In a letter to his daughter, Viktar Babaryka recently wrote about the reading restrictions he is facing. The telegram channel “Viktar Babaryka” has published an excerpt of his story about the conditions in the colony.
“I don’t have much success in reading. Lately, they even tried to limit my reading while standing. Previously, I could at least stand under the roof, but now they require me to go outside and if it’s raining or snowing, you can’t read even in a “workhorse” position. So that’s another minus 15 minutes out of the reading schedule. But it’s not raining and snowing every day. So I do read:) So far, I have managed to read only newspapers and magazines. It’s hard to do it with books”.
The former candidate for the presidency said that in prison, he had read “Dogs of Europe” by Alherd Bakharevich and that he was glad that “such authors and trendy works started to appear in Belarus.”
Babaryka also recalls Solzhenitsyn’s “Gulag Archipelago.”
“A difficult book to read, although Maks Znak is right in assessing it is being relevant for our conditions. We get the current system by taking away the brutal physical violence and adding more sophisticated ways of dealing with mental and intellectual development.”
Viktar Babaryka is a banker, former head of Belgazprombank, a public figure, and a candidate for the presidency in Belarus. He was detained on June 18, 2020. He was sentenced to 14 years in prison under Article 235 of the Criminal Code of the Republic of Belarus, which is “Legalization of funds obtained by criminal means” and Article 430 of the Criminal Code of the Republic of Belarus; such as “Bribetaking.”
