“I had to kneel with my forehead on the ground, they tied my hands behind my back and started to beat me. There were two of them who did the beating, and another one held my head with his feet so I couldn't move. They were interrogating me: who did I work for, how much did they pay me, who were the people under my command. They found ten Euros in my wallet, then there was a flash drive with 'Polish Radio' on it and my passport with Polish visas. They thought I was a Polish spy. I wasn't afraid. I did read quite a few interrogation records and I knew that if I confessed they would kill me right away. And if I told them that I was a journalist, a human rights activist and an observer, they would kill me as well. I told them that my daughters were coming back to Minsk, which was true, and as there was this raid going on in front of our house, I was afraid they could get involved and get in trouble. They started asking me what I was doing for Poland, what was on that flash drive. I told them I was doing research into repressions that took place in Orsha and that there was an analysis of data regarding the victims of those repressions on the flash drive. I told them that both my grandmother and my grandfather were interrogated as well before they had been executed. They were laughing at me and said: 'So that's your legacy.' I told them it was indeed. They slapped my buttocks maybe twenty times. One of them tried to appeal to my conscience, asking me things like: 'What is it you don't like about Belarus? Don't you like order, stability? Are you hungry, like in the 1990s? Would you like things to look like they did before?' This hollow propaganda I kept hearing on television before, from Lukashenko, which had no effect on me whatsoever.”
“It was not just me, as even some election committee members and also observers representing various bodies of the state were surprised by the number of people who had come to vote. From 8 AM to 8PM there was this constant stream of people, the line was more than fifty meters long. We hadn't seen anything like that in twenty years. And as Tikhanovskaya's team ordered that the ballots should be folded in this quite distinctive manner, we could observe not only how many people came to vote but also how those folded ballots were being cast. It was evident that many people were voting for Tihkanovskaya, many of them wore those white armbands. So many people had come and I could only exchange just a few words with most of them, but still I maybe missed only two or three people. At the end of the day as the polling place closed down they asked us, all the independent observers, to leave. There was this observer from some state agency who was with us and she kept advising us to make a deal with them. She said that they would keep on harassing the chairman of the committee and that this OMON-man (a special police detail member) visited her on the evening before, and that they got into trouble as we had been watching them for five days straight. The chairperson stood her ground. So the police came and they put her in custody right away. They forced us to go to the foyer first, and then they just drove us away from the building. There were maybe tens of people standing outside waiting for the election results. Votes were still being counted when my daughter called me, saying that the central election committee just announced that 79 percent of voters voted for Lukashenko.”
“I was shocked by the fact that in his interrogation records I found that my great-grandmother's brother confessed to him being a Polish spy, as well as his cousin, as she supposedly had been a leader of this spy ring of theirs. He confessed that he had been taking some packages from Orsha to Moscow where he got paid on delivery. Later I found out what was in those packages, as there was money from his brother in Poland for a coat, there was no spy ring, just money to buy a coat. For the second time I was shocked when I found this list of my relatives in Anton Kamensky's interrogation report. He stated maybe fifteen names, with exact details on how they were all related. There were many names I didn't know. And I was looking for them in this open internet database and it showed that they were shot, almost all of them.”
Igor Stankevich was born on January 30th 1976 in the town of Orsha in Vitebsk Oblast in the then Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic. He is of Polish ancestry on his mother’s side, their family name being Kamenski. After the October Revolution of 1917 several of his ancestors had to face fabricated accusations of being ‘Polish spies’ and were persecuted. In 1930 the Kamenskis were labeled kulaks and their property was confiscated. His grandmother, Anna Josifovna Kamenska, and his grandfather, Zachary Samuelovich Chodovcev, were executed in 1937. Their relatives were sent to GULAG camps or shot. During a twenty year period more than thirty of his relatives fell victim to the repressions. Igor studied journalism at the Belarus State University. He took interest in Belarusian history, learned Polish and Belarusian and he created his genealogical tree. In 2000 he was one of the organizers of the Rally for Independence, in 2001 he had been working in the press centre of the election campaign team of V.I. Goncharik, an opposition politician. In 2017 he started the civic initiative “Kobylyaki. Executed in Orsha” that aimed to raise awareness regarding the victims of Stalin’s terror and to honour their memory. During the presidential elections of 2020 he was an observer, working for the Belorussian Helsinki Committee, a human rights organization. On August 11th he was been arrested, interrogated and beaten. Fearing for his life he left Belarus for Poland thanks to his ‘Pole’s Card’ which he had been issued due to his ancestry. Since then he has been living in Europe.
