The Battle for the Mural — and the Future of Belarus

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As his family slept, the man spent his nights planning. There were about 40 security cameras among the three buildings in central Minsk, maybe even more. He had long ago calculated their blind spots. He knew there was only one place in the shared courtyard they didn’t see. It took him a day to map out the best approach. The group had decided that they would act in the evening, when there would be enough people on the street so that their actions would not arouse suspicion but not so many that someone would be likely to report them to the police. He wasn’t afraid for himself as much as for the rest of them. If they got caught, it would be his fault.

They positioned their spotters to watch for the Belarusian security services, the siloviki. They agreed on a plan to create an emergency diversion if they arrived.

On the morning of Feb. 25, he took a white piece of cloth the size of a flag and painted it quickly. It would take four hours to dry. When it was ready, he folded it deliberately, carefully aligning the fabric to make sure it would take the least amount of time to unfurl. He attached carabiners to the corners and put it in a bag.

As he made his way to the fence next to the utility shed, the man felt only anger — a voice in his head that demanded to know how can a person be afraid to do something like this? When he reached the fence, he hooked up the carabiners, then threw the cloth over the top. It unfurled in seconds. He fastened the bottom and stepped back. Weeks of planning ended in minutes. In the purple light, the banner was ethereal and simple — the logo of their group, a peace sign and the words NO WAR.

An hour and a half later, a minibus with tinted windows arrived. Plainclothes officers stormed out and tore down the banner. The next morning, investigators from the local branch of the Ministry of Internal Affairs arrived. They started collecting security footage from the buildings as well as nearby stores and combing over the tape. The man believed they wouldn’t be found. They had followed protocol and stuck to the route.

They had been shouting for more than a year and a half that their country was a dictatorship, that Belarus was under occupation, that everything would be disastrous if Aleksandr Lukashenko were not stopped. No one had listened. There were more than 1,000 political prisoners in detention; sentences for those who opposed Lukashenko’s regime stretched into decades. Now Russia had launched an assault on Ukraine, and Lukashenko had sold their country to the Kremlin as a giant military base.

If they had overthrown Lukashenko, the man thought, probably none of this would be happening. Vladimir Putin would not have had the strategic assets to be able to carry out this war — no support from the northern flank, no airfields for refueling planes, no silos to keep the missiles. If the world thought Belarusians to be collaborators, he needed to show they were anything but. They had been fighting against this for far longer than people realized. They had taken far greater risks than people knew.

On weekday mornings, the elevators in Diana Karankevich’s building were so crowded with young parents bringing their children to school, she often took the stairs. With 20 floors, the prefabricated high-rise had loomed over the nearby squat, beige Soviet-era buildings in the New Lake neighborhood almost as soon as construction started around 2011. By the time everyone moved in, the new development’s three identical buildings on the intersection of Smorgovsky Tract and Chervyakova Street teemed with young, upper-middle-class families. The appeal of buying there was obvious — it was a 10-minute drive from downtown Minsk, with a supermarket across the street and good schools nearby. It was a short walk to the Belarusian capital’s largest park and the shores of the big lake that locals in the landlocked country referred to as the Minsk Sea.

Before 2020, whether because of Belarus’s long Soviet hangover or their busy, phone-absorbed lives, most people in the buildings never knew their neighbors. Diana, a 30-year-old nail technician who had worked in a beauty salon on the first floor, was an exception. Outgoing and opinionated, she was always saying hello to someone. From the apartment she shared with her mother and her then 5-year-old son, Timofey, Tima for short, Diana could see the road that led to the three buildings’ shared courtyard, where there was a small, multicolored playground surrounded by benches. In the afternoons, the congestion reversed — the same parents bringing their children home, sometimes stopping at the swing set or the seesaw.

On Aug. 6, 2020, Diana was walking Tima home from kindergarten, through the verdant birch trees of a smaller square nearby called Peoples’ Friendship Park.

“Why are there so many people?” Tima asked, confused.

“Because they came out,” she answered absent-mindedly.

It was a few days before the August 2020 presidential elections, which until recently Diana and pretty much everyone else in Belarus had expected to be the sixth straight election President Lukashenko would win through a combination of voter apathy, oppositional disarray, electoral suppression and outright fraud. But for the first time in his 26 years in power, the usual script of the regime’s election interference had gone awry.

A few weeks earlier, the opposition united around a single candidate: Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, a 39-year-old housewife married to a popular video blogger, who had surprised even herself by registering to run for president after her husband was disqualified on charges that were largely viewed as political. Tsikhanouskaya, whom many just called Sviatlana, had rocketed to a level of popularity unheard-of since Lukashenko himself came to power in 1994 in the only free elections Belarus had ever held.

Sviatlana had called for a rally in Friendship Park, one of the few venues to allow political gatherings in Minsk, but the city authorities refused to issue a permit. They had announced a musical concert in honor of “Railway Troops Day” instead. When Diana heard, she could only laugh. There had been no railway troops in Belarus since 2006. It was exactly the kind of absurdism Belarusians had become inured to over the years.

Diana noticed that the regime’s concert was sparsely attended, the cordoned-off area empty aside from the state-employed D.J.s and a few pensioners, the kind who came to every Lukashenko rally, waving the red-and-green flag Lukashenko had resurrected from Soviet times. The rest of the park, however, was unusually crowded. Diana thought maybe they were hopefuls waiting for Sviatlana to show up. Diana was leading Tima away when a loud cheer went up. Maybe she came after all? Diana moved closer and heard lyrics from a song that anyone who grew up in the former Soviet Union knows by heart:

Changes!
It’s the demand of our hearts.
Changes!
It’s the demand of our eyes.

The rock band Kino’s 1986 song “Changes” was a famous anthem across Eastern Europe that presaged the Soviet Union’s collapse. It was blocked from Belarusian radio airwaves during past periods of protest. The crowd cheered louder, emboldened by one another’s enthusiasm. Diana pushed forward with Tima in her arms. The two young D.J.s stood with their arms raised above their turntables in silence, unflinching, as the music blasted. One had his fingers up in a V for victory with a bit of white cloth — the color of the opposition — wrapped around it; the other had made a fist around a white bracelet.

Journalists surged forward: “Whose idea was this?” “Aren’t you scared?” “You’re not afraid of losing your job?”

The D.J.s replied that they were just doing what they thought was right. Almost immediately, they were arrested. Roughly a week later, residents woke up to a large black-and-white mural of the D.J.s with their arms raised.

Diana would eventually learn it had all been an accident — the mural was never meant to be there. Some guys had wanted to stick it on the wall where the D.J.s played the song, but the cops drove by, and they lost their nerve. Since they had everything ready to go, they glued the mural to the first safe place they encountered — their buildings’ own playground.

But if it had started as an accident, perhaps the rest of it was fated. If the mural had been placed elsewhere, Diana thought, maybe it would have vanished. Maybe when the authorities decided to paint over it, as they had so much other revolutionary graffiti, no one would have stopped them. But the residents of the newly named Square of Change noticed. The mural meant something to them, and they would ensure it would come to mean something to the entire nation.

For more than two decades, Belarusians had existed in an equilibrium of quiet authoritarianism. If the repressions didn’t directly touch them, most people tolerated them. The country’s national anthem started with “We, Belarusians, are a peaceful people,” and a common proverb to describe the national psyche was “maya hata s krau” — which translates roughly to “my house is on the side.” Whatever is happening outside my family is none of my business. But over the course of 2020, a country whose history and identity never much interested a majority of people who lived there became something they would sacrifice their lives for. Before the battle over the mural became a symbol of the nation they would call New Belarus, there were just three nondescript buildings in the middle of a city of two million, a courtyard set around a children’s playground: swings, a seesaw and a roundabout, surrounded by benches.

In 1991, the year before Diana was born, the leaders of Belarus, Russia and Ukraine negotiated the end to the U.S.S.R. at a hunting lodge in western Belarus. Diana’s compatriots were among the least interested in independence — 83 percent of Belarusians had voted against it. Still, they emerged one day into a new reality of seismic proportions; their state, their ideology and all the order they knew had melted away. As an only child after perestroika, Diana was allowed to do whatever she wanted, too young and too loved to realize the real toll of the upheaval running through the former Soviet empire.

Diana grew up on the outskirts of Mogilev, a city roughly 120 miles from Minsk, due east toward the Russian border. Her neighborhood, the Eighth, was split — half was cop territory, with a police academy and officer housing, and the other half, where she lived, was called banditski. In the chaos of the 1990s, she recalls, everyone knew that if a cop came to the bandits’ side, it would end poorly. Her parents straddled the new divide neatly — her mother worked for the state, while her father worked the corner. He tried everything to get in on the new economy. He drove plush toys from Smolensk, Russia, hawked meat at an open-air market and thumbed stacks of rubles on the black-market currency exchange.

Their family, like most Belarusian families, spoke Russian at home. Belarus had not existed autonomously within its present borders before it belonged to the U.S.S.R. It had been part of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania — sharing its medieval capital, writers and historic heroes with present-day Lithuania and Poland — before being absorbed into the Russian empire. In 1918, an independent Belarusian state was declared and existed for a few months, before being swallowed into the Soviet project.

