«The Dog-Eat-Dog Soviet System.» Ales Bialiatski Spoke About the Attitude Towards the Nobel Laureate in Prison

— Ales, tell me, has your authority among prisoners and administration representatives grown after the Nobel Peace Prize?

— Regarding the prisoners, yes. Those who understand, who have ever heard about this Nobel Prize, who know something about it, they certainly treated me with respect. Especially now, when there was a lot of talk about whether Donald Trump would receive this prize, or not in 2025, it again drew attention.

We sit in the so-called «lenka,» in the «Lenin room,» watching TV, and there are debates about whether Trump will receive the Nobel Peace Prize or not, and here sits a Nobel laureate alongside others like them… Twenty people sit on these benches, and he sits among them. It was clear that for people this was some kind of nonsense — how could such a thing be.

But given that Belarusians are an unemotional people and that this is even more pronounced in prison, because any emotions are suppressed by the administration, it is believed that you should sit there with your mouth shut, then, of course, there were fewer of these expressions and messages from prisoners. But it was evident that even among criminals, among people who had never engaged in politics, who generally have a negative attitude towards all politics, the news evoked a certain respect: this guy is indeed very famous there. This was consistently the case in both the penal colony and the pre-trial detention center (SIZO).

As for the administration — I also noticed this — they know about it, first of all, but they are just doing their job. Especially those who are career-driven. As in any strict state structure, there are more careerists, and there are ordinary workers. And these careerists worked strictly according to instructions on how to treat political prisoners; all of this extended to me as well.

— So, there was no leniency for the Nobel laureate?

— No, especially this concerned 2023, as soon as I arrived at the penal colony, and it was the same in 2024. I went through everything that political prisoners went through. This included insults, and being addressed informally («ty»), you were treated like an ordinary prisoner, like a political prisoner. If the head of the regime department wanted to — he stripped you naked, forced you to squat, because he was conducting a full check, even though you only had a meeting with a lawyer there. Before that, he stripped you, lest you suddenly smuggle in some note, or whatever he was looking for there, I don't know. All of this — mockery and inhumane treatment — was certainly present.

And there were endless reports of violations of internal regulations; they loved to write out these papers. For any trifle, both warranted and unwarranted — that you weren't shaved, your shoes weren't cleaned, you cleaned your section poorly when it was your turn to clean, you didn't greet an officer who passed by. All of this happened, and I myself didn't know there were so many papers against me.

But a couple of months ago, I reached the halfway point of my sentence. Considering the rule «one day in pre-trial detention (SIZO) counts as one and a half in a penal colony» and the fact that we spent almost two years in SIZO, my net sentence amounted to 9 years and one and a half months — what I was supposed to serve. Recently, I underwent an evaluation for half of this term and heard that, it turns out, over two and a half years of being in the Horki penal colony, 23 reports of internal regulation violations were filed against me. I was considered a malicious violator. A Nobel laureate — a malicious violator of regulations. This is completely normal, without any schizophrenia, for the local Horki authorities.

It was especially painful upon release on December 13, when the deputy head of the penal colony, the head of the regime department, the head of the operational department, and the officers who released me from the colony, confiscated all the papers I had, all my correspondence, those letters that initially reached me but then stopped arriving. But I tried to keep what had arrived in 2021‑2022 before the start of the war, because once the war began, we effectively found ourselves in informational isolation; there were very few letters. For the entire year 2025, I received only one letter from my wife, for example. And she did not receive a single one of my letters. This was complete isolation.

In addition, I wrote three hundred pages of memoirs about the Maksim Bahdanovich Museum and kept a diary in which I tried to record the conditions, so that something would remain. But all of this remained there and was effectively destroyed. They did not allow me to take a single piece of paper out of the colony. This is how they treat you, you, the Nobel laureate. You are nobody to them there, not a Nobel laureate.

However, knowing what other prisoners went through, who were beaten, who were in worse conditions than I was, I must say that I was spared this.

— Can you say whether there was torture, inhumane treatment of you?

— Inhumane treatment, certainly, yes. As for torture — no. When they lock you in the SHIZO (punishment cell), and you only have light clothing on, and the cell is plus 8 [degrees Celsius], and you have to sit for 10 days, you can't sleep because you're shivering from the cold — what is that? That is inhumane treatment. When you can't sit down because the bunks are pinned up, you have to walk, and the bench is narrow — 20 centimeters. This is a place where you can sit at plus 8 in a cell, maximum plus 10, and you're in a shirt — what is that?

This applies to all prisoners, not just political ones. This brutal Soviet system, which was aimed at destroying any prisoners, equally transferred into the Belarusian system in places like punishment cells, BURs, the colonies themselves, and it equally extended to political prisoners, sometimes with special emphasis, special excesses. Even now, before their release from prison, some political prisoners were held in BURs.

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