DON’T BE RUSSIAN – Nikita MELKAZYOROVA’s last interview | LUKASHUK – about life, Belarusianness and how to wait for freedom

Who are we? This is a question that runs through life. In the latest issue of “Life-Raspberry”, Nikita Melkazyorov talks to Alexander Lukashuk – long-term director of the Belarusian service of Radio Svaboda, writer and researcher.

A man who saw the birth of freedom three times talks about how not to be on the side of evil – not to be Russian, why the KGB archives are the arrested memory of the people, and why Lee Harvey Oswald chose Minsk. This is a conversation about Vasyl Bykov, Zyanon Pazniak, Viktor Babarika and why despair is a mortal sin.

Timecodes:

• 01:00 – What is it like to be Belarusian today? Don’t be Russian

• 02:40 – About Russian high-handedness and human dignity

• 04:43 – Does the national leader have to speak Belarusian?

• 05:51 – Victor Babaryka and “kisson disease” after prison

• 08:21 – Europe’s new security architecture: a chance for Belarus

• 10:45 – Nuclear weapons: would there be a war if they remained in Ukraine?

• 12:18 – Belarusian meekness as a survival tactic next to a predator

• 13:59 – Phenomenal level of modern Belarusian leadership

• 15:28 – Belarusian KGB: guards of the government, not the country

• 18:00 – Comparison of modern repressions with Stalin’s

• 21:05 – Intellectual elite in Soviet captivity

• 24:20 – UNS as a “collegiate assembly”

• 28:25 – Lukashenka: a Soviet man or a cunning dynamic type?

• 31:16 – Vasyl Bykov: a man who renounced everything Soviet

• 37:19 – KGB archives – arrested national memory

• 39:15 – The Oswald case: why did the documents return to Minsk?

• 42:10 – “Document diplomacy”: how Lukashenka can use the Oswald files

• 47:11 – Partridges: casualty estimates

• 49:00 – Three different Zenon Pozniaks

• 52:13 – How Euphrosyne Polotsk’s search for the Cross led to Oswald

• 57:40 – Norman Mailer in Minsk: why Belarusians have the best memory in the world

• 01:08:18 – Stanislav Shushkevich: a person-resonance

• 01:12:11 – Three defeats that are actually the spiral of freedom

• 01:14:40 – The formula for life at 70: don’t drink anything and don’t lie