During World War II, Belarus was the center of hostilities between the Nazis and the Soviets — at least two million people were killed on Belarus’s land. Minsk was bombed so brutally, the Wehrmacht had to wait for the fires to subside so they could enter the city. Whether because of extermination, displacement or deportation, by the end of the war, Belarus was missing half its population. Under Stalin, Belarus underwent rapid industrialization, urbanization and Russification. The capital was rebuilt and later awarded “Hero City” status for its suffering in what the Soviet Union called the Great Patriotic War. By the mid-1980s, only a third of the country spoke Belarusian in daily life.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, a new generation of leaders rose in the former republics, but Belarus remained under old Soviet nomenklatura rule even after independence. Though the red-and-green Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic flag was swapped for the red-and-white flag of the Belarusian National Republic that existed for a few months in 1918, previous institutions other than the Communist Party remained intact.

Belarus’s leadership was slower to embark on market reforms than Russia or Ukraine, whose torturous adventures into unfettered capitalism in the ’90s Belarusians watched with trepidation. In Belarus, too, as the economy was liberalized, standards of living dropped, while criminality climbed. Diana didn’t remember the food lines, but her grandmother often told her that while life in the Soviet Union was difficult, it was stable, and the people were kinder.

Lukashenko made his entrance into this morass. The former head of a small collective farm, he was elected to Parliament in 1990 but remained unknown until he became head of an anticorruption committee three years later. He shot to fame after giving a speech denouncing high-level corruption on the floor of the legislature when he was 39. Lukashenko presented himself as a mix of everyman populist and cherry-picked Soviet-nostalgist, bellicose and bombastic. He defeated Prime Minister Vyacheslav Kebich with 80 percent of the vote in the 1994 presidential election.

Almost immediately after taking power, Lukashenko began to impose autocratic rule. He censored state media; he closed Belarus’s only independent radio station and several newspapers. Lukashenko stripped powers from the Parliament. He oversaw a referendum to resurrect Soviet national symbols and made Russian a state language. In 1999, Belarus and Russia signed a treaty that committed them to merging into a confederal state at some future point. (At the time, President Boris Yeltsin of Russia was so sick and unpopular, Lukashenko believed he might head the eventual union.)

While Putin’s Russia worked hard to rehabilitate discredited Soviet symbolism, Lukashenko’s Belarus easily revived his favorite old Soviet traditions — unpaid working Saturdays called subbotniks and holidays like the Great Patriotic War’s Victory Day on May 9. By the end of the ’90s, Lukashenko controlled all executive and judicial authorities, the Central Election Commission, unions and the military and law-enforcement structures. Through a 2004 constitutional referendum, he abolished presidential term limits.

In some ways, Lukashenko’s autocracy outgrew even the U.S.S.R.’s model. Belarus had no ruling party, no place to incubate rivals or create factions — the elites existed at Lukashenko’s pleasure. The president made all key personnel and economic decisions, including the appointment and dismissal of heads of cities and districts, lower-court judges and directors of major factories. The K.G.B. was never disbanded. Instead, “curators” were placed in important institutions.

Because Belarus was slow to privatize, oligarchs never had much of a chance to materialize. Half of the economy remained under state control. Lukashenko instituted a short-term job-contract scheme in the state sector, which was used to target anyone who became too political. Placements in institutions of higher learning were similarly weaponized. Independent journalists were jailed intermittently and then released, the steady two-step of a repressive state.

By the time Diana was in seventh grade, even she could sense it. Every year, the same droll history class on the first day of school — the Belarusian flag is red and green, the president is Lukashenko, they would intone. “Lukashenko, Lukashenko. Will we ever hear someone else’s name?” Diana joked, drawing laughter from the other students.

Lukashenko’s was a soft authoritarian system, with the requisite window dressings. If you were a private nonpolitical citizen, you were unlikely to encounter the K.G.B. There was little fear of serious consequence for an ordinary citizen making a joke. People could openly talk about hating the president in cafes; they could make fun of his often nonsensical ramblings. They could mock his mustache, his combover and his rural accent.

There were small, unpopular opposition parties, which were allowed to rent office space in the capital. They registered for elections. There was no personality cult — no portraits, streets or statues dedicated to the Great Leader. Instead, the regime relied on technicalities, like an article in the criminal code covering insults to the president, which it used to persecute critics. The authorities rarely shuttered publications outright, preferring to impose crippling fines instead.

But most crucially, for well over a decade, Lukashenko was genuinely popular. A level of propaganda undergirded his rule, reinforcing the perception of a social pact in which the state would provide for the citizen. Lukashenko relished his supporters’ calling him Batka — Father. Most experts agree he would have won elections without rigging them. Belarus’s economic growth hovered in and around the double digits. The economy was buttressed by money the state earned refining duty-free Russian oil and gas and reselling it. Excluding the Baltics, Belarus was the former Soviet republic with the highest standard of living. Belarus’s per capita G.D.P. was nearly twice that of neighboring Ukraine. Life expectancy was higher than in Russia.

For a long time, Belarusians had some faith in their justice system. Everyone knew there were two parallel tracks — cases involving the government and everything else. The country had escaped much of the petty corruption of the post-Soviet neighborhood — under Lukashenko, the traffic police did not make it a practice to shake down drivers; the bureaucracy didn’t operate on bribes. Courts ruled relatively impartially in civil cases. Even the political cases had a certain logic to them. Independent lawyers fumed at the sentences for activists and politicians, and international human rights groups slammed politically motivated verdicts, but only those in the “opposition ghetto,” as it was called, received outlandish sentences.

The opposition itself was not very popular, embroiled in its own internal scandals — often tarred by the regime as being made up of nationalists, fascists or hooligans. They were in a minority anyway. Most citizens steered clear of anything political, and many believed what their TVs told them. Diana did her best to avoid her high school boyfriend’s brother, who she knew traveled to Minsk to attend protests. She would see people on TV scuffling with the police and throwing Molotov cocktails. “Aren’t you afraid of him?” she asked her boyfriend. What if he’s hiding something in his room, like a grenade? She tried to make sure they didn’t cross paths.

When she got to university in Minsk, where she studied materials science, Diana realized she had been fooled by state television. In 2011, runaway inflation struck the country — there was a major currency devaluation, and the regime imposed price controls on basic goods and food. People in Minsk gathered to clap in civil disobedience. Diana was curious and went out to watch. The assembled were absolutely peaceful, she marveled, nothing like how they were portrayed on TV, but nearly 2,000 people were detained, more than 500 of whom were given five-to-15-day sentences.

The authorities responded with their usual farce — they banned applause unless directed at veterans. They arrested a one-armed man for clapping. They accused a deaf and mute man of shouting anti-government slogans. When people started to protest by flash mob, the authorities banned standing around doing nothing in a group.

Diana graduated in 2014 directly into a process-engineering job at Minsk Gear Works, part of the Minsk Tractor Works — one of Belarus’s largest manufacturers. Every morning at work, Diana opened Tut.by — the country’s most popular news portal — and read the headlines over coffee. She couldn’t open other independent media on the government computers, but Tut.by was allowed. The portal was started in 2000 by the businessman Yuri Zisser, often referred to as Belarus’s Steve Jobs, and was read by 62 percent of the population, reaching people across the political spectrum. The regime had invested heavily in telecommunications infrastructure and left most of it alone, focusing efforts on television propaganda.

The year Diana started her job, Ukrainians staged mass protests that toppled the government after President Viktor Yanukovych bowed to Russian pressure and halted plans for an economic-alignment agreement with the European Union. Taking advantage of the chaos, Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula. Fighting broke out with Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine. It was nonstop news in Minsk, with everyone glued to the daily developments.

Lukashenko, who often played Russia and Europe against each other for his own gain, did not recognize the annexation of Crimea and refused to join the Kremlin’s boycott of the West. Since Putin’s election in 2000, relations between the two presidents had been strained. Russia subsidized the Belarusian economy and by extension kept Lukashenko in power, but Lukashenko rarely made it easy for the Kremlin. Belarus was an important transit country for Russian gas exports to Europe, and Lukashenko knew Putin was loath to see political instability along the border. For years, Putin had pushed for closer ties, economic and military, based on the 1999 union agreement, but Lukashenko balked. Though Belarus agreed in 2014 to join Russia’s version of the E.U., the Eurasian Economic Union, Lukashenko stalled Russian demands for a new air base in Belarus. He wavered on extending leases on two military facilities.

Watching the 2014 invasion of Ukraine, Lukashenko seemed to decide that an overreliance on the Kremlin could lead Belarus to the same fate. He flirted with the European Union and the United States and began a limited political liberalization, marketing Belarus as a Slavic Switzerland — a neutral country where negotiations and peace talks, like the Minsk Accords for a cease-fire in eastern Ukraine, could be held. Most Belarusians agreed — they didn’t want to be part of the E.U., nor did they want to merge with Russia. The status quo was fine.

Lukashenko began to tolerate more expressions of Belarusian national identity, encouraging the Belarusian language, elements of pre-Soviet history and national symbols, like traditional embroidery on the national soccer team’s uniforms. For the first time since the 1990s, he gave a speech in Belarusian.

In 2018, after a three-year state-subsidized maternity leave, Diana found it difficult to go back to the factory. Most people just sat around doing nothing but drinking tea and living the Soviet adage, “We pretend to work, they pretend to pay us.” She had divorced her husband, a college boyfriend of two and a half years, and was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease shortly after Tima was born. She needed a job that could provide her with paid time off and sick leave.

