When the whole country took to the streets
When Alaksiej Velikaselec was beaten up by riot police units in downtown Minsk in July 2020, he thought it was a necessary sacrifice: freedom does not just fall from a tree, you need to fight for it, and your opponent in this fight knows no mercy.
When a video showing a man being dragged into a police van and Alaksiej trying to wrestle him out of the police hands was uploaded to Onliner, a popular Belarusian portal, the protagonist of this story did not think that it was dangerous: it seemed like these videos would soon end up in archives and journalists would put them together from time to time to celebrate another anniversary of the victory over the dictatorship.
When Alaksiej left Belarus in autumn 2022, he did not mean to stay in Europe for long. But that’s not what happened in reality.
Alaksiej had been protesting from 2010 and onwards. However, he did not think that the protest would change anything: he only came out to raise the protester numbers and show that a lot of people oppose the authorities. He did it to live at peace with his conscience and know that he did not sit back and remain silent.
But when the presidential elections were announced in the spring of 2020, he decided that it was not enough to just protest. Alaksiej joined a public action group of opposition figure Viktar Babaryka and signed himself up as a volunteer for all civil rights projects — from independent monitoring to CCTV tracking. He printed out leaflets of independent candidates and disseminated them around his area, registered as an election observer, and took part in rally bike rides. It all seemed like a normal political process at first.