The Hunger Strike Continues

October 30 — International Day of Political Prisoners.

Today, this day is known throughout the world. People are preparing for it. Concerned citizens are writing mountains of letters in advance to show their support for political prisoners in various countries. Human rights organizations around the world are issuing a joint statement with a call to release political prisoners, of whom, according to their estimates, there are more than a million worldwide. These organizations even joined forces to form the October 30 Coalition.

It all began many years ago with a routine hunger strike in a labor camp. In 1974, astronomer and dissident Kronid Lyubarsky, an inmate at Dubravlag, decided to organize a day of resistance for political prisoners. And the primary method of resistance available to prisoners—one of the few—was a hunger strike. From April through October, prisoners in the Mordovian camp zone used various methods to pass information about the planned hunger strike to the outside world and to political camps in Perm.

Soviet dissidents were always prepared to go to prison and often agreed in advance with their loved ones on a code to convey important information without attracting the censor’s attention. For example, dissident Valery Ronkin, who was arrested in 1965, had agreed in advance with his wife that if he were to go on a hunger strike, he would use the word “Shepetivka” in his letters. And three years later, in 1968, political prisoners in the Mordovian prison zone decided to go on their own local hunger strike, insisting on the right to wear crosses around their necks and to have access to religious literature. At that time, Ronkin sent his wife a postcard featuring cheerful little animals on skis and an innocent little poem: “Without much training, but determined and zealous, a sports team races from Moscow to Shepetivka. Let everyone in the world know about these athletic achievements!” For his wife, who received the postcard, it contained everything: a message about the upcoming hunger strike, information that the strike was not personal but involved the entire camp—a “sports team”—and a request to spread the word. Ronkin’s wife fulfilled her husband’s request; all the “enemy voices” reported on the hunger strike, negotiations eventually began with its participants, and the KGB agents were most interested in how word of it had gotten out to the outside world. During interrogation, the Baptist pastor Boris Zdorovets spread his hands and said: “It’s all God’s will…”
In the 1970s, the number of political prisoners kept growing, and experience in passing information not only to the outside world but also to other camps was accumulating. So by October 30, 1974—the start of that very hunger strike by prisoners in the Perm and Mordovia political camps—information was circulating between zones and making its way to the outside world. On that day, Andrei Sakharov held a press conference at his home, and by morning the Western press was abuzz with reports about the hunger-striking political prisoners and their demands. The demands, incidentally, were simple—the lifting of restrictions on correspondence and visits with family members, and access to medical care. Nothing that wasn’t already guaranteed by Soviet law.

At that press conference, Academician Sakharov and human rights activist Sergei Kovalev announced that from then on, October 30 would be Political Prisoners’ Day, and as a sign of solidarity, all concerned citizens would observe a one-day symbolic hunger strike. Years have passed; political prisoners have been released or have died in prison, and eventually the USSR was reduced to nothing but a shadow of its former self, but October 30 ultimately became International Political Prisoners’ Day.

And even though the USSR has long since ceased to exist, people continue to be imprisoned on its ruins. Human rights activists speak of a million political prisoners. It is impossible to calculate exactly what proportion of them are Belarusians. This is because the regime continues to intimidate relatives, forcing them to remain silent about those arrested and sentenced “for political reasons.”

But there are most likely not hundreds, but thousands of them—brave Belarusian political prisoners who have endured and continue to endure prisons and penal colonies, the Gulag of our time. The names of many only become known after they are released from prison. The same goes for the torture they endured.
Former political prisoners say that upon arrival at the penal colony, they were immediately offered the chance to sign a petition for clemency. Those who refused were told: “You’ll be crying here every day. We’ll put your children and your parents in jail.” But they don’t cry. They fight to survive and get out. A desperate desire to live to see the end of tyranny—that is the main thing that keeps them going.

Statistics like “every second, this many children are born on the planet, and this many marriages take place” are very popular around the world. Well, remember this: every second, political prisoners are being tortured in Belarusian prisons. Nonstop, without lunch breaks, without a moment’s respite. And right now, someone is being sent to solitary confinement, someone is being threatened with having their children sent to an orphanage, and someone in a solitary confinement cell is wrapping themselves in toilet paper to stay warm.

Let’s keep this in mind.

Irina Khalip, exclusively for Charter97.org

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