The first vacation she took, Diana and Tima went to Cyprus to sit by the sea. She was on her hotel balcony while Tima napped, when she read an article on Tut.by about the average salary in Belarus. She was shocked to learn that it was three times what she was making as an engineer at a state factory. She had been doing nails on the side ever since university, having fallen in love with it when she got her first manicure for high school graduation, and thought she could make more as a full-time nail technician in the private sector. The first thing she did when she got back to Minsk was put in her notice.

Diana had been active on her building’s Telegram group chat as soon as she moved into her apartment in 2018. People were polite, willing to help out when asked — like when she had a problem with her radiator or needed to borrow a carrot to finish making soup. In March 2020, when Covid hit, Lukashenko dismissed the virus as “psychosis” that could be treated with a shot of vodka, a tractor ride or a sauna visit. There was no lockdown, and citizens were left to fend for themselves. The residents’ chat exploded with news — true and false. When people began damaging the elevator by using their keys to press the buttons, other residents implored them to use their knuckles. Arguments broke out.

Stepan Latypov, who lived on the 16th floor, chimed in. He explained that he was an arborist and took it upon himself to message the group with information. Hospitals were running out of supplies, infection rates were spiking, doctors were being silenced for speaking the truth and deaths were being covered up. Stepan, an outgoing 41-year-old divorcé with a pet hedgehog, posted photos of oxygen cylinders and explained that he had three in his apartment. If anyone needed them in an emergency, they could write to him.

Vasili Logvinov, a 38-year-old computer programmer on the 13th floor, followed along avidly. He and his wife had a toddler. Vasili had never really bothered to meet any of his neighbors before but was relieved to learn that there was someone in the building they could trust.

In April 2020, a group of activists started ByCovid-19, a crowd-funded volunteer initiative that raised 370,000 euros to purchase 450,000 pieces of personal protective equipment, oxygen cylinders, oxygen splitters, pulse oximeters and more. The regime could have blocked the effort in a pen stroke, but instead the Health Ministry coordinated with ByCovid-19. State TV praised their work. It was the largest and most successful civic action that Belarusians had ever coordinated.

Covid was the great equalizer — it was impossible to stay detached, to maintain maya hata s krau. The regime must have sensed that something was amiss, that the social contract Batka had relied on for so long was fraying.

After the elections were scheduled for August, a handful of new candidates with no political experience announced that they would run. Sviatlana’s husband, Sergei, the populist video blogger, traveled the country talking to ordinary citizens, documenting poverty and highlighting the failures of the regime. He carried around a slipper and shouted, “Stop the cockroach!” Diana found him crude, and like many young professionals, she preferred Viktor Babariko, the chairman of Belgazprombank. Vasili, the coder, preferred Valery Tsepkalo, a former diplomat who started Hi-Tech Park in 2005, Belarus’s successful version of Silicon Valley.

No one understood where these neophytes had come from. Rumors swirled that they were Russian plants sent to remove Putin’s disdained ally. After Lukashenko distanced himself from Russia in the wake of the Crimean annexation, Moscow had shown its ire. The Kremlin tried to increase the price Belarus paid for oil, while Belarus tried to raise gas transit taxes. Lukashenko repeatedly complained that the Kremlin was trying to bully Minsk into a union with Russia. As relations deteriorated, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo became the highest-level U.S. official to visit Belarus in decades. When the presidential campaign began, Lukashenko openly accused Russian oligarchs and “higher” people of interference. He detained 33 mercenaries from a Kremlin-linked security contractor, the Wagner Group, whom he claimed had been dispatched to depose him.

By mid-July, all three candidates had been removed from the ballot — two were in jail, and one fled the country in anticipation of his own detention. The campaigns united under Sviatlana, who was running on three demands — release of political prisoners, curtailed powers for the president and free elections. Charismatic and earnest, she was adored for her image as a Decembrist’s wife — women who had given up their lives and followed their husbands to exile in Siberia.

The day of the vote, Diana waited in line for hours at her polling place. Sviatlana’s Telegram channel had asked supporters to come with a white ribbon so independent observers could keep track of them. Around her, everyone was wearing white bracelets, some made of torn shirts, even medical gauze. A platform called Golos, a word that means both vote and voice, asked everyone to take photos of both sides of the ballot paper and then upload them to the platform, which would provide an alternative poll count. Diana took photos of her ballot as Golos requested.

The next day the Central Election Commission announced preliminary results that Lukashenko had won with 80 percent. Golos later tabulated that Sviatlana won at least 56 percent of the vote. If the results had been less lopsided, perhaps nothing would have happened, but now there was a general feeling of indignation: Did they really expect people to doubt their own eyes? Did they really think Belarusians would accept this outrageous figure meekly? In seven years of relative liberalization, as Belarusians like Diana had come of age, they had forgotten what totalitarianism was capable of.

For three days, the wide boulevards and tidy parks of downtown Minsk were full of protesters, most of whom had ventured into the streets for the first time. They were met by riot police, tear gas and stun grenades so loud the residents could hear the echoes in their homes. The authorities cut off the internet — the only way to understand what was happening was to go outside.

One of Diana’s neighbors, a mother in her 40s, drove downtown with a friend. On one corner, she watched five siloviki beat one unarmed protester. On another, she saw two young men running away as the siloviki sicced dogs on them. At a junction, a silovik in full riot gear was running after someone; when he missed the protester, he started beating the mother’s car instead. She curled into a ball and waited for the assault to end. She had never had a reason to fear the siloviki before.

Nearly 7,000 protesters were arrested in four days. Hundreds were beaten and tortured. Lukashenko called protesters “drug addicts” and “prostitutes.” Human Rights Watch documented prolonged stress positions, electric shocks and threats of rape. The group counted broken bones, cracked teeth, skin abrasions, inflicted electrical burns, kidney damage and traumatic brain injuries. It was an unprecedented level of brutality by the regime. On the fourth day after the election, hundreds of women carrying flowers formed a chain in the central market in Minsk, twisting Slavic misogyny in their favor. The siloviki didn’t know what to do — could they beat the women or arrest them or what?

That night, Stepan messaged the building chat that they should do something, but there was so much fear, no one knew what would be safe. They decided to shout “Long live Belarus! Leave!” from their windows. The next night, Diana joined a small group gathered by the building entrance. Everyone was timid and anxious, but they shouted and waited. Nothing happened. The night after that, they ventured to the children’s playground and shouted slogans from there. The following day, they called to their neighbors to join them.

In mid-August, the buildings woke up to the D.J. mural. Stepan messaged the building chat that everyone should come to the playground. Residents arrived with thermoses. They hung red and white ribbons on their fence and began to gather for tea every night. A few mornings later, the building chat pinged with a message:

“The mural was painted over.”

“The paint is not very good!” someone replied. “Looks like the municipal workers saved money and mixed the paint with water!”

“Let’s wash it off!”

Diana was already at the salon, but Vasili joined a dozen others with rags and water. The paint rubbed off easily. The D.J.s re-emerged from the gray background.

In the chat, meanwhile, others were composing a letter:

Dear Citizen of the Republic of Belarus constantly painting over the current mural with persistence worthy of another use,

We appreciate your hard work, whether you work under compulsion or out of personal conviction. After all, we ourselves had to work hard to build these beautiful houses, playground and this exit from the parking lot that our authorities dislike so much. We appreciate all work and even though we don’t agree with you, we want you to be happy. It hurts to see the camera recordings where you have such a sad face. Smile. Go to the coffee house at 62 Chervyakova Street. There is paid coffee and cookies for you and your comrade. Every labor should bring joy. (Thank you for putting down a tarp.)

— Tenants of the yard.

They hung it next to the mural and waited.

By the end of August, Lukashenko’s system seemed to be teetering. Hundreds of thousands of citizens had joined weekly Sunday marches demanding a recount. State-run factories held walkouts. Siloviki publicly handed over their badges. State-TV journalists resigned or even dared to air segments devoted to the protests. On a visit to Minsk Wheel Tractor Plant, Lukashenko was greeted with loud boos and shouts of “Leave!” He appeared shaken and vowed that they would have to kill him first.

One Sunday march, Lukashenko reportedly took to the skies in a helicopter, buzzing over the crowds. He returned to the presidential palace and stalked the grounds brandishing a Kalashnikov with his 15-year-old son, Nikolai, wearing a bulletproof vest and condemning the “rats.”

Neighborhood and building courtyard chats had proliferated around Minsk to coordinate smaller actions. Residents of Diana’s building sewed giant red-and-white flags and hung them off the balconies, spanning four floors. Then Stepan, the arborist, strung up a home-sewn red-and-white flag between two buildings, using children’s socks stuffed with uncooked rice as weights. Almost immediately, a fire truck arrived to take it down, but the firefighters couldn’t figure out how to get on the roof. They sat in their truck all night, waiting. By morning, one line had sagged, and they were able to cut the rope. But they still couldn’t get on the second building’s roof to cut the line on the other side, so they left to find a door cutter. Stepan quickly pulled the cut side back up again. When the siloviki returned with the fire truck, dressed in all black, the whole group stormed the building. “Look, it’s Special Operation Flag!” residents taunted on their neighborhood chat.

