The Origins of a Partisan

“Citizens wore red and white, the colors of the Pahonia, the traditional flag of Belarus, a symbol made illegal in 1995 shortly after President Aliaksandr Lukashenka came to power.”

Sonia was a kindergarten teacher when the revolution started. It was May of 2020, and he was twenty-seven. After the presidential election was called and the Belarusian KGB arrested opposition leader Sergei Tikhanovsky, numberless citizens took to the streets, and Sonia was one of them. All that summer he went to the rallies in Minsk, always pushing to the frontline of the demonstration, pushing so far forward that he could not know if he was protected by the relative safety of the crowd, or if he would be dragged away by the OMON, the brutal crowd control troops of the Ministry of the Interior. He had never been political before, but now he truly understood the corrupted country his generation was inheriting. He had been called.

On the morning of August 9th, election day, Sonia and his parents walked to School No. 180 where they stood in line to vote. Bluetooth speakers blared protest songs into the streets from the windows of Soviet apartment blocks. Citizens wore red and white, the colors of the Pahonia, the traditional flag of Belarus, a symbol made illegal in 1995 shortly after President Aliaksandr Lukashenka came to power. The voter in front of Sonia wore a Pahonia COVID mask, defiance strapped across his face.

Sonia ticked the box next to the name of Sviatlana Tikhanovskaya, the woman running as the opposition candidate in place of her imprisoned husband. Like most other voters, Sonia and his parents each took a picture of their completed ballot and immediately posted it on Telegram, the one part of the internet the KGB had not managed to block on election day. By lunchtime, voters were being arrested for photographing their ballots.