The day before yesterday. Those of us still at the camp have more than a day to go before it is broken up. Next to me stands a veteran of the opposition, who has been at every meeting since 1988. God, how well preserved he is! I wish I was as quick-witted as he is! There are about a thousand people at the square and he thinks this is a victory, though I can’t see anything victorious about it. But as soon as I try to communicate my doubts to him, he interrupts me, not wanting to hear a word of it, and saying: “So you think we should do nothing!!!” This wasn’t a question, it was a categorical statement. But I certainly wasn’t saying that there was nothing to be done. I only wanted to say that perhaps we weren’t doing this quite right. Even that we ought not to be doing this.

You can do or not do something. But if we ought not to be doing this, then we mustn’t do it. Yet you can’t reverse what has happened. What’s done is, after all, done.

Another veteran, who was expelled from the Belarussian People’s Front and then refused admission to any of the other opposition movements, as a result of which he took no part in the pre-election campaign, came to the square when the tented camp began spontaneously to take shape. He came to take that spontaneity under control, to inspire them not to disperse too soon. He appealed to them all to stay ‘to the very end’. No clear explanation of what this end might be could be extracted from him. In any case, he didn’t see the end of the camp; first his mother was arrested and released only after suffering a heart attack, and then he too vanished who knows where. The camp was broken up and cleared away without him.

The people at the camp were carted off to the Okrestina detention centre. In the morning, a crowd of relatives began to gather at this strange institution. Then the two presidential candidates arrived.
Why did they come?

Well, something must be done!!! So, try beating your head against a wall. Sometimes it helps. But why? People say that one of the candidates really did do this, tried literally to break down the locked doors, banging against them, if not with his head, then with his hands and his whole body. A jarhead, in other words. Though even jarheads, once they have their doctorates, begin to understand that you can find a better use for your head. But though they know you can, they don’t know exactly what.

And so it happened that, exactly four hours before the break-up of the camp on October Square, named originally after Kastus Kalinovsky, I tried to have a chat with this former jarhead about using our heads. The conversation lasted less than a minute, and he categorically disagreed with my assessment of the futility of his actions. And now we’re unlikely to have any desire to talk again. Because what would we talk about? About the fact that something must be done?

No, I have no intention of discussing this subject with anyone any more. Because it’s impossible. When confronted directly by problems and danger, you can’t do just anything. You must do only that which solves the problem and lessens the danger.

Nothing Milinkevich and Kazulin did before the elections met this requirement. Their actions failed to solve any of the problems or to lessen the danger.

I can say this now with complete certainty. I don’t even need to prove it, because the result is clear to see. That is to say - there is no result.

I will not say that the people have conquered their fear. That’s a lie. A bare-faced lie, called up to justify the foolishness of the candidates and their teams. This nonsense can be heard after almost every meeting and demonstration. And a year ago, after Andrei Klimov’s revolution. I said that this was not a revolution at all, merely the foolish escapade of a broken man, who could not think of anything more worthwhile to do.
People tried to put me to shame, saying: “Something has to be done! At least Klimov is doing something! And it will happen soon, won’t it.”
It didn’t.
When I said that it hadn’t happened, people objected that “all the same, the people did overcome their fear”. But if they overcame it then, why do they need to overcome it all over again, almost exactly a year later?
Maybe no-one overcame anything at all on 25 March last year? Shall we check it out tomorrow? Tomorrow is 25 March again – our unofficial Freedom Day. This year, hundreds of people are seeing in Freedom Day behind bars.

Something has to be done!!! And Kozulin is beating at the locked doors of the Okrestina. It’s too late. A man needs to use his head to think ahead, not to scratch around for ideas and then gnash his teeth after it’s all over.

“But surely it’s not Kozulin’s fault!” they object.
“No, not Kozulin, of course,” I agree. “It’s Milinkevich’s fault!”

It is him and his staff, with their idle pre-election talk about defending their election victory in the square. There was no victory – there was nothing to defend. We might as well have dispersed. That’s how it was in 2001 too. But Milinkevich couldn’t repeat Goncharikov’s treacherous act. He had to the challenge of remaining in politics, unlike Goncharikov, who disappeared completely from public life after the 2001 elections. If he had dispersed the crowd on 19 March, he would have been compared with Goncharikov and would have been ridiculed for it. He had no option but to appeal to people to come to the square again the next day. Which is what he did. Didn’t he realise what this would signify after the “orange revolution”?
Of course he did. The only question is when.

If he realised only on 19 March, then … to put it politely, he isn’t very intelligent. But that is not true. The untruth is not that he is unintelligent – but that he only began to realise on 19 March. Because I myself told him about the likely scenarios that would occur during the presidential election period - more than a year before they were due. He knew all about it over a year ago.
But then there’s another question: why wasn’t he prepared for the camp in the square?
For he really was unprepared. This much became clear on 20 March. Unprepared both in terms of the material support of the camp, or rather, the lack of it. And in that neither Milinkevich, nor Kalyakin, nor Kornienko, nor any of the unified democratic candidate’s staff, knew what to do next.

