Belarus activists urge owners of Chekist barbershop to change its name


Livestream by Stas Karpau

The name of a newly-opened barbershop has detonated controversies among Belarusian Internet users.

On Tuesday, activists and former political prisoners Zmitser Dashkevich and Eduard Palchys visited the salon in Minsk. They were accompanied by journalists.

Talking to a co-owner of the barbershop, Zmitser Dashkevich suggested it should be renamed. He promised that Belarusian bloggers would promote the salon on social media providing that it gained another, less questionable, name. According to Dashkevich, they will go bankrupt if the Chekist title remains.

The activists placed a poster with the names of 128 persons executed in the Soviet era, but another co-owner removed it.

“When we all sobered down, there was a discussion – we were talking for half an hour off the record. In fact, they [co-owners] may think about changing the name. Moral responsibility for resurrecting such ideas does exist; for example, normal countries banned Communist symbols. According to them, ‘Chekist’ is like James Bond, Agent 007, they just wanted to cut through the clutter. In turn, we told them they had alreadyshowed off, and now they should think about how to solve the situation – e.g. they may ask for some new ideas about the name or help in making logo,” Zmitser Dashkevich told belsat.eu