Going Home

Irina Khalip
26.12.2025, 14:59
6,088

My man of the year is an expelled political activist.

Five years ago, on a similar December day at the end of the year, I wrote: "If you want to see the man of the year, look in the mirror". The person of the year, undoubtedly, was a Belarusian who came out to the protests in August and did not give up. A year later it was a political prisoner, then a Belarusian volunteer defending Ukraine. This year I would name the person of the year a former political prisoner - the one who was supposedly pardoned, but in reality just thrown out of his own country.

I talk to many former political prisoners who stayed in Belarus. It was very difficult for them, after serving their four or five years, to go not to freedom, but to the occupied country, where there is not a trace on the asphalt of those white and red drawings. They are supervised or registered, they are forbidden to leave, they are visited at night, they are controlled. Some of them have already managed to serve several times after leaving on "per diem", because policemen in the penal inspection during the next "mark" can demand a phone and immediately send them with a protocol to Okrestina. Students expelled for protesting and serving time can no longer study. High-ranking professionals are barely getting jobs as movers, because otherwise they can go to jail again. And yet they all say with one voice: "What a blessing that my term ended a month before the next batch of political prisoners were expelled! If I hadn't gotten out earlier, I could have been among them. They are happy to be at home, with their loved ones, even with all the legal restrictions and the inability to speak loudly.

Natalya Dulina, who had six months left before her release, dreamed of returning home, hugging her mother and sitting on the sofa with her favorite cats. Instead, she ended up in a shelter in Vilnius.

Maksim Viniarski, who had a month and a bit of time left, tried to return to Belarus from the neutral strip together with Nikolai Statkevich, but in the end he still ended up in Lithuania - without a passport, without money, without belongings, with a single 15-day Lithuanian visa on a separate piece of paper and a yellow tag of an extremist spoiled from his uniform. That's all the possessions. Several dozen more political prisoners were deported with the same stuff. All of them, falling asleep in the evening in the colony or in prison, imagined returning home.

They dreamed of embracing their relatives, of going out on the balcony and seeing such a familiar landscape, which, though essentially ugly, was still surprisingly beautiful. One imagined a cup of coffee, a call to friends, wet leaves in the park next door, the cheerful surprise of neighbors, and endless unshouted conversations. Instead - a night in a detention center or a bag over your head, handcuffs, tinted vans and at the end "there's Lithuania over there, get out".

Or in general - first Ukraine, then Poland, then Lithuania. The longer the road, the greater the uncertainty and fear of the future. Elena Gnauk, Sofia Bachurinskaya, Natalya Malets were on that long road. While young politzeks can learn a new language and get a job in a foreign country with enough ease, the story is quite different with pensioners. Bachurinskaya is 70, Gnauk 68, Malets 65. Who will pay their pensions? That's right, no one. They worked and earned their pensions in their country, which first put them behind bars and then simply threw them away.

And yet all of them, who were taken out of Belarus in summer, fall and winter, are now somewhere in rented apartments, in strange houses, in strange cities, looking at Christmas tree lights, lanterns and sparkling Bengal lights and thinking that next year will be better. They will peel tangerines, drink champagne and laugh, because there is no more strength for tears.

They will dream again about how on a snow-covered path they will enter their yard. They will open the door or the gate. They will jingle their keys - the one from the top lock is sure to be defective, chipped - and insert them into the keyhole. And breathe in the smell of home. It doesn't matter if their relatives rush to meet them or smell the dust of the uninhabited, abandoned, forgotten. It will be home. A point of attraction. A stop on the journey. Any way from home is easier when you can return.

Going Home

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