Ales Bialiatski, Belarusian human rights leader and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, was released after four and a half years in prison, as part of a deal brokered by the United States. He was jailed in 2021 during the crackdown that followed the contested elections, and says that political prisoners in Belarus face harsh conditions similar to those of the Soviet era. His human rights group, Viasna (Spring), continued its work from outside the country.
The prominent Belarusian human rights activist and Nobel laureate, Ales Bialiatski, knew that his turn would also come. His fellow activists were being harassed and arrested. He just didn’t know when his time would come.
In July 2021, that day arrived for the long-time founder and head of the Human Rights Center Viasna, when he was arrested during the unprecedented crackdown that followed the mass protests against the disputed 2020 presidential elections, which many in Belarus and abroad have described as rigged.
“We talked then about leaving Belarus,” Bialiatski told the Belarus Service of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), a few days after he was finally released from a Belarusian prison on 13 December, as part of a deal mediated by the United States, which led to the release of a total of 123 detainees held by the authoritarian ruler Alyaksandr Lukashenka.
“But I felt that, as the head of an organization that was already under attack, it would be wrong to run away. Our volunteers were being imprisoned, our colleagues were being targeted. We had to stay and face the blow together,” he said.
The 63-year-old human rights defender described his imprisonment – which lasted about four and a half years – as both a personal ordeal and a continuation of his life’s work: documenting repression.
Bialiatski said he was mentally prepared for arrest. Having previously served a sentence in a pre-trial detention center in Minsk in 2011, returning to prison felt like what he called “déjà vu.” What he had not anticipated was the length of his imprisonment: he was sentenced to 10 years.
According to Bialiatski, the length of his sentence was influenced by external events, most notably Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine at the end of February 2022. The invasion, launched in part from Belarusian territory, shifted the world’s attention away from the ongoing crackdown inside Belarus, allowing the regime to intensify its methods.
“We became hostages,” he said. “Political prisoners in Belarus are not ordinary prisoners. We are closer to being prisoners of war.”
HELD AS HOSTAGES
Bialiatski stressed that Viasna’s leadership had anticipated arrests and prepared for continuity. Younger staff members moved abroad and immediately resumed work, opening the organization’s first foreign office in the Lithuanian capital, Vilnius.
While imprisoned human rights defenders could no longer operate in the traditional sense, he said their very imprisonment itself became a form of testimony.
“The presence of human rights defenders and journalists in prison is the clearest indicator that there is no longer any democracy there,” he said. “Our imprisonment showed the true situation in Belarus.”
Bialiatski drew a comparison with the Stalin-era repression of Belarusian intellectuals in the 1920s and 1930s, emphasizing that history was fully repeating itself, even if today’s circumstances differ from those of a century ago.
A NOBEL PEACE PRIZE BEHIND BARS
Bialiatski was reviewing the documentation of his criminal case when he learned that he had been named co-laureate of the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize, together with the Russian human rights group Memorial and Ukraine’s Center for Civil Liberties. Another inmate was the first to tell him the news in a corridor. His lawyer later confirmed it.
“I was stunned,” he said. “The Nobel Prize had never crossed my mind. But I immediately understood that it was not a personal award.”
He described the prize as a symbolic recognition of the Belarusian protest movement and of human rights defenders in Belarus, Russia and Ukraine. Like earlier awards to figures such as Andrei Sakharov, Bialiatski said, the Nobel Prize highlighted systemic abuses rather than individual achievements.
Among the prisoners, the news was received with quiet respect.
“Imagine watching TV debates about whether someone like Donald Trump might win the Nobel Peace Prize, while an actual Nobel laureate is sitting next to you on a prison bench,” he said. “It was unbelievable.”
The prison authorities, however, did not treat him any differently. He said he was subjected to daily humiliations, searches and disciplinary punishments—23 in total—for minor “violations” such as unpolished shoes or failing to greet an officer.
“After my release, they confiscated everything,” Bialiatski said. “My letters, my diary, more than 300 pages of notes and memoirs. All of it was destroyed.”
HARSH PRISON CONDITIONS
Although he said he was not physically tortured, Bialiatski described the prison conditions as inhumane: prolonged isolation, cold cells, sleep deprivation, and punishment cells where detainees were forced to stand for hours.
“This is a Soviet system designed to break people,” he said. “It is used on all prisoners, but political detainees are targeted with particular cruelty.”
“More than 1,000 political prisoners remain in jail,” Bialiatski added. “This system frees some and arrests others. For now, it is endless.”
Despite his ordeal, Bialiatski remains optimistic. He believes that repression cannot extinguish Belarusian society’s demand for dignity and justice.
“The only thing that still works in Belarus is the people,” he said. “This is a dark period, but it is also a period of resistance.” (RFE)