All right, I can forgive the lack of material support. This can be ascribed to the saboteur Dobrovolsky, for whom the sit-in during the “short lived snow-white and blue revolution” was his salvation, as he would otherwise have got a beating at the square. But the fact that not even the next two or three moves had been worked out – this I simply cannot forgive. Because I had worked them out myself, told Milinkevich, and then spent several months trying to get him to agree to start work on them together. But he never lifted a finger.

I have fewer complaints against Kozulin in this respect. He ignored my invitation to come to the Games to develop our Strategy-2006, and, until yesterday, he and I had never met since 1994. I do remember, of course, how he made the whole university cave in to Lukashenko, how he secured the professors’ loyalty to the regime and conducted a purge of the Belarussian State University. But that is irrelevant to the current situation. But Milinkevich was familiar with Strategy-2006 and deliberately ruined it. I consider this to be a crime. A crime against the country, against the people and against the future of our children.

Should I really believe Belarussian TV, when it says that Milinkevich, like Kornienko, was simply carrying out the foolish orders of Kazanetsky, who hasn’t been in Belarus for years and understands nothing? Anyway, Kazanetsky too was familiar with Strategy-2006. And I don’t know what is worse. The fact that Milinkevich acted like Kazanetsky’s blind puppet, or that neither of them understands the first thing about what they are trying to do.

This is terrible. It’s terrible that they incited people, stirred up by the pre-election campaign, to an act of civil disobedience, not only without having made any provision to support this action, but also without having given any sense of the cause they were supposed to be defending. What was there to defend when, according to even the boldest virtual polls, Lukashenko had won at the first round? Were the people really supposed to be defending a sociological falsehood? No, a democratic public can only defend truth and justice. Sometimes that democratic public may be mistaken, and take a falsehood as the truth, or injustice as justice. But never will they try to defend lies and injustice.

So it’s important to understand that people went to the camp in the square in the knowledge that Milinkevich had lost the election. No-one much was interested in the elections - everyone knew the circumstances in which they were held, and that it was impossible to win them, rather like the game of three cups and the hidden ball. People turned out to protest against the dictatorship, and the entire “election” system, not to defend Milinkevich’s or Kozulin’s win. And not for any second-round victory either. Milinkevich and Kozulin were mere symbols of this protest, rather like the bell that Kozulin tried to set up at the square.

But unlike the inanimate bell, these flesh-and-blood symbols are expected to come up with some appropriate course of action. And here is what is most terrible. Neither Milinkevich nor Kozulin meets these expectations.

First Kozulin denies responsibility for the civil disobedience and advises everyone to disperse and go home.

You can understand him. Not even the possession of a doctorate and a professorial chair is any guarantee of intelligence, but, all the same, even Kozulin understood the utter hopelessness of such a protest and of the whole action. True, you might ask, what was the point of that procession of icons and the laying of flowers at the Victory memorial? Well, he brought out a flash-mob and then got them to go home. But what can you expect of a man whose hobbies are astrology and para-science? Only irresponsibility. And so Kozulin saw how desperate the situation was and walked away from it. But the action is still going on.

But surely Milinkevich can’t be blind to the desperateness of the situation too. Especially as everyone is pestering him with questions about what to do next. But he doesn’t know. He tries gently to suggest to the people in the camp that it might be time to break it up. But they don’t listen to him, and listen instead to that same veteran whom I mentioned at the beginning. Why should they listen to Milinkevich? He neither organised the camp, nor is it up to him to close it down. Then Milinkevich simply denies responsibility for what is happening in the square. But this is unacceptable behaviour from our human symbol. All the more so as, having denied responsibility for what is happening, he then appeals to everyone to come to the square on 25 March for Freedom Day. This is with the ‘ulterior motive’ of dispersing both the meeting and the camp at the same time. I cannot imagine how he would have done this, even if the camp had survived until 25 March. No-one at the camp was listening to him. And after Freedom Day, more and more people arrived to join the camp. There still weren’t enough of them to gain a victory. They should still have been dispersed.

You cannot solve a problem by doing nothing. And you can’t solve it either by just doing any old thing.
But something must still be done!

It must, and not some general thing, but something absolutely definite and absolutely responsible. For several days, I was racking my brains, thinking what to do to achieve any kind of positive effect and to minimise the countless setbacks. I even worked out exactly what needed to be done. I fixed a meeting with Milinkevich and told him my ideas. It was like a replay of last year with Strategy-2006. He agreed that it was a good idea, and perhaps his only option, but he needed time to consider it. I said that, by my reckoning, he had less than a day to think about it. Milinkevich only came back with his answer on the evening of 23 March. His answer was essentially that he means to act according to his own interpretation of events. An hour later, I found out from the Internet what that amounted to – 25 March was declared to be not a political action, but a holiday.

So the revolution is replaced with a discotheque - this I how I interpret it.

What kind of holiday is it, when his closest friend and comrade Viktor Kornienko is beaten up in the morning? What kind of holiday, when the Okrestina has already run out of cells for all the people who have been arrested?

No! Something must be done about this!!! And I know what.

V. Matskevich

24.03.2006

Translated by Chris Ayton (Scotland)