It has been more than a year since relatives and friends have heard from Maria Kolesnikova. The Belarusian activist is one of 1,416 political prisoners behind bars as part of a crackdown that has maintained pace this year before parliamentary elections this weekend.
“The last letter from [Maria] was received on 14 February 2023,” her sister wrote last week. “Since then, which is exactly a year ago, we have not received any reliable information about her.”
Kolesnikova, a pro-democracy activist and former flautist who was close to the opposition presidential candidate Viktar Babaryka, was arrested in September 2020 after she joined a female triumvirate spearheading the opposition to the Belarusian leader, Alexander Lukashenko. She was sentenced to 11 years in prison for “extremism” and other charges. In February 2022, her lawyers lost contact with her and she ceased writing letters, one of a number of high-profile political activists to vanish in prison in Belarus after the anti-opposition crackdown.
The death in jail of the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny on Friday will add further anxiety to the families of political prisoners not only in Vladimir Putin’s Russia but also in Belarus, which is Moscow’s staunchest ally among ex-Soviet states.
In an interview last year, Kolesnikova’s sister, Tatsiana Khomich, said she believed Kolesnikova had been placed in a punitive cell in a prison colony, most likely in isolation, where she was being held incommunicado, given just 30 minutes outside her cell each day and with no access to communications.
“These are the conditions that Belarus’s most public and famous political prisoners are being held in,” she said, referring to would-be opponents of Lukashenko in the 2020 presidential elections, such as Syarhey Tsikhanouski and Babaryka, along with many of their top supporters and prominent human rights lawyers.
“Of course it’s very hard to be in this situation and it’s sad to see others who have relatives who have been behind bars for two or three years,” said Khomich, a co-founder of FreeBelarusPrisoners. “The atmosphere inside Belarus is very hard. But people are trying to support one another because we don’t have any other choice. We don’t have another situation.”
Kolesnikova had established herself as a musician and organiser in Stuttgart, but helped establish cultural organisations in Belarus, including the youth art space OK16 that was closed by the government in 2021. “For the 12 years she lived in Germany, she maintained a very strong connection with Belarus … she wanted to bring the things she saw in Germany to Belarus,” her sister said.
She entered politics through her connection with Babaryka, a banker and public figure who sought to oppose Lukashenko in the 2020 presidential elections but was arrested and ultimately sentenced to 14 years’ imprisonment for bribery and tax evasion, charges seen as politically motivated. At the time, Kolesnikova was his campaign manager, and she was later detained after public protests over mass voter fraud.
When Belarusian authorities sought to expel her from the country, she refused to go into exile and tore up her passport, choosing to go to prison instead.
“We never tried to talk her out of it,” Khomich said of Kolesnikova’s activism. When Babaryka and his son Eduard were arrested during the campaign, she chose to remain in the country and become one of the leaders of the pro-democracy opposition. “She said: ‘My friends and colleagues are behind bars. I can’t leave them. I can’t abandon them.’”
Viktoriia Vitrenko, a singer and conductor who co-founded the InterAkt Initiative, met Kolesnikova at a recital in Stuttgart, where the two women lived in 2017. Despite Kolesnikova’s ties to the city, she “never lost her connection to Belarus”, Vitrenko said. In March 2020, she said, she noticed a change as Kolesnikova entered politics and became far more careful about what she shared by phone, ultimately telling her it “was not safe” to write about her life.
She was clear-eyed about the risks of joining the opposition to Lukashenko in Belarus, her friend said, and understood the dangers of her work.
“I remember asking her: ‘Are you 100% sure of what you are doing?’” she said. “It’s a huge difference if you’re in Germany and if you’re in Belarus. And she said she’s 100% sure and she knew what the outcome could be.”
Vitrenko said she understood Kolesnikova’s principled decision to risk jail in support of the protests against Lukashenko.
“I think that someone had to do it otherwise, you know, the nation would be just lost, and without any hope,” she said. “Someone has to be the symbol for the nation, just to give a hope. So, this is my interpretation of what happened. Maybe she didn’t even have a choice … not to do that.”
In prison, Kolesnikova had health problems due to poor treatment and was hospitalised in November 2022, undergoing an operation for a perforated ulcer.
In her last letter, she told her family to look after themselves and always ended her letters with some form of the phrase “Everything will be OK”.
Khomich said: “We need support from European countries to support Belarusians. Even if you don’t see protests on the streets, it doesn’t mean that Belarusians have chosen to surrender. Of course the government is still afraid if they continue to arrest people over protests that happened more than three years ago.”
