Belarus: Revolution and Repression

Almost exactly five years after the start of these mass demonstrations in August 2020, the IWM Tischner Debates 2025 examined the legacy of these protests. What remains of that revolutionary spirit? What effect are the repressions having upon society? And what is it like to live in Belarus today? The debates were held in the village of Krasnogruda in Poland’s Sejny district, near the intersection of the Polish, Belarusian, and Lithuanian borders. The frontier with Belarus, today Europe’s most heavily guarded border, is just a few kilometers away. The debates  consisted of two panels.

In the first talk, moderated by the historian and professor at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy at the University of Toronto Marci Shore, Pavel Barkouski and Andrzej Gniazdowski, both former IWM fellows, took a closer look at the specificities of recent political events in Belarus. Their “phenomenology of a revolution”—the subtitle of a book they have co-authored—analyzes the socio-cultural factors that played a key role in determining the successes and failures of the revolution. Most of all, however, they place the Belarusian protests within the larger historical context of political liberation movements in Eastern and Central Europe.

The second part of the evening was dedicated to testimonies of the ongoing political repressions in Belarus. In a conversation with IWM Permanent Fellow Ludger Hagedorn and Krzysztof Czyżewski, author and initiator of the Borderland Foundation, Palina Sharenda-Panasiuk, who for many years was an active participant of the European Belarus initiative before being sentenced to prison on January 3, 2021, spoke about the inhumane conditions in Belarusian jails and her current political views. Ekaterina Tewes, film scholar and project manager for the S. Fischer Foundation, shared a remarkable book project that she is working on: “Diary from Minsk,” a collection of reports on everyday life by an anonymous writer in the Belarusian capital.