And so it became a routine. Each time the municipality painted over the mural, the residents came right back down to wipe the paint off. Whenever they cut down the ribbons on the fence, the group put them back up again. One day in September, the residents had to wash the paint off twice in one day. At some point the authorities seemed to tire of cutting the ribbons and a man came with a blowtorch and burned them instead. Someone had made a Square of Change sign in the same style and lettering as all the street signs in Minsk, white letters against a blue background. When the authorities knocked it down, residents nailed it back.

People had started making pilgrimages to the Square, taking photos of themselves against the famous backdrop. Visitors left gifts — candies, honey, cookies and notes of support. They came from other parts of Belarus or as far away as Moscow and Vilnius. A Belarusian American from Florida visiting Minsk came to take a photograph. Someone programmed “Square of Change” into Yandex — the Russian Google Maps equivalent, which is widely used in Belarus — and it was official.

The Square became its own universe. It had a Telegram channel, an Instagram account and a Facebook page. There were Square of Change sweatshirts and stickers. Dozens of residents would gather there every evening. Unlike the Minsk streets or weekly citywide Sunday marches, where people continued to be detained, the courtyard felt safe, like an island of freedom where residents could create the community they had long been denied.

One day in the middle of September, the authorities returned to the mural. This time, Stepan and a few others stood in front of the booth, blocking their access. Stepan asked the officers wearing balaclavas to identify themselves. “If you show your credentials, we will, of course, follow the orders of any policeman,” Stepan repeated loudly and calmly, his hands behind his back. Two siloviki in ski masks grabbed him and carried him away. Residents blocked the police car with their bodies and filmed the whole encounter. “Take off your mask!” they shouted. “Show your face! Introduce yourselves! This is our children’s playground!” An unmarked van pulled up, and a group of men in green, wearing ski masks, ran out. They grabbed Stepan, threw him in the van and sped off.

That night, the residents gathered to discuss what happened. Diana thought maybe he would be held overnight, maybe for a few days at most. But the following week, Stepan was still in detention, and state television ran a program saying prosecutors knew he was planning to poison the police. They accused him of being the organizer of the Square of Change and said they found chemicals and murderous plans in his house.

Everyone was incredulous. The group decided that they would show the authorities who the real organizers were. They printed masks with Stepan’s face on them and took photos: “We are all Stepan Latypov,” they posted on Instagram.

But the initial optimism was fading. Peaceful marches were shrinking as attendance became more dangerous. During the postelection melee, Sviatlana had been detained and forced into exile in Lithuania. From Vilnius, she had started calling herself the “leader of democratic Belarus.” A quasi-state had reconstituted itself around her as other political figures, NGO workers, campaigners and civic activists fled or were driven out of the country to Ukraine, Georgia, Lithuania or Poland. Those who had not fled were arrested; there were no protest leaders left in Minsk.

Putin had publicly congratulated Lukashenko on his victory soon after the election, but his patron had made no other large-scale moves of support. Pragmatists knew their fate was tied to Moscow. Given the personal animosity between the two leaders and the rumors that the opposition candidates were actually Kremlin-approved plants, people thought perhaps Putin would withdraw his support for Lukashenko. Sviatlana and the opposition had taken pains to paint themselves as Russia and E.U. neutral. This had nothing to do with wanting to join the E.U. or NATO, they said — they just wanted free elections.

But in mid-September, Lukashenko and Putin met in Sochi, and the Kremlin extended a $1.5 billion loan, cementing continued support for Lukashenko’s regime. Lukashenko dug in and reshuffled the security services, promoting hard-liners, and quickly began making overtures to Russia. Some of the gestures were performative — floating the removal from the Constitution of the country’s neutrality — but others were more concrete. He released the Wagner mercenaries, and the Russian National Guard reportedly signed a cooperation agreement with Belarus’s police force to combat “terrorism and extremism.”

Everyone was sure there were siloviki sitting in the open chats, monitoring them. We should start a new secret chat, everyone whispered to one another when they met in the playground. But no one wanted to be the administrator; it was too dangerous. “I’ll do it,” Diana decided. She was tired of hearing everyone repeating the same thing without taking action. The secret chat quickly ballooned with enthusiasts. Diana thought it was getting too big to be secure; she had to be able to trust everyone in the chat. I am Diana, the chat administrator. I want to hear from each of you, privately or publicly. I need your real name and your photo, for security. Don’t be shy. She uploaded a photo of herself and sent it. She tried to meet everyone in person, either at the playground or on a walk. She wanted to find out who they were, what they wanted to accomplish and what skills they had that could help the Square. When it was done, about 60 people remained.

Every Sunday at 7 a.m., Diana wrote out the instructions: “Good morning, guys. Today is a day to be responsible. We are going to a march. Whoever isn’t going, cheer for those who are going. Those who are going: The first thing we do is clear all our history, then wipe our pictures. Good luck to everyone. We’ll meet again tonight.” She would delete the whole chat before she left the house and resurrect it at 5 p.m. with a dummy poll, something like: “How would you rate the weather? 1 to 10?”

Diana previously assigned everyone in the chat a number, and whatever question she posed, each person had to reply with his or her assigned number. If someone responded with another number or didn’t reply at all, Diana assumed that person had been compromised in some way and would remove him or her from the group chat. Every night before midnight, Diana would ask everyone to check in with their numbers.

In the chat, they operated as a democracy, debating future actions, voting on ideas. Diana was a natural leader, stern when she needed to be, unafraid to speak her mind, even if nearly everyone in the group was older than she was.

By October, three months after the election, 16,000 people had been detained. There were 101 political prisoners. Diana instituted safeguards for the chat. If they attended a protest, they should let her know, so she could make sure they made it back. She kept a record of their screen names hidden on a piece of paper in her apartment for that day. At night, she would rip it up into small pieces.

The Square of Change continued to flourish. The members gathered there every evening. They held concerts and performances nearly every night. One evening, residents watched a video of the D.J.s thanking the Square. After the D.J.s’ arrests and a 10-day sentence, they had fled the country. Another night, Sviatlana called in. By November, the residents had added Saturday fairs to the weekly repertoire, bringing food, small items like handmade soaps and art for the kids. Diana had delegated many of the roles — managing content for their Telegram channel and Instagram account, creating the nightly performance schedule. There was even someone in charge of keeping track of the thermoses.

In her apartment, Diana kept a prepacked bag she called a “panic suitcase” filled with items of first necessity to bring to those who were detained. She found a friend who never seemed to mind being woken up in the middle of the night to drive her to detention facilities. When someone was released, the group always greeted them with a cake made by a sympathetic pastry chef with icing that read: Hero of the Square of Change.

On the night of Nov. 11, Diana heard that someone had written “Lukashenko is a sucker” in marker on the parking booth, and she went down with acetone to remove it. She hated when people did vulgar things on the Square. Roman Bondarenko, a 31-year-old store manager whom everyone called Roma for short, came up to Diana beaming. “I quit my job!” He announced happily. An interview for his dream graphic-design job earlier that afternoon had gone well. “Now I will come to the courtyard every day!”

Diana first met Roma after someone speculated in a chat that he was a tihar, a plainclothes policeman, because of the way he dressed, always in black, with his hood pulled over his head. Plainclothes police officers had a habit of monitoring protests. At an earlier gathering on the Square, Diana confronted him.

“Are you a tihar or not?” she asked.

“Me?” He turned toward her, incredulous, his blue eyes wide and earnest. “I’m Roma! I’m not a tihar!” Roma would eventually persuade them of his sincerity when they saw him teaching their children to draw at a Saturday fair.

That night by the booth, Vasili trotted over to them. “We need to leave now,” he said sharply. “Unmarked vans have arrived.” Everyone knew that meant trouble, and they decided to split up for safety. As she walked, Diana noticed strangers on the Square. They were wearing hats, hoods and face masks. After getting into a car with a friend, she messaged the chat: Guys, there are buses in the courtyard. Please do not go out. We will redo the ribbons. Let’s not go out. Everybody got it?

Everyone agreed.

One woman did not see the messages. She came back from the store with her child and confronted the masked men. Another woman walking by joined her. Roma watched from a window.

“I’m going out,” he wrote in the chat.

Seven minutes later, he wrote again. “Come out.”

No one replied. Diana had the feeling something weird was going on. “Guys, what is happening?” she wrote. “Why is it so quiet?”

“There was a fight, some people ran away,” they replied.

“Was anyone taken?”

Residents had access to the buildings’ security cameras, and they started uploading and poring over the footage. In the videos, Diana watched the masked men taunt Roma. It was clear to her he wasn’t there for a fight. Trying to protect the women, he stood with his hands in his pockets. The men started to beat him and carried him away. Diana wasn’t overly worried. It seemed like the usual detention. They would need to locate Roma and bring him the panic suitcase.

They called the precinct a few times and were told there was no one by the name of Roman Bondarenko there. When they called again, they were told Roma had been there, but he had started to feel sick and was sent to the hospital. When they called the hospital, no one picked up. Diana thought maybe they broke his arm or leg when they loaded him into the bus. “We should go there and bring him some stuff,” she wrote the chat. “Give me five minutes.”

A carful of them arrived at the hospital at 2 a.m. After a few tries and incorrect names, the receptionist told Diana that Roma was in surgery. But when Diana called the surgery department, they told her Roma wasn’t there.

