Ever since Belarusian strongman Alyaksandr Lukashenka was returned to power in a disputed presidential election in August 2020, rights activists, democracy campaigners, and media reporters have all come under mounting pressure as the country’s civil society bears the brunt of a vicious crackdown on potential dissent.
Now, undesirable books and other published materials have also found themselves increasingly in the authoritarian regime’s crosshairs.
The Belarusian Information Ministry currently maintains a list of “extremist” items that consists of more than 2,750 books, CDs, websites, Telegram channels, and other messaging platforms. The list is some 1,100 pages long and is updated almost daily.
The banning of books is nothing new in Belarus, and several publications have been controversially blacklisted in the country, where Lukashenka has ruled with an iron fist since 1994.
However, whereas special expert commissions were previously entrusted with deciding what could be designated as “extremist,” a lot of this work now seems to be done by district courts, and they don’t appear to be particularly fussy or discerning about what they prohibit.
"We see how…Telegram channels with three subscribers are banned simply because someone doesn't like the name,” says Paval Barkouski, a professor at the Polish Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Philosophy and Sociology who formerly taught at the Belarusian State University.
“It is clear that we are not talking about any qualified expertise,” he adds. “We are talking about the repression of everything that does not agree with the policy of the current authorities. Why do they need expertise? It will simply interfere with the process.”
The lengths the authorities are going to in their efforts were highlighted recently when a man in the western town of Kobryn was detained for 10 days on a charge of “spreading extremism.” The authorities censured him for the “public display” in a bookcase in his apartment of a collection of historical novels by the prizewinning Belarusian writer Uladzimer Arlou.
'They Rummaged Through The Shelves'
This heightened clampdown on books and other publications is yet another example of how Belarusian authorities are taking their lead from totalitarian and authoritarian regimes of the past, says Barkouski of his homeland, where, at Lukashenka’s direction, security officials have waged a brutal campaign of repression against those who protested the 2020 election.
After arresting thousands and pushing most opposition figures out of the country, the authorities now seem to be spreading their net even wider, going after libraries and bookstores across the country to make sure they are not stocking anything that makes the regime uncomfortable.
Bestselling authors whose books were sold at state bookstores until recently, including Alherd Bakharevich, Uladzimer Nyaklyayeu, Vatslau Lastouski, Ales Petrashkevich, and even the Nobel laureate Joseph Brodsky, are among those who appear to have been targeted.
Staff at other outlets say they have also been subjected to spot-checks. One sales clerk at a secondhand bookshop in Minsk told RFE/RL about how two people in civilian clothes arrived at the premises in May and had a long conversation with the manager.
“They rummaged through the shelves themselves,” she said, adding that they found a number of books objectionable, including two from the Knihazbor series, which focuses on Belarusian history and classic literature.
“This ‘commission’ took the books with them,” she said, and the store manager was forced “to write them off.”
'Hysterical Reaction'
The former library head at a secondary school in the western city of Brest says inspectors also paid her a visit in 2023. She told RFE/RL that they were especially interested in books on history, foreign languages, and literature on academic research, even showing her an image on a smartphone of the kind of items they were looking for.
“Well, they found textbooks and books from the 1990s,” she said. “‘These should not be in the library. Write them off as a matter of urgency,’ they shouted. There was such a hysterical reaction to the books -- as if they were explosives!”
Although school textbooks are routinely written off every five years or so, the librarian says some old course books had been retained, as they dealt with certain topics better than newer publications. Now, she says, they have all been pulped, something which undermines the library’s important role as a repository of knowledge.
“One copy must be kept in the library,” says the librarian. “This is what I was taught at the library faculty. I told the director and the commission about it. No one heard my objections..."
Besides schools, prison libraries also seem to have been scoured by officials looking to remove anything deemed objectionable. One former political prisoner, who was recently released from a penal colony in Navopolatsk where more than 100 political prisoners are serving their sentences, told RFE/RL that there used to be a very decent library there, with many books, magazines, and periodicals in the embattled Belarusian language, but these “were all confiscated,” along with textbooks on foreign languages.
“They even confiscated a couple of books in Chinese,” he says. “We joked, saying, ‘The Chinese are our friends[....] Personal books were also confiscated. We asked what will be done with them. The guard cynically replied that they would burn.”
'Deliberate Destruction'
In Barkouski’s view, the current drive to shred or burn uncomfortable books is reminiscent of other strongly ideological regimes that set out to crush dissent.
“The deliberate destruction of books began as early as the time of the Inquisition,” he says. “Works that the church considered free-thinking were included in the list of prohibited books. Books were publicly burned on bonfires. In Nazi Germany, bonfires were also lit in the squares. It also happened in the Soviet Union, but less theatrically -- quietly, secretly.”
The fact that Belarusian books appear to be among the materials that are being targeted recalls the dark days of Belarus’s own Soviet past, such as in 1937 when Belarusian authorities subordinate to Moscow ordered the removal and destruction of more than 400 Belarusian books, including several classic titles.
For Barkouski, the practice is indicative of where things could be headed in Belarus as authorities in Minsk show no sign of loosening their grip on power.
“Destroying books…is considered a normal and good practice in the 21st century,” he says. “It just shows how far into the past the henchmen of this regime have dragged us. It's not just 1937 anymore. Regime officials are ready to return to the fires of the Inquisition.”
