Posted 19 июня 2020,, 12:06

Published 19 июня 2020,, 12:06

Modified 24 декабря 2022,, 22:37

Updated 24 декабря 2022,, 22:37

Lukashenko became enraged: not only people are arrested in Belarus, but also the paintings

Lukashenko became enraged: not only people are arrested in Belarus, but also the paintings

19 июня 2020, 12:06
The election situation in a neighboring country is becoming more alarming with every day, thousands of people take to the streets protesting against the actions of the authorities. Belarusian sociologist Yelena Gapova carefully monitors what is happening in this country today and comments on the situation:
Сюжет
Elections

On August, 9 the presidential election will be held, and not only the usual cohort with the ideas of the popular fronts of the late 1980s, but people from today came forward as candidates: unexpectedly blogger Sergei Tikhanovsky, or more truly his wife (he already was “closed” because he “pushed” a policeman), the former director of the High-Tech Park Valery Tsepkalo and the chairman of Belgazprombank Viktor Babariko, who resigned from this post to participate in the campaign (there was no privatization in Belarus, so the chairman of the bank is not an oligarch who has appropriated BelAZ).

For the latter, it’s obvious that everyone I know, even my “left” friends, are ready to vote now, and some for the first time in my life came to the headquarters “from the street”, took forms for signatures and began to bypass the entrances. For the first time, kilometer-long lines appeared on the streets to sign up. Here is some kind of person. He moved forward and it became clear that yes, for the first time in twenty-five years, something else had appeared. For the first time I would vote without "I do not want to, but there are no others".

But to the essence of the story. About fifteen years ago, Belgazprombank began to collect a collection of paintings, buying at auction paintings by artists from these lands. And this is Chagall, Soutine, Bakst, Tsarfin and others (the Pale of Settlement, yes). The bank is small, but brought to the country 150 paintings for $ 20 million. In 2017, he transferred the collection to public access and posted it in the Art Belarus Gallery. Pictures of Shraga Tsarfina were transferred to the museum of the village of Smilovichi, where he and Soutine came from. Well, you come to a village with wooden houses, where there is a pansky park, a monument to Jews killed in the summer of 1941 and a museum in an art school building - a two-story brick building, walls with oil paint, geraniums on window sills - and there is a museum of the "Paris school". AHL said, "I won’t give this country to them".

After Babariko’s nomination, they came to the bank right away (although he was checked in January), 15 people were already arrested, they had already been presented, they had already been announced by state. television about the "gold bars behind the baseboard", as well as that the bank has appropriated the art collection (!). They came to the gallery, the collection was seized (I wonder what residences it will be in). The picture shows the remaining frames, in which the curators placed barcodes: you can get to the site with a description of the paintings there. The FB-friend wrote "as hanged in the square" (this is a reference to executions after the 1863 uprising). Already taken for interrogations for 10-12 hours of personal friends: those who did not work in the bank, had no relation to business, were friends with family; a woman, a member of the headquarters, has been kept in the KGB detention center since Thursday, they describe property, do not allow a lawyer and do not allow - in connection with quarantine - to transfer a linen change. With special cynicism, in short. I’m somehow telling this wrong, because in my heart I’m completely dostoevskuyu feeling, as when executing Petrashevites, when he goes to execution, loses his galosha, thinks that he will wet his feet and get sick and at the same moment understands that it’s not important . That is precisely this feeling.

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It seems that the authorities were very scared: usually the mopping-up takes place after the elections during protests against fraud), now it is impossible even to register alternative candidates with tens of thousands of signatures. The fact. that if earlier the candidates were put forward by the “opposition”, which did not have broad support, this time the candidates come from another cohort. They do not have a history of participation in the "opposition." Their social base is the "urban educated (entrepreneurial, middle, etc.) (proto) class." It turns into a “class for itself” (using Marxist terminology), that is, it acquires collective self-awareness. Over the past twenty-five years, elections have caused such widespread participation and public interest for the first time. Candidate V. Babariko detained, he is charged with "leadership of illegal activities." The paintings that the bank previously headed by him bought, were legally brought to the country and given to the public (they were declared a national property; Soutine's painting “Portrait of Eve” is the most expensive painting in Belarus) were confiscated under the pretext that they were urgently prepared for export (they cannot be export and can not be legally sold anywhere in the world; they have absolutely clear provenance). Information appeared on the network about torture in the pre-trial detention center and a message that P. Sevyarynets, being in inhuman conditions in a punishment cell, made an attempt to open his veins. People are starting to gather in the squares.

In the evening, ambassadors of the EU and the USA were invited to the Belarusian Foreign Ministry. The lie of the state media is completely Goebbels, and the parents write to the FB: how to raise children under these conditions? What should they say?

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The arrest of a collection of paintings and the lies around are all about objects. And here about how children and women are taken hostage. The wife of the detained Vladimir Numik is crying at this link in Grodno. They came to her from the guardianship authorities (director, kindergarten teacher and psychologist) and reported that they would take away a five-year-old daughter, since the child was "in danger." The banality of evil? Yes, in its pure form. Here the wife of the arrested blogger Tikhanovsky, who nominated her candidacy (many sign up for her), says that she received a threat from the "unknown" to kill her and the children. The wife of another candidate - Tsepkalo - asks the "respected bodies" to protect Tikhanovskaya: after all, we live in a state of law. "Isn't it?", - she says.

On the network there were messages from women from initiative groups that they received threats of gang rape. Svetlana Kupreeva (a member of the initiative group Babariko and a longtime friend of his wife and the whole family) is still in prison. She was charged with tax evasion and $ 4 million. She is retired, lives in Khrushchev with her 80-year-old mother, never engaged in entrepreneurship and did not own anything...”

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