“What the hell?” Diana raised her voice. She was tired and angry. “I didn’t get this number off the top of my head! The registrar told me that a Roman came to you. All day today everyone is telling me they didn’t admit Roma.”

The receptionist at the desk beckoned to Diana, passing her another number. Diana looked at her with exasperation.

“I made a mistake,” the receptionist said uncomfortably. “He’s not … in surgery.”

“Then where?”

“Neurosurgery.”

Diana started shaking. She didn’t want to think about what that meant. She took a minute to collect herself. When she called neurosurgery, she learned that Roma had been in the operating room for several hours.

“He was admitted in what state?” Diana asked.

“Unconscious.”

“Thank you.” Diana hung up. They sat down in silence.

Roma died at 7:10 p.m. the next day. All day the large Telegram channels and media carried his story. The group had left the hospital vowing that what happened to Roman Bondarenko in his own backyard would be everywhere. They spent the twilight hours finding Roma’s family to inform them. They also contacted every journalist and channel they could. By evening, the Square was crammed with people holding a vigil more crowded than any previous event.

The following day, there was a minute of silence. It felt as if Minsk froze all at once. As soon as it was over, cars started beeping, and the city wailed in unison. Even more people thronged the Square with candles and flowers. “We won’t forget, we won’t forgive,” they chanted through tears.

The authorities denied responsibility for Roma’s death, saying he had been killed in a fight, while Lukashenko told reporters Roma had been “drunk.” In response, someone leaked a copy of Roma’s medical records, which stated that he had no alcohol in his system. He had died of a hematoma.

Telegram channels began calling for a Sunday march through the city that would end at the Square. Others called for an occupation like the one the Ukrainians had in 2014. The residents of the Square thought this was a terrible idea. “The Square is surrounded on two sides by a metal fence,” they wrote to everyone. “It will be easy for the police to trap everyone and arrest them all.” No one listened. Chat members started patrolling their own courtyard asking people to remove tents and take supplies somewhere else.

That Sunday, the march was enormous. Diana watched from a balcony as people flooded the route. In the afternoon, lines of siloviki moved toward the marchers, cutting them off at different intervals. They were kettling the crowds. Diana rushed downstairs to the entryway just as people started running into the courtyard. Residents had opened the three buildings’ doors and started letting people inside, ushering them up the elevators and the stairs. “Guys, run!” Diana shouted as she watched the black wave of riot police rolling in from one side, then another. Streaks of color raced by her, hurrying through the door. She slammed it shut at the last second.

But the security services soon managed to get in and started going from apartment to apartment. “They’re here,” someone would message. “They’re here too,” another would add.

Since Diana had been the last one upstairs, she hadn’t taken anyone in. She, her mother and Tima sat with the lights off in silence. Her mother was terrified, but Diana wasn’t scared. Since Roma’s death, she had felt nothing but fury. “Why should we be afraid? We are in our own apartment.” Diana turned on the lights and started making noise.

The chat pinged with stories. People had taken up to 20 people per flat. Some refused to open their doors. Others opened them with great theatrics.

“Are there people here?” the siloviki asked.

“Yes, one behind the couch, and two in the closet.”

The siloviki thought they were kidding and left.

Another called her priest. She explained to the seven people she was sheltering that they were congregants of such and such church on such and such street. She taught them some prayers and streamed an online sermon. When the police knocked, she opened the door.

“What is this!” The officer asked, looking at the people seated in the living room.

“We’re listening to the word of God,” she explained. She pushed her screen toward the officer. “Hello!” the priest bellowed.

Two journalists from Belsat TV, an opposition station based out of Warsaw, were livestreaming from the 14th floor. The police flew a drone above the building to find them. They cut the door off the apartment and detained them. They would be sentenced to two years in prison, the first time criminal charges would be applied to journalists covering protests. Around 100 people took shelter in the basement. They spent 16 hours hiding without heat, light and food.

Some officers simply carried people to police vans, while others took the opportunity to punch and kick those they detained. Diana thought about the system that killed Roma. For so many years, they had all been part of it, paying their taxes or working directly for the state. Diana knew each person had just been trying to survive. Then they woke up and constructed the most beautiful version of their country, not just the people of the three buildings but all those people who felt this New Belarus in their hearts. When would they be able to live in that country?

The morning after the march, residents woke to a police patrol that would stay on the Square 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for nearly five months. A pair of officers stood at each building, and three pairs walked the children’s playground. The mural had been painted and repainted so often no one could say exactly how many times, but they thought it was at least 18. Now it was gone again.

The police patrolled the courtyard through the winter snow and spring rain, checking people’s identification papers to make sure they were building residents. All the while, the secret chat continued to agitate. Neighborhood marches were instituted. Members of chats met with other neighborhood chats and went on short, clandestine walks. The residents of the Square staged covert actions in their stairwells, filming five floors of people, their backs to the camera, lined up with a view of the courtyard police patrol in the distance. They took photos behind the parking booth with the white-red-white flag, just under the siloviki’s noses, and posted them online. On the 12th of every month, they released a video to commemorate Roma’s death on their channels. They fantasized endlessly about resurrecting the mural.

The cost of even small protests was rising. By April, there were more than 350 political prisoners. What was previously a five-to-15-day administrative detention was now indefinite pretrial detention with possible criminal charges that carried years of prison time. But if they had put their hands down, mourned and kept silent, what would have been the point of Roma’s death? Diana asked herself. No, they had to keep fighting, putting up stickers and posting photos. Small symbols had grown larger. These ciphers mattered.

On April 8, 2021, the residents woke up to an empty Square — the patrols had vanished. So they started to plan. If the first few times they put up the D.J.s they had done it mostly in the open, they knew better now. They met in the parking garage at midnight on May 8, the eve of the Great Patriotic War’s Victory Day. They all had taken their own routes there to avoid the security cameras. Each one had a task — some were on lookout, others would put up ribbons, some would work on the flag and others would draw the mural. They changed into matching white hazmat suits in the parking lot, wore gloves to hide their fingerprints and grabbed the supplies. They wore headphones, tuned to the same channel and waited.

When they received the signal, Diana and Vasili walked straight to the booth’s wall. Even if someone had screamed at her, Diana was sure she wouldn’t have noticed; her ears were thudding with the sound of her pulse. The D.J. stencil was big. Diana held it for Vasili, and he held it for her. He had climbed the wall and hung off a metal pipe above her. It was as if they were one unit, a mechanism working in tandem. Diana did the bottom and threw the canister up to Vasili, who grabbed it midair and began to paint. He dropped the canister down to her, and she caught it with one hand. The adrenaline hit hard, the kaleidoscopic sensation of being outside her body. They were done in four minutes.

The ribbons were up, the flag was raised, the mural was repainted. They went back to the parking lot, changed and exited the way they planned. They would all walk around the neighborhood for a while, taking different routes, arriving home at different times through different entrances. They were giddy; no one had seen anything. A few hours later, photos of the mural were everywhere — on the news, on Telegram, on Tut.by. The Square of Change had returned.

They were caught the following week. One participant, who went by Tanya, had violated protocol and gone home straight from the parking lot. Her face was everywhere on the security-camera footage. On Friday at 7 a.m., plainclothes police officers arrived at her door. She held them off for an hour, stalling by calling the police on the police.

As word spread through the chat, people panicked. If there was one thing they were sure of, it was the ability of Belarusian security services to break the weakest link — they knew Tanya had a child with a disability, so it wouldn’t take much. They were all worried they would be next. Some started clearing their apartments of anything incriminating. Diana disconnected her buzzer to give herself time to think. She needed to be normal; she needed to take Tima to kindergarten. She went to the bathroom to take a shower. As she turned on the water, she started wiping her phone. There was pounding on the door.

Diana opened it in her towel, half naked. “Hello, I’m in the shower,” she said. “Come in or stay out there, but I have to get dressed.” She went back into the bathroom and cursed to herself. She erased the chat and her contacts. She unsubscribed from opposition Telegram channels. She came out of the bathroom with a clean phone.

The two men said they were from the criminal investigations department. “You know why we are here,” they said. They told her to call Vasili. She told them she didn’t have his contacts. She was showing them her clean phone when an alert flashed. It was a message from Vasili: “Someone is knocking on my door.”

One of the men took Diana’s phone. “Open it, everything is fine,” he typed, and he hit send. Diana was furious but had little recourse. One of the investigators was talkative, bantering about this or that, while the other stood masked and silent in the entryway. They told her she would be coming to the station.

On the way to the local branch of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the talkative one asked her, “Diana, are you in favor of change?” When she told him yes, he asked why. “Because even a husband and wife, if they are not satisfied with something, they do not stay together for 26 years. They get a divorce,” she said. “It’s normal when people change something in their life. They have the right to choose. We don’t have the right to choose. We have only one choice. All my life I have seen only one thing. I was practically born under him, and I will probably die under him.”

“Are you married?” he asked. Diana told him she was divorced. He kept talking while the silent officer drove. Was this a good cop, bad cop routine?

When they got to the station, the quiet one took off his coat, pulled off his mask and threw the papers he was carrying on the table. “Why should I have to deal with this [expletive]?” He started cursing. “Some guys drew some [expletive], what do I have to do now — kill them? I have to run after them? What? I don’t have other things to do?”

Diana had to stop herself from laughing. She had mistaken his silence for intimidation. Now she realized the system was just as fed up with itself as its own citizens were.

