Pen vs. Sword

"Young people don't like Lukashenko," she says. "They want to travel. They want to have normal lives. He understands that he needs to control them. Young people will go to the streets -- they don't have that much to lose."

So Student Thought, to stay alive, will now go even more underground than it was before. The next issue, says Vidanava, will definitely come out, but she doesn't want to say exactly how. Meanwhile, she waits, in limbo, for news of her own future.

Lenin After Lenin

Last summer, before the government confiscated the October issue, the offices of Student Thought hummed with the controlled frenzy of magazine offices everywhere. With a picture of Iryna on the wall -- laughing -- the young journalists who manage the day-to-day editing while she is away explain how they hope their magazine can influence the country's youth. For them, Western music and fashion aren't just luxury goods; they're a statement, a refusal by young people to disappear in the country's "sovietized" society.

Designer jeans, chic glasses, colorful shoes, a haircut that isn't just another military brush cut, are all about standing out from the faceless, brutalized crowd. Bono is a hero to them for his mix of music and social consciousness. They want to be "Belarusian Europeans," not Belarusian Russians, the cultural identity that Lukashenko promotes through close ties to Vladimir Putin's leviathan state to the east.

"We are not political," says Max Aheeu, the pen name of one of the magazine's two main editors. Only Iryna has her real name on the masthead. The magazine's offices are in a nondescript, Khrushchev-era apartment flat. They've moved four times in the past three years. The KGB has tried to infiltrate the group, approaching one of the magazine's lead writers. When she realized she was being tracked, she quit her job and changed apartments. They apparently lost the scent.

Aheeu says the magazine isn't political, but it is certainly independent, and that's bad enough. Student Thought has published investigations into the rampant bribing of college professors during exam season -- the cover showed an exam book stuffed with cash. It has profiled music promoters and young political leaders. It has published a very popular guidebook to studying abroad, but that was before Lukashenko instituted new restrictions making it increasingly difficult for students to study outside of Belarus.

"For us, the most important thing is to stay alive and have access to young people," Aheeu says. "The major idea is you should stay active. You should not lose hope, you should not be like this gray mass."

Across town, in the offices of Iryna's father, the message was the same.

"The main thing is to live until the elections," Karol says. If the editors at Student Thought look to reform youth culture with European values, Karol looks to his country's past to explain his mission.

After the breakup of the Soviet Union, he says, Belarus was left a little lost. Other former Soviet republics embraced independence. There was a flourish of nationalist sentiment in the Baltic states to the north, and Ukraine to the south. But under Soviet rule, Belarusian national identity had been ruthlessly squelched. So while Belarusians became independent, they did so without a strong sense of who they were and what the future might be after communism. Unlike in most of the rest of the old Soviet Union, the statues of Lenin never came down, and many people still associate "democracy" with the turmoil and privation of the first few years of independence.

Karol struggled to change that.

"In the Brezhnev era, we intellectuals weren't satisfied," he says. "We understood that the current system was a vicious system and needed to be changed. As a historian, I had access to closed archives, and I was working to rehabilitate the people who had suffered from the regime in the 1920s."