"For People Who Have Come Out Of Prisons, It's A Shock."

• 1.02.2026, 21:00

Gennady Fedynich told how to identify real leaders.

In a big interview with the website Charter97.org, former political prisoner and trade union leader Gennady Fedynich told why Belarusians failed to regain their freedom in 2020.

- Let's go back to 2020 - the year of the Belarusian revolution. You watched the protests while under house arrest. How do you assess these events, after the elapsed time?

- I have never seen such a flow of people on the streets of Minsk (and I live near the former Masherov Avenue). And when they asked me during interrogations in the KGB if I had been to any rally, I honestly told them: if I had been, it is unlikely that we would be talking to you here, because law enforcers were constantly on duty near my entrance when the protests were held. It is clear that I was at that moment on home chemistry, and even if I wanted to, I could not take part in the actions.

But that's not the point. It is clear that people had accumulated a lot of problems at different levels: at the local, at the regional, at the republican level, all this stirred up the Belarusians from the point of view of the desire for change, the struggle for a better future.

And I will say honestly about those events: I don't know who directed this scenario, but why did you set up so many people? Why did you organize it if you couldn't do anything? The questions remain. Of course, we should learn lessons from mistakes. Believe me, I have experience, I am not a kid in these matters. When representatives of MAZ, Minsk Tractor Plant and MZKT came to our REP office, I used to say: "Why are you going back and forth, I can't understand, what's the point of going back and forth? They won't let you go to work tomorrow, because you skipped work."

"How can they not let us go?" - they wondered. For tomorrow they were not allowed into the factories because of absenteeism. Formally everything was done correctly, but no one supported them at the factories because no one worked with the collective. This is not the way to do it.

Yes, the bulk of Belarusians went out on the streets, but without a purpose. Sooner or later everything will be revealed, because the organizers framed so many people, who were later tried. Why didn't anyone think about people when organizing the events? I still have this question.

- In fact, the organization of the marches was handled by Tikhanovskaya's headquarters. What mistakes did her team make? Why did they fail to achieve victory? After all, people were ready to sacrifice a lot for victory.

- First of all, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya is a completely new person in this respect, and she was given the opportunity to be a leader, and to be a leader, you need to prove it every day with concrete work. And the impression was that people in Tikhanovska's team were overly cautious. So why did they start this whole thing? Neither then nor today does she have much experience in working with people. And experience is necessary for people to listen to you, believe and know that you won't let them down.

Believe me, having 200 thousand people at the rallies in Minsk and other cities, everything was elementary. People in uniform, in my opinion, were waiting for a command to obey in this situation. But here they are looking at something incomprehensible, the situation is completely stupid. Before you organize something, you should clearly understand what you want to achieve. This was not the case.

- You have already partially understood the situation that is developing now. What changes have taken place over the years? How do you assess the activities of the structures of Sviatlana Tihanouskaya and Pavel Latushko?

- As for today, it's a shock for many people who came out of prison. It is clear that the Belarusian diaspora has never been as organized as the Ukrainian one. I can tell you by my own example - when we were in Australia with the trade unions, the Ukrainian diaspora immediately came to meet their people. Such an attitude should be learned for more than one year.

But I will say to Tihanovska and Latushko: you have been given the role of leaders, but you do not fulfill it. It is necessary to be at international meetings, no one has canceled it, but a system should be created to protect every Belarusian, who has found himself in a difficult situation abroad, up to his employment. Then it will be possible to maintain contact with him, because he will be grateful to you. And who is he grateful to today? To himself or to a friend who told him where he could get a job. So I will say that there is no systemic work. Organizing people under the aegis that "I am a leader today" or "I was elected to the coordinating council"... Guys, all this is nonsense. Once again I say that leadership must be proven every day. Let Tihanovskaia's and Latushko's colleagues think about how they have proven leadership over these five years.