The Bastards Will Answer

• Irina Khalip
• 17.10.2025, 11:40

In memory of Shura and all the others.

The other day Alexander Palynsky died in Polotsk. Shura Palysky was my generation of journalism students: we used to sing rock songs together under the guitar, sit late at night in someone's dorm room on Oktyabrskaya Street in a big group, talk with quotations from Mit'kovsky's work and believe that life ahead is so beautiful that it is impossible to imagine.

Shura died, and his wife Tina Palyskaya has been in the Vitebsk pre-trial detention center for five months. Her eldest daughter Margarita is also there. I don't know if Tina will be told about her husband's death. In the past, they not only told her, but also took her under escort to say goodbye. Even in handcuffs, but it was possible to sit for 10 minutes by the coffin. Now no one is given such an opportunity to say goodbye to a loved one. Maybe they don't even inform about death.

Shura Palynsky was a good journalist, and then - a good poet. He lived in Polotsk with Tina and her daughters. Tina Palynsky, having left journalism, found herself in archives. She compiled family books.

But she did not just search the archives for records of births, marriages, deaths - she went to the town or village where the customer of the book came from, asked the old-timers, wrote down stories. It was not a genealogical tree - it was always a story, alive and vivid, with images and memories.

Tina was important that the story had details - for example, the color of her grandmother's sundress, in which she chased suitors off the porch. And Tina could also just help find traces of a family that once lived in Belarus. I know many people whom Tina helped to find them and restored once broken family ties.

A noble cause, and most importantly - no connection with modernity. Archives. Church books. The dust of centuries.

In May, Tina was arrested together with her eldest daughter Margarita, a student of the BSU history department. The younger daughter was taken away by her father. Palysky's son Igor, musician and creator of the band Sumarok, is in exile. There was Shura Palysky's house - and it was gone. There was a family - and gone. And now Shura is gone.

I often think about this. We used to consider those who died in prison as killed by the regime. Witold Ashurok, Nikolai Klimovich, Igor Lednik, Ales Pushkin and our other heroes - you all know these names. But why we do not include those who did not wait for their relatives from behind bars to be killed by the regime? Those whose heart failed? Those who have no strength left to live, reading every day about torture in colonies and prisons? They were murdered in cold blood just like that. And not only Palynsky.

Remember Igor Afnagel, encyclopedist and marathon runner. The distances he ran could wrap the equator four times. He was a healthy strong man, but after his son Eugene was arrested, he died a few months later.

Remember Viktor Statkevich, who lived waiting to meet his son for many years, during all of Nikolai's terms. Hanging in there, he knew he had to wait. Viktor Statkevich died last spring, a year after letters from Nikolai stopped coming.

Remember the mother of Larisa Shchiryakova, who died six months after her daughter's arrest. Larisa was not only not taken to say goodbye to her mom, but was not even allowed to go to her grave - she was taken to Lithuania after three years of imprisonment. And she, a Homel resident, could walk from the colony to the cemetery. But Larisa saw her hometown only in a glimpse, in the car window, when she was taken to the Belarusian-Lithuanian border. And she didn't see her mother's grave at all.

Eugene Afnagel couldn't go to the cemetery either - he was also taken out of the country. Not to mention Nikolai Statkevich.

So, could all these people - Larisa's mom, Eugene's and Nikolai's dads, Tina's husband and many others - have continued to live if their relatives had not been imprisoned? Surely they could have. So they are as murdered by the regime as Pushkin and Ashurok. And the account of victims should be kept with these losses taken into account as well.

A long time ago Ales Bialiatski explained to me that a repressed person is not necessarily someone who has served time. Ales said that if, for example, a person could not find a job because of his civil position and for this reason did not gain the necessary length of service and did not receive a pension, - he is also a repressed person.

So, the same approach is needed in relation to particularly serious crimes of the regime. A murdered person is not only someone who was writhing on the prison floor in his last moments without medical assistance, but also someone who could not survive the arrest and sentence of a loved one, who could not endure, did not live, did not wait.

The bastards will also have to answer for them.

Irina Khalip, especially for Charter97.org.