There was no way they would get serious charges, Diana told herself. Everyone here recognized this script for what it was. They let someone bring her shawarma; they asked her if she was sure her phone was “OK” to be handed in as evidence. The system had cracks where humanity came through. Then in the afternoon, they announced that her case was being transferred to another investigator. The investigator sighed when he saw who. Someone else came in and cuffed her hands behind her back.

Diana refused to talk. They put her in a 4-foot-by-6-foot cell with a concrete bench and no windows. Later, she was joined by four sex workers, and in the evening, they brought Tanya in.

She had been in interrogation all day. Her eyes were wide, and she was trembling. Tanya explained that she had told the investigators that Diana was the administrator of the secret chat and that Diana and Vasili had drawn the mural. “They tortured me,” she told Diana. “I said the first name I could think of. They said if you just tell us everything right now, we will let you go home.”

At 2 a.m., they brought them to the paddy wagon that would take them to the temporary detention facility. Diana faced the wall. Behind her a voice shouted:

“Any abrasions on your body?”

“No.”

“There will be.”

“Are you pregnant?”

“No.”

“You will be!”

Diana turned around and saw a boy who couldn’t have been older than 18, shorter than her by a foot, poorly playing the role of intimidator. “Even your jokes are beneath you,” she retorted.

Diana was charged under Article 341, the desecration of structures and damage to property, punishable by up to three years in prison. She remained hopeful that the investigators were simply following protocol. She decided she would not be afraid.

Every third person Diana knew had gone through this. It was like watching a movie someone had spoiled the plot of. Oh, so the light really is on all the time, Diana marveled. It’s true that it’s cold as hell here. The food really is inedible. When she realized she was being deprived of a mattress and sheets, she knew the case was being tried on political grounds — everyone said it was only in political cases that the authorities removed the bedding. Still, compared with others, she thought she was being treated relatively well. No one had laid a hand on her.

Diana was shuffled between the detention center and the station all weekend. She ate one meal in three days. She started thinking she was glad Tanya had named her and Vasili. She couldn’t think of better people to withstand this kind of pressure and keep their mouths shut.

The investigator had the option of letting Diana and Vasili out on bail, but he chose among the most punitive measures of restraint available. Vasili remained in pretrial detention and was taken directly to a prison about 35 miles northeast of Minsk. Diana, as a single mother, was put under house khimiya, similar to house arrest. She was prohibited from going outside except for travel to and from work. She couldn’t even take Tima to school. She was not allowed to use her phone or the internet until her and Vasili’s joint court date in August.

The morning Diana returned to work, the salon received a visit from the health department for “violations.” No one needed to be told what to do: Diana’s boss fired her and said they might have to close the salon because of pressure from the regime. All the adrenaline from days of detention vanished. Diana lost her job and could cost her co-workers theirs. That night, because she was banned from using her phone, she wrote a letter on paper to pass to her chat. She asked them to protect one another, then she sat down on the couch.

She had nothing to do — no job, no social life. Even her son was away all day. She fell into a deep depression, and for two months, she only ate and slept. She didn’t want anyone to see her, to touch her, to look at her. She gained 20 pounds. Around her, the New Belarus they built was collapsing — nothing they did had made any difference.

Throughout the country, repression had seeped in like gas, slowly tainting the air they breathed. A 75-year-old had been fined for posting a photo with a white-red-white marshmallow; a woman was arrested for wearing track pants with white-red-white stripes; a man was fined for hanging a piece of paper that said “This is not a flag”; a 65-year-old returning from church was arrested for carrying a red-and-white umbrella; a woman was arrested while dancing around a Christmas tree for “active participation in an unauthorized meeting”; two young women dressed as Santa Claus were detained for giving candy to children; a woman was prosecuted for wearing white socks and red sneakers.

According to the Belarusian Association of Journalists, the authorities detained about 400 journalists on administrative charges between August 2020 and March 2021; at least 100 were given short jail terms. The authorities moved forward with laws that would make it illegal for journalists to “discredit” the state, thereby prohibiting any criticism of the regime.

On May 18, Tut.by’s offices were raided. The state detained 15 employees, including the editor in chief, the general director, journalists, project managers and accountants. Tut.by was charged with tax evasion and declared “extremist.” Belarus’s pre-eminent publication was destroyed. The outlet’s remaining journalists fled to Kyiv and started running a news website called Zerkalo, which means mirror.

In late May, a Ryanair flight en route to Vilnius from Athens was forced to land in Minsk because of an apparent bomb threat. After the plane landed, authorities detained Roman Protasevich, a 26-year-old former editor of NEXTA, a Telegram channel with over two million subscribers that had publicized and promoted the large protests. Days after his arrest, Protasevich appeared on state television, bruised, declaring that he was being treated well and that he was indeed responsible for “organizing mass riots.”

The E.U. added a fourth round of sanctions and blocked most flights to and over Belarus. Lukashenko responded by prohibiting Belarusians from leaving the country altogether; only those who had permanent-resident status in other countries or a few official exemptions could cross. In June, Belarus’s premier human rights organization, Viasna, recognized Vasili as a political prisoner — he was one of 608 by the first anniversary of the stolen election.

Diana’s cousin had passed her the Telegram contact of a man named Feodor, who promised to help those facing political prosecution flee Belarus. Diana knew nothing more about him. She used a second phone to contact him, and he asked her to fill out a verification form. When he got in touch with her to coordinate her escape, Diana realized she didn’t even have the energy to save herself.

That month during a court proceeding in Minsk, Stepan, the arborist, tried to kill himself. He had told his father the authorities were pressuring him to plead guilty or else they would come after his friends and family. Standing in the prisoner’s cage in the courtroom, Stepan plunged a pen into his neck and collapsed on the bench. He was taken to surgery in a hospital and later put back in jail. He was sentenced to eight and a half years in prison.

In mid-July, Belarusian authorities in at least 10 cities searched more than 60 homes and offices of major organizations, including the Belarusian Association of Journalists; PEN Belarus, whose president is the Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich; the country’s oldest independent newspaper and even groups working with senior citizens and those with disabilities. Lukashenko signed a decree that those caught participating in extremist activities or causing grievous harm to the interest of the republic could be deprived of citizenship.

Two months into her house arrest, Diana downloaded a morning workout app and started moving, just a few minutes every day. She began ironing. Then did the dishes. And slowly she woke up to a reality even worse than the one she knew before. Sentences had become cartoonish — one presidential candidate was sentenced to 14 years in prison in a closed trial. It was clear she would have to run.

Diana and Vasili’s trial took place over two days. It went exactly as expected. Vasili was sentenced to two years. Diana was sentenced to two more years of home khimiya. That night, Diana told Vasili she had made all the arrangements for them. They had to get out of Belarus.

Diana could not leave Tima behind and did not want to risk smuggling him across a border. If she left without him or was imprisoned, the state could take custody of Tima and put him in an orphanage. Feodor came up with a plan, though he couldn’t give her details. He never disclosed the entire route in case someone was detained along the way.

One evening in late August, Diana put on warm leggings, a tank top, a T-shirt, a long-sleeve shirt and a thin jacket. She packed her Crohn’s medications, two T-shirts, three pairs of underwear and two sets of socks. Feodor had told her that she should bring no more than what she could fit into a backpack.

It was 7 p.m. when Diana had to say goodbye to her mother. They refused to cry. “You go, set yourself up and then I’ll come to you,” her mother told her.

“Why are you always chasing me?” Diana joked. “I moved from Mogilev to Minsk, you followed me. I moved into an apartment, you followed me into a second apartment. Sit yourself in your Belarus!”

Diana and Tima boarded a microbus with a young college student they met 24 hours earlier. They traveled together to the official border, and then Diana sent Tima on with the stranger. They told him they were playing a game called “spies.” He had to stay very, very quiet and alert. She didn’t tell him she had no idea when they would see each other again. She didn’t let him see her upset. The college student messaged her when they had made it across.

‘I hope that when my son asks, “Dad, what have you done for justice in Belarus?” I will tell him, “I spent time in jail for my country.” ’

Diana and Vasili had been joined by Alex, another I.T. worker, who was fleeing a possible prison sentence for a comment he made online. The three of them settled into a rented apartment in another city and waited. Diana worried about Tima. She knew he was in Kyiv, in a house full of other recent arrivals, but wasn’t sure exactly where or whom he was with. They spoke every day, but other than that, Diana had to trust Feodor’s network.

Diana, Vasili and Alex were told they should be ready to cross at any time, but days stretched into weeks. They talked about Feodor constantly. They debated who should be the one to message him to remind him they existed. They couldn’t tell anyone where they were or what was happening to them. Diana had told the chat that she had come down with Covid and was visiting her grandmother’s village to recover. Sometimes, alone, Diana wept. It was taking so long. It had gotten cold, and she didn’t have any warm clothes. Vasili gave her his sweatshirt. “When will this be over?” she asked herself.

One day in October, after six weeks of waiting, Feodor called. “Today,” he said. “Now. Gather your things. You’re leaving.”

They got in a car with their guide. Three men sat in the back seat, and Diana lay on top of them for hours on bumpy roads. They threw away their SIM cards and turned off their phones. They walked across in the direction they were pointed. Deep in the woods, Diana felt a tinge of fear, but her adrenaline overpowered it. She tore her pants scrambling over barbed wire. Alex ripped his coat. When they arrived in Ukraine, they jumped up and down like children.

