Dziady Victims in Loshyca Park: Historian Kuzniacou Pronounced Persona Non Grata

Some 100 people, mostly opposition activists, took part in a commemorative procession staged in Minsk on Sunday to honor the memory of the victims of the Stalinist terror on the occasion of Dziady (Remembrance of Ancestors Day), BelaPAN says.

The march, organized by the Conservative Christian Party (CCP) and sanctioned by the Minsk city government, ran from the Culture Palace of the Worsted Mill on Majakouskaha Street to Loshyca Park, a Stalin-era massacre site.

Participants displayed Belarus’ historically national white-red-white flags, chanted “Zhyvie Belarus!” (Long Live Belarus!) and sang patriotic songs.

The procession was accompanied by plainclothesmen, with some of them filming the event on video cameras.

Such events are important for the Belarusian people, CCP Deputy Chairman Jury Bielienki told reporters before the beginning of the march, which ended with a rally in Loshyca Park.

“Formerly, Belarusians were destroyed physically and now the Belarusian nation is destroyed indirectly, though ethnocide, Chernobyl, hydrolysis vodka and degradation,” he said. “By such marches, we want to show that the Belarusian nation exists and will continue to exist.”

Bielienki emphasized the importance of the fact that more and more young people take part in the annual march to Loshyca Park, which he said testifies to the succession of generations.

During the rally in Loshyca Park, Jury Bielienki read out the letter by leader of the Christian Conservative Party of the BPF Zianon Pazniak as RFE/RL reports. In the letter, Pazniak told the story of Loshyca claiming that around 10,000 Belarusians are buried in Loshyca Park.

Then Jury Bielienki recalled Kurapaty and also stated that sometimes people who were not real historians interfered into the matters linked to the mass graves of executed Belarusian. Thus, Ihar Kuzniacou — who is famous for his researches on the repressions in Berlarus — was pronounced persona non grata in Kurapaty.

It was said that Kuzniacou was a political instructor and made a brilliant career in Moscow and then returned to Belarus. He did nothing for Kurapary, but names himself a person who takes care about the site, Bielienki said.

Loshyca Park is one of the nine known sites in and near Minsk where people were executed and buried by the NKVD in the 1930s and the early 1940s. In the late 1980s, Soviet authorities filled up the ravine where people had been shot and garages were built there.

A five-meter high wooden cross bearing the inscription “To the Victims of the Bolshevik Terror” was erected in the area in 1995 by civil society activists on the initiative of the Belarusian Popular Front.

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