The United Transitional Cabinet of Belarus
THE ANNOUNCEMENT OF THE UNITED TRANSITIONAL CABINET OF BELARUS ABOUT CONDEMNING COMMUNISM, TOTALITARIAN AND IMPERIALIST IDEOLOGIES Several decades have passed since the collapse of totalitarian regimes in Central and Eastern Europe. Each country chose its way of reconsidering and processing of the traumatic past. The countries of Western Europe, which didn't have the first-hand experience of communist dictatorship, treat the Holocaust as the basis of their remembrance policy; the countries of Eastern Europe have the same attitude to Stalin's repressions. Belarus didn't join the EU-wide remembrance policy. Moreover, up to this day the archives in Belarus are largely closed, and studying the topic of communist regime crimes is undesirable and actually prohibited. We know for sure that repressions started in 1917 and the number of victims reaches hundreds of thousands of our citizens - Belarusians, Jews, Poles, Ukrainians, Tatars, Russians. Lots of people heard about the tragedy of one night of 29 to 30 October in 1937 when, supposedly in Kurapaty, they shot 132 representatives of Belarusian cultural and political elite who tried to build the national country under the totalitarian regime. But this shooting is just an episode in the list of other communist crimes: mass executions, torturing, deportation, arrests, extrajudicial cases. All that paved the way of the Communist Party to the promised bright future of workers and peasants. We still know nothing about the hundreds of thousands of Belarusians who were sent to death to the North of Russia, beyond the Arctic Circle. On The Remembrance Day of victims of mass political repression we condemn all totalitarian ideologies from which our Belarusian people suffered and still suffer, which has a tragic and catastrophic impact on our history and society. We condemn the ideology of imperialism, nazism, communism and revanchism. Today under the banner of the so-called "Russian world" Ukraine and the Ukrainian nation is being destroyed. They also want to destroy Belarus under the same neo-imperial flag.
We have to: entirely open the archives; have a toponymic reform (to return authentic Belarusian names to the streets and residential areas or give them new names if necessary); remove the monuments to the people related to repressions or other activities which directly or indirectly did harm to the Belarusian society. Today we have to finally realize: any violence against free thinking, any requirement to think alike, any wish to make everyone be like one - in human history all that leads to repressions, torturing, murders, ruined lives, shot poets. As the co-aggression of Lukashenka's regime in the Russian war against Ukraine proves that again - such violence inevitably leads to war. Any ideology which demands synchronized thoughts and feelings from its citizens, any regime that interferes with people's private lives, families, profession, school classroom or a scientific lab - kills the society. We have to remind ourselves daily: ideologies which make people search for enemies, dehumanize those who are not similar to them, eliminate others - are criminal ideologies, no matter which wording they use. Any word that is paid for with the blood of an innocent victim is a word of crime. Any idea that needs killings is a criminal idea. Only total condemnation of totalitarian regimes and denying ideologies which deprive people of their dignity, the right to life, freedom of thought, speech and conscience or make people scared and write denunciations for their neighbours - only such condemnation will open the doors to the future in which Belarus is a free and democratic country. Long Live Belarus!
WARSAW - VILNIUS - TALLINN, 27.10.2022