“There are particles of freedom in the air!” they screamed.

Vasili and Diana walked into a coffee shop in downtown Kyiv to meet me. It was already cold in the middle of October, and they had arrived in Ukraine’s capital the week before. They were planning to continue on to Poland, but that required paperwork and more waiting. Vasili’s wife and son were taking the bus from Belarus to Ukraine through an official border crossing later that day, and he was nervous — maybe someone had caught wind of his escape, and his family would be punished for his crimes. Diana had picked up Tima, who didn’t recognize her at first. “You didn’t have that sweater before,” he said.

When I met Diana and Vasili again later that day for dinner, they wore matching hoodies that read “I live on the Square of Change,” with the logo of the two D.J.s. Vasili was distracted. His family was on the bus. Toward the end of our meal, after recounting the outlines of their experience, he grew melancholy. They had done so much to change Belarus and ended up in Ukraine with me instead.

“When a person is killed on your playground and you saw it practically with your own eyes, you cannot unsee it,” he told me. “I hope that when my son asks, ‘Dad, what have you done for justice in Belarus?’ I will tell him, ‘I spent time in jail for my country.’ And if he asks, ‘Why has nothing changed?’ I’ll say, ‘Because your father and a few other people were willing to spend time in jail, while others were not.’”

Diana spoke up: Not everyone was willing or able to serve time. She couldn’t. She was a single mother. Vasili told her that was the point — there were a lot of people with a reasonable excuse. The end result was the same; not enough people joined their movement.

A few weeks later, they would both receive their papers to continue to Poland. Vasili and his family would go to Gdansk and Diana and Tima to Warsaw. I met her there in November, in a partitioned studio apartment where she had spent the mandatory Covid-quarantine period with Tima and Alex. The first day Diana got out of isolation, she cried. She felt a mixture of relief that she had finally made it to freedom and sorrow for everything she had left behind. Warsaw was big and gray and cold. Nothing was familiar. She had set up donation pages on different diaspora websites, but little help had arrived. She was eager to put Tima in school, find a permanent apartment and start looking for work. We attended a Belarusian solidarity protest, which were held weekly in downtown Warsaw. That Sunday it was damp and rainy. The crowd was small. Most people wore masks, concerned about their security even in Poland. We didn’t stay long.

Every time we broached the topic of whether the movement had failed, Diana would say, “The Square of Change is not a place, it is the people.” Though she had fled, others remained, and neither those who left nor those who stayed would give up, she said. Diana still lived inside the chat, spending hours talking and planning. She was not the only one.

Waves of repression over three decades had already created a small, fragmented core of exiled Belarusians in opposition, mostly concentrated in Poland and Lithuania, funded by governments long suspicious of Russian ambitions. Then in 2020 they were joined by new arrivals fleeing the latest crackdown — Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania and Georgia had flexible residency or humanitarian-visa policies toward Belarusians. As more people fled, they called themselves not refugees or exiles but “relocants” — waiting to go home.

In Vilnius, I met Feodor. He was actually two men, who had started the Emergency Relocation Initiative after their own precarious journeys out of Belarus. They estimated that they had helped hundreds of relocants who were not on travel-ban lists cross legally and dozens of illegal relocants, who like Diana were fleeing charges.

I sat with them for a few hours while they guided a young woman across the border through Telegram messages and calls. She had left detention that morning, and they believed she had 24 hours before she ended up on a no-travel list. At one point, she broke down in tears at the border, convinced she would be forced back into Belarusian territory. The Feodors stayed calm and spoke firmly to get her to follow their directions. After an hour of terror, she made it to Ukraine.

Unlike other exiles and refugees, the Belarusians I met over the course of three months in Vilnius, Warsaw and Kyiv had not set about constructing new lives. They kept their Belarusian SIM cards and paid their monthly bills back home. They had apartments in Belarus they hadn’t sold, cars they had parked somewhere. Their immediate family members remained, and so they worried about retaliation. Many had assumed they were leaving for only a month, just long enough for the situation to blow over.

When Sviatlana first arrived in Vilnius, a small army of volunteers joined her, living in a Hilton for months. As the leader of democratic Belarus, Sviatlana traveled constantly. She met Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, President Emmanuel Macron of France and President Biden — advocating for the unfinished revolution and for stronger sanctions against the regime. “Until people are free, you simply cannot stop,” Sviatlana told me in Vilnius.

The new exiles formed various pseudo-state structures around her. There were advisers on the future Constitution and economic reform. A group of former security-service members set up ByPol, short for Belarus Police, working to encourage more defectors, investigate claims of police abuses and release their findings. Another group calling themselves the Belarusian Cyber-Partisans aimed to disrupt regime communications, cripple infrastructure and leak names and addresses of security-service members. A collective of programmers coding pro bono found a way to send donations to Belarus in untraceable peer-to-peer cryptocurrency transfers.

Relocants genuinely believed that Lukashenko’s days were numbered — and that because Lukashenko had created a system based entirely around him, if he went, the regime would crumble instantly. The authorities were trying to sever ties between relocants and those in Belarus by declaring certain Telegram channels extremist and creating a new law that said that those subscribing to their content were part of an “extremist formation.” They made examples of people — a husband and wife who had texted each other links to “extremist” materials had been in detention for four months. People unsubscribed from channels in droves.

By December, despite multiple rounds of sanctions, the regime hadn’t suffered, in large part thanks to Russia’s continued financial support. Belarus’s economy had even benefited from the rise in commodity prices, including that of potash, the country’s second-largest export. For his part, Lukashenko recognized Russia’s annexation of Crimea and signed a 28-point program that moved Belarus and Russia closer to the 1999 union state. Lukashenko and Putin approved a joint military doctrine but no further political integration.

Since the summer, the Lukashenko regime had assisted refugees in flooding the borders of Lithuania and Poland to force the E.U.’s hand on sanctions against his country. Poland, which accepted practically no Syrians in the 2015 refugee crisis but had opened its borders to white, Christian Belarusian protesters, was a billboard for the hypocrisy of the bloc. Lithuania had started constructing a razor-wire fence at the border with Belarus. In November, Polish border guards fired water cannons in freezing conditions at families with children.

Lukashenko seemed to delight in the spectacle of the humanitarian disaster. “You’ve enforced sanctions against me,” he said. “You’ve put a noose on my neck in order to choke me, and you, scoundrels, want me to protect you? It won’t happen.”

When Diana and I met in Warsaw, the crisis was reaching an apex. Lukashenko threatened to cut off gas transit to Europe, but Putin stepped in to undercut him. It wasn’t Belarus’s gas to cut off. The Belarusian regime allowed some reporters in to document the crisis, which is, I suspect, how I ended up with a visa in late December. The press accreditation was good for seven days, effective immediately. “Remember you are coming to prison,” one journalist wrote to me from Minsk as I packed.

At 8:30 p.m., I arrived at Independence Square in the center of Minsk and walked to a sculpture of an architect. I stood in front of it for a minute and took a photo with my phone. The city was glimmering under a light frost. Minsk was austere, brutal and beautiful, as spotless as everyone had promised, but also empty and so cold that being outside burned my skin.

I checked my next instruction: I was supposed to walk to a commemorative plaque, take a photo of that and stand there for a minute. Next, I was supposed to walk to the Minsk Hotel and then down the stairs to a shopping mall, where I was to walk along the hallway, pausing at a Christmas tree. Then I had to take a certain set of stairs to a sofa and sit there, and then go to the parking lot.

Diana had asked the chat members if they would meet me. They agreed and promised to figure out a way to do it safely, and so they sent me something resembling a treasure map with multicolored symbols and a set of instructions. They would be watching, and once they made sure I was alone, they would message me the number of a parking spot.

By the end of 2021, there were 969 political prisoners. I was warned of random spot checks on the street of my phone. There was also the probability that I would have a tail or a minder. Most people were too afraid to meet with a journalist. Others who had agreed to meet wanted to do so outside to check if I was being followed.

As I walked the route, I looked around anxiously. As in any effective totalitarian system, it wasn’t clear whether danger was real or imagined. When I arrived at the dark parking lot, a car flashed its lights, and I got in with a man buried deep under a beanie and a face mask.

He introduced himself with a coiled energy. He was driving and talking with a kind of careless speed, as if he had saved up months of thoughts to share. We reached the Square’s parking lot and went through a side entrance, up the stairs out of view of cameras, and into an apartment where a group was already waiting for me.

At a table laden with chocolate, candies, mandarins and tea, I met Sous-Chef, Shamberbetch, Josephine, Marionetka, Monika and Red, who asked me to use their nicknames for their safety. (When I contacted Tanya, she said that her lawyer advised her not to speak to me.) Over the course of two nights, they joked, bantered and interrupted one another with the easy camaraderie of old college roommates. They thrummed with energy and thoughts they needed to put somewhere. They told me about their acquaintances who had been forced to resign from civil-service positions for having signed for Babariko’s candidacy. Neighbors were reporting on neighbors. Children were forced to pose with the green-and-red flag or recite Lukashenko’s biography. The group couldn’t gather in cafes or anywhere outside of apartments anymore. They knew they could be arrested at any time, yet they laughed so loudly and boldly at the kitchen table, as if the danger were an illusion. This duality was almost impossible to process.

