Pen vs. Sword

Karol used his access to state archives to put together a better understanding of the Stalinist purges against Belarusian nationalists. With perestroika, he and other intellectuals started advocating for the revival of a distinct, Belarusian cultural life. And then they started forming political parties. Karol founded one, and also a newspaper in 1992. At one point his circulation was about 50,000, but now, he says, people are afraid to buy it, or be seen reading it. As of last summer, circulation was down to fewer than 6,000. The offices have been robbed, computers have been confiscated, and in September 2002, Karol was attacked in the street, by government agents, he assumes.

Iryna is close to her parents, communicating with them often by instant message over a cell phone. Her father has advised her over the years, and now she advises him as well.

"We are friends, partners," she says. "He brought me to the movement, and we discuss everything. I was lucky to be born there."

She describes a childhood in which her father wasn't a dissident, but "in our house we always had unusual books." Her mother has supported her family's often dangerous political activities. Her brother, a financial analyst living in the United States, sends financial advice stories home to his father's newspaper.

"In Belarus, people really know very little about how to manage their money," says Iryna. Or, she might well add, how to function in a free society. Both Iryna and her father are part of a wider movement to reform Belarusian values. Lukashenko's power is so absolute, his ability to steal elections so certain, they argue, that the opposition must work to change the basic culture before it can hope to change the government.

Even some politicians, including the opposition candidate Alexander Milinkevich, speak of a deeper "Belarusian" problem that must change if their country is to change.

"The main problem of Belarus is not Lukashenko himself but the mentality of each Belarusian," Milinkevich said one day last summer. "Unfortunately, Belarus as a country was sovietized in the strongest way, compared with other post-communist countries. The process of decommunization did not take place. And there are two major problems: The first is fear and the second is the absence of information."

Leaf through any of the official, state-sponsored newspapers and you see the depth of the problem. "Economic crisis in Ukraine goes hand in hand with political crisis," began a typical article one Sunday, suggesting that Ukraine's Orange Revolution, which unseated another post-Soviet authoritarian government, had brought nothing but chaos. "Dead at Disneyworld" screamed another story about accidents and heart attacks at the American theme park. And then there was the almost comical discovery, early last summer, of a shadowy new group called the "Belarusian National Liberation Army," a terrorist group threatening mayhem. Independent journalists just laughed at what they said was a government hoax.

The Beautiful Land

"It is an essential part of the justice dispensed here that you should be condemned not only in innocence but also in ignorance," said a bitter Joseph K., the frustrated hero of Franz Kafka's "The Trial." This might be Iryna's motto, as she awaits word on her legal status.

Belarus today is somewhere between Kafka's dark fantasy of opaque and authoritarian bureaucracy and the brutal Big Brother of George Orwell's "1984." Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has called Belarus "the last true dictatorship in Central Europe." Europe and the United States shun Lukashenko and his government, especially those top officials implicated in the 1999 disappearances of opposition figures. To intellectuals and opposition figures in Belarus, Lukashenko is just a thug, and a rather ridiculous one, given to rantings about spies and terrorists and American agents determined to overthrow the government.

But Lukashenko's steady campaign against publications such as Iryna's Student Thought, and her father's newspaper, has created a vast, dead, negative space within the country. It's a society in which even the mood of the people is a mystery.

Vidanava hopes her magazine will bring something new, something independent and questioning into the lives of young people, "who lead very sad, gray lives." But Belarus is also relatively prosperous, and it's not clear how many young people are, in fact, unhappy with their existence. It's an unknowable fact in a land of silence.