God save Belarus!
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Valierya Charnamortsava is a former political prisoner, organizer and guide of excursions to Belarusian and foreign places connected with Belarusian history. She has long been dealing with the subject of the Gulag and Stalinist repressions. She was born on 6 November 1978 in Minsk, Belarus. Both parents were architects. Her mother raised her alone, she did not know her father, he was Jewish and went to Israel. The views and attitudes of the young Valierya were influenced by classical Belarusian literature, the songs of the singer Danchyk, her Belarusian-speaking grandmother, the patriotic club “Bielaruskaya chatka” and a teacher with anti-Belarusian attitudes. In 1996 she entered the Belarusian State University of Radioelectronics, majoring in economic informatics; after graduation she worked as a programmer in a factory. In parallel, she started organizing patriotic excursions, and this eventually became her main occupation. As part of the “Repentance” program organized by the Belarusian Christian Democratic Party, she records the memories and testimonies of witnesses - Stalinist repressions, Soviet gulags and people who went through imprisonment in Lukashenko’s regime. In 2023, she spent three months in Belarusian prisons before being sentenced to two and a half years of house arrest. She managed to emigrate and now lives in Vilnius, Lithuania. She is studying for a Master’s degree in “Cultural Heritage Development” at the European Institute of Humanities. She considers the Belarusian poet Larysa Henijush as her role model and appreciates the fact that on 9 August 2024 she received the Larysa Henijush Medal from the hands of the President of Belarus Sviatlana Cichanouskaya. She is an active Orthodox Christian and faith plays an important role in her life.
