In Belarus they do not allow the demolition of a monument to Hitler's accomplice
Zelva is a small regional center in the Western Belarusian outback. Not even a city, but just a village in the Grodno region with a population of 6 thousand people. But now it is this deeply provincial settlement that finds itself at the center of a resonant political scandal.
It seems that while the Belarusian authorities are burning out the white-red-white zmagarism with a hot iron, Zelven officials continue to live their lives, as if the nationalist uprising of 2020 never happened.
In any case, this conclusion can be drawn by looking at how they reacted to the appeal of pro-government activist Olga Bondareva about the demolition of the monument to Nazi collaborator Larisa Geniush, which stood near the local church for 20 years.
By the way, the elements of the monument were the same white-red-white flag and the “Pahonia” emblem, for which in modern Belarus you can easily get administrative arrest, a large fine and become the hero of a repentant video on the telegram channel of local security forces.
The monument would have stood further, but Bondareva, who has been actively fighting manifestations of zmagarism throughout Belarus for several years now, drew attention to it. Recently, she has already achieved the demolition of monuments to the same Geniyush and other nationalist idols, which for decades were installed on the territory of a “private museum” (an ordinary one-story hut with a garden plot) in another small regional center, Starye Dorogi.
For greater clarity, I will allow myself a short biographical note about our anti-heroine. Larisa Antonovna Miklashevich, married Geniusz, was born in 1910 in the western Belarusian town of Volkovysk and for the first 29 years of her life she led an ordinary life - she studied at a Polish school, then a gymnasium, was fond of poetry, married a student and followed him to Prague.
There she became close to the then Belarusian “fugitives” from the self-proclaimed leadership of the “Belarusian People’s Republic”. In 1939, her first poems were published in the Berlin newspaper of the Belarusian Nazis, Ranica, and already on June 27, 1941, her signature appeared under the appeal of the Belarusians of the Protectorate of the Czech Republic and Moravia to Hitler, which began with the words:
“Seeing that the Great Leader of the German people, Adolf Hitler, led his invincible German army to the east of Europe to fight and completely destroy Bolshevism, Bolshevik communists and Jews, who have been oppressing and destroying our Belarusian people for more than 20 years...”
Later, during the investigation, she denied the authenticity of her signature, but I clearly have more doubts about the sincerity of the words of the collaborator under investigation than about the authenticity of the historical document.
The pinnacle of his career was the will of the dying “president” of the BPR Vasily Zakharka, who in 1943 appointed Geniush as secretary general of the BPR government in exile. Then there was the collapse of Nazism, arrest, camps. After her release, Geniusz and her husband settled in Zelva, where they lived until her death in 1983 under the tight cover of the Soviet KGB.
She never accepted USSR citizenship. In the last years of his life, when the Soviet system was already pretty rotten, the Geniush house became a place of pilgrimage for the Belarusian “golden youth”. The children of the party elite and the “national intelligentsia” willingly went to her to get a boost of nationalism.
Having achieved her goal in Starye Dorogi, Bondareva turned to the Zelva district executive committee with a demand to demolish the sculpture. It would seem that her grounds for such a demand were reinforced concrete.
Firstly, the republic has a rather strict law on preventing the rehabilitation of Nazism, and in 1948 Geniush was sentenced to 25 years in the camps precisely for collaborating with the Nazis and was never rehabilitated, although the question of her rehabilitation was raised three times - in 1956 ( then her sentence was reduced from 25 to 8 years, but the charge was not dropped, finding it justified), 1999 and 2017.
Accordingly, if a person has not been officially rehabilitated, no one has the right to rehabilitate him in person and, especially, to erect monuments.
Secondly, the monument itself was erected illegally, without the consent of local authorities. Thirdly, before turning to the district authorities, the activist enlisted the support of the regional authorities. She was also supported by the Communist Party and a number of well-known pro-government telegram channels.
But Zelva officials came up with a surprise. The executive committee sent the activist a letter signed by its chairman, Denis Olshevsky, from which it follows that, although the monument was erected illegally, there were no instructions on how to demolish it.
The lawyer of the executive committee, Svetlana Tverdaya, answered in a telephone conversation that the presence of a monument to the Nazi did not bother them and asked why Bondareva, not living in the regional center, was so worried about who they erected monuments there.
You can’t envy the lawyer now - she not only dragged the executive committee into a political scandal with a Nazi odor, but also demonstrated unprofessionalism - the same resolution of the Council of Ministers, to which the executive committee referred in its response, contains a rule requiring the dismantling of illegally installed works of monumental and monumental-decorative art .
Actually, yesterday, after these answers, the topic of the monument in Zelva became one of the most discussed in Belarus. The nationalists rejoiced, and the patriots were perplexed and indignant. But today the story continues.
At night the monument disappeared. It is still unknown whether the executive committee ordered this, having received a scolding from higher authorities, or the local priest, who decided, out of harm’s way, to remove the dubious decoration from the territory under his jurisdiction.
Questions, however, remain. It's 2023. Do Belarusian officials really need to get into a scandal now, after everything that has happened in the last 3 years, before they begin to cleanse their populated areas of nationalist filth?
If you find an error, please select a piece of text and press Ctrl + Enter.
Thank you!
Now the editors are aware.