“Technically, we cannot gather in a company of more than three people,” Monika said about our meeting. “They can immediately say that this is a rally.”

“Everything is absurd here,” Marionetka added. “In our court system, it was decided that white is black, and now you live with it. If you say otherwise, we will shoot you. I exaggerate, of course, but nevertheless. This absurdity is in everything, all the time.”

“Those who were against Lukashenko always treated him condescendingly,” Monika said. “This has always amazed me. He will say some nonsense, and people come up with jokes about this. ‘Oh, well, this is our collective farmer, he did something really weird again.’ But in fact he does terrible things.”

“I have an anecdote that will explain this well,” Shamberbetch announced. “Germans captured a Russian, a Belarusian and an American. The American is told, OK, betray your people, where are they hiding? If not, then we will hang you. He’s like, I won’t, and they hang him. They come back in the morning to check if he’s dead, and he is. They call in the Russian. They say, tell us where your fellow partisans are. If not, then we will hang you. He refuses, so they hang him. They come back in the morning to check if he’s dead, and he is. Now, they ask the Belarusian, tell us where the partisans are. He says he won’t, so they hang him. They come back in the morning, and he’s still alive. They’re like how is this possible? He’s like, ‘Well at first it was bothering me over here’” — he gestured to his neck — “ ‘but then I got used to it.’”

The group knew the risks they were taking. “I work remotely,” explained Red, who had seen the August violence with her own eyes. “I hear every shudder behind my door. If someone hits something somewhere, I tighten up all over.” She had developed cysts in her jaw from clenching it too hard. “I understand that if I get taken to the precinct, I’ll likely be put in jail, but I won’t leave. And so, this suspense, it’s endless.”

The only thing they had left were symbols. Two of them wore white rubber bracelets with two tiny D.J.s. When I asked, they explained they knew the danger; a man had recently been picked up in a cafe for wearing a white bracelet when a Lukashenko supporter called the police. Since Roma’s death, each one of them felt their responsibility. There was no space free from the regime. This pressure existed even in its absences — on bare wrists where people had removed their bracelets. If before they had shouted to the patrolmen, “Get out of here!” or “Show your identification!” they had become mute. In that silence, Shamberbetch explained that he heard his own rage even louder. “They thought they would suffocate us, but no way,” he said. “We exist.”

By early February, Belarus had become a satrapy. Thirty thousand Russian troops had moved into the country, including highly trained special-forces units and airborne troops; they brought S-400 antiaircraft systems and hundreds of aircraft, tanks and armored vehicles. Putin and Lukashenko denied that this was a maskirovka, a Russian military deception, but instead pointed to a preplanned joint exercise called “Allied Resolve 2022.” It was the Kremlin’s largest deployment on Belarusian territory since the end of the Cold War. As a result, Russian troops were stationed within a few hundred miles of Kyiv.

No one believed the war was coming. The New Belarus movement was busy preparing to protest a constitutional referendum that would allow Lukashenko to stay in office until 2035 as well as give him lifetime immunity from prosecution once he left. The proposed amendments also included a change removing Belarus’s commitment to be neutral and free of nuclear weapons, which meant the country could host Russia’s nuclear arsenal.

In the early hours of Feb. 24, Russia’s military attacked Ukraine. When I messaged the group, they were horrified. Their country had become one large Russian military base bordering three NATO countries. Lukashenko tried to justify his participation in the Kremlin’s slaughter. “They tightly fastened us to Russia,” he said. “If only Russia collapses, we will be next. And not even next, we will go there together.”

Sviatlana and her supporters immediately announced their firm antiwar position. As the sanctions began to resemble those recently imposed on Russia, the exiled movement maintained that the people inside the country were prepared to suffer. What else could they do to stop Lukashenko now when they had failed to overthrow him already? Not everyone was as convinced. Sanctions risked hurting the average citizen; they had a mixed record of effecting political change.

As the war continued, Belarusian relocants in Kyiv fled farther west, many of them now forced to run for their lives twice in less than a year. In Warsaw, Diana had been working on a plan to open a house for newly arriving Belarusians — a community where people could get advice on residency, refugee status, health care and schools. The group she was working with, Courtyard Activists Abroad, pivoted to providing supplies for Ukrainian refugees. She attended protests at the Belarusian and Russian Embassies. She grappled with a sense of shame. All along they wondered if they could have done more to stop Lukashenko, to free their own people and by extension to stop this war.

“Our guilt is greater than our attempts at justification, because we didn’t finish what we started — our unfinished revolution,” she told me. “Lukashenko is sitting there and cooperating with Russia. This is our fault. For two years, we tried, but we couldn’t overthrow him. Given we screamed that we are the majority, we should have been able to do it. We could have done it. But to say we could or couldn’t is just a discussion; we didn’t even really try. We could have overturned the buses, even if they had 20 siloviki in them. We had thousands in our marches. But we didn’t try. Instead, we were peaceful. We walked with flowers.”

Sviatlana released video after video supporting Ukraine, and she praised the Belarusian volunteers going to fight alongside Ukrainians. The Cyber-Partisans paralyzed Belarus’s railways to prevent Russian military movements. Three rounds of negotiations between Russian and Ukrainian officials have taken place on the Ukrainian-Belarusian border. By the end of March, the Pentagon had counted at least 70 missile launches from Belarusian territory, though no Belarusian troops had been confirmed on the ground in Ukraine. In Minsk, people had begun to fear that they would be forced to fight against their will. If Belarus announced that it was officially at war, men of military age would be barred from leaving the country.

On Feb. 26, the night before the constitutional referendum, the chat members in Minsk decided they would go to the Russian Embassy the next day to protest the war after they went to the polling station to spoil their ballots. There had been no large rallies since the previous winter. It was a huge risk to take to the streets. When they were about to depart for the Russian Embassy, they heard it was surrounded by paddy wagons. Arrests had already been made. The group decided to change course: They would go to the Ukrainian Embassy with flowers instead.

They wandered there alone or in small clusters, taking care to make sure they weren’t being followed. As they approached, they saw that the embassy gates were already covered with yellow and blue flowers. They joined about 50 people who had assembled. Together they chanted “Glory to Ukraine,” “Long live Belarus” and “No war!” A Ukrainian Embassy employee came out of the building and clapped for them. The group clapped back. He walked to the front of the gate and began to sing. Slow and mournful, he intoned Ukraine’s national anthem. They left after half an hour. It was too dangerous to stay longer.

They weren’t the only ones who risked their freedom to take a symbolic stand. Though the regime had spent a year and a half decimating the ranks of the politically active, thousands of Belarusians still took to the streets. Across the country, more than 800 people were arrested. (In Russia, with a population roughly 15 times greater, 2,000 people were arrested that same day.)

Westerners often looked at Belarus as if it were Europe’s own little North Korea. Lukashenko himself mocked reporters who called him “the last dictator of Europe.” People who have not experienced it tend to believe all autocracies are the same, but in reality, regimes and freedoms vary, and repressions exist in shades. For Belarusians, the shift from gray to black, from autocracy to totalitarianism, was calculable in lives.

Nearly 10 million people still lived in Belarus, unwitting collaborators in the raging war. According to a Chatham House poll in mid-March, only 3 percent of Belarusians supported entering the war alongside the Russian military. The Square of Change wanted the world to know that Belarusians had recognized this danger earlier, that they had been fighting this regime, which owed its existence to Putin, for a long time. Even in this atmosphere of repression, they had not given up or fled.

They had tried so fervently to build the independent Belarus they were promised when the Soviet Union fell. Still, 30 years later, they were thwarted by dynamics that formed decades before their birth. It had been foolish to believe that the U.S.S.R. could collapse so peacefully, that its ghosts would not demand placation. Now they were all paying the price.

There is so much discussed about the act of fleeing, but perhaps even more puzzling is the choice to remain. “I have no fear for myself; I have fear for my family,” Shamberbetch told me. “I want to send my relatives abroad. I want to stay here as long as possible, to fight. When I realize there’s nothing I can do here anymore, I’ll leave the country through the woods.”

What started for two D.J.s as a small act of symbolic defiance at a concert became a mural on a wall. That symbol became another, the Square of Change, which became to Belarusians the symbol of what their new nation could be. Then those who created that symbol became symbols themselves.

Each revolution creates its own hieroglyphics — bracelets, flags, murals, heroes and demons — but to what end? How long can a revolution survive on symbols? When your country participates in the destruction of another, how much is symbolic protest worth? Is a symbol worth your life? “This is what worries us now, that the meaning of fighting with stickers and other symbols simply loses its meaning,” Sous-Chef wrote to me in March. “Our peaceful protests have practically no effect on the current state of affairs.”

Still, a few nights earlier, on the fence next to the children’s playground, on that white sheet the size of a flag, they painted NO WAR in red with a black peace sign. On the side, they marked their stencil — two small D.J.s with their arms raised.

Sarah A. Topol is a contributing writer for the magazine. She lived in Cairo and Istanbul for over a decade, reporting from the Middle East, the former Soviet Union, Asia and Africa. Her work for the magazine has won a National Magazine Award for feature writing as well as an Overseas Press Club Award, among others. Yauhen Attsetski is a photographer, civic journalist and former resident of the Square of Change in Minsk, Belarus. He left Belarus in 2021 for political reasons and now lives in Lviv, Ukraine.