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.