 1956. She returned with her husband to Zelva, where she lived until her death. Larysa Heniyush did not accept Soviet citizenship and was under constant KGB surveillance. At the end of the 1970s, she wrote her memoirs, which would later be called "Spovedz" ("Confession"), a painful autobiographical work about her rejection of Soviet reality. The manuscript of the work was secretly taken out by Belarusian archaeologist Mikhail Cherniauski.

"Mikhail Cherniauski had known Larysa Heniyush for a long time and had asked her to write a memoir of her difficult life. In 1982, he got off his digs and went to visit her. She handed him the manuscript almost at the door. He realized at once what it was. He quickly walked out of the house and, past the wall of the house, so he couldn't be seen by the KGB, whose building was opposite, through the vegetable gardens, over the fences, out onto the road, stopped a car and brought the manuscript back to Minsk, gave it to me right in the doorway, saying: "Hide it somewhere so no one can see it." I hid it under the linen in the closet, and the manuscript remained there for many years," - Sviatlana, Mikhail Cherniauski's wife, recalls.

Mikhail Cherniauski edited the manuscript by Larysa Heniyush and gave it to the magazine Maladosts, and then a separate book was published. Soviet secret services were interested in the poetess's manuscript for a reason, as they thought they could stumble on the trace of the BPR archive, because after the death of BPR President Vasil Zakharko, Larysa Heniyush became the general secretary of the BPR, and the next president was Mikalai Abramchyk.

"As she mentions in "Spovedz," she and Mikalai Abramchyk packed up these archives and went to Paris, where Mikalai Abramchyk lived. At this point, traces of the archives are lost," - the creator of the virtual museum of Soviet repression, Valeryja Chernamortseva, notes.

The only thing the KGB was interested in during interrogations, when Larysa Heniyush was caught in their clutches in 1948, was where the archives of the Belarusian People's Republic were.

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