Three Free People In A Cage

Iryna Khalip
6.01.2023, 22:24
24,684

No interest for the punishers — only disgust.

— Where do you work?

— I am a human rights defender.

— So you don't officially work.

This was said yesterday, on the first day of the trial of Nobel laureate Ales Bialiatski. A new year, a new court, the first hearing — and I have a strong feeling that this has already happened before.

And indeed, it has. Only more than half a century ago, and the defendant was still twenty years away from the Nobel Prize. But it was also winter, and the accusation was fake, and the accused was called Joseph Brodsky.

— What do you do?

— I write poems. Translate. I think ...

— No thinking. Do you have a permanent job?

— I thought it was a permanent job.

— What is your specialty then?

— Poet, poet-translator.

— And who admitted that you are a poet? Who ranked you among the poets?

Half a century has passed. Even more — 58 years. The country in which the judge demanded to show a certificate that Brodsky is a poet no longer exists. Outside the window is a completely different century, a different millennium, a different country. And the rhetoric is the same, the accusations are just as absurd, the style of judicial interrogation is the same. As if life, having swayed to the right, swayed to the left, as the same accused wrote in the famous “Christmas Romance”. The Soviet press called Brodsky a “near-literary drone.” Bialiatski is called by the Belarusian Soviet press nothing more than a criminal and a recidivist. Those who defended Brodsky — writers, translators, journalists — the public prosecutor Sorokin called “rogues, parasites, wood lice and bugs”. Those who defend Bialiatski are called by the Belarusian security forces and propagandists “zmagars, white-red-white crowd, demon-possessed” and so on. It is even strange that neither scientific and technological progress, nor open borders, nor the fall of the Iron Curtain, nor the space-time gap between Leningrad in 1964 and Minsk in 2022 — nothing could break the blood ties of those former punishers and propagandists and these current ones. They probably were the same in ancient Rome.

True, the Soviet authorities nevertheless sent poet Brodsky into exile, and not into a camp, although he was then not only a Nobel laureate, but also a famous poet. They sent him there for five years, but when Soviet writers began to apply to the Central Committee with letters of protest, and Jean-Paul Sartre said that the Soviet delegation was in for big problems at the European writers' forum, the authorities released the poet, and returned him to Leningrad. Instead of five years, he spent a year and a half in exile in the Arkhangelsk region. Even the awarding of the Nobel Prize and worldwide attention to the fate of Ales Bialiatski could not inspire the Belarusian authorities to at least change the restraint measure, not to mention dropping insane and senseless charges. It turns out that the current punishers are complete degenerates even in comparison with the former Soviet ones. I wonder if they themselves understand this? However, the degree of their self-consciousness can hardly be the object of our curiosity, even research. No interest — just disgust.

But in the photos from the courtroom, I saw three free people in a cage. Yes, exhausted. Yes, tired. Yes, older ones. But free. Calm. Confident. Defending their right to speak their native language, demanding an interpreter from Russian, declaring a challenge to the judge, and indignation at the handcuffs in the cage. Not passive, but rebellious. Ready to go through hell and come back without giving up. Defending their own rights, not ours — as an exception — in this court. Well, ours too. As they always did.

Iryna Khalip, exclusively for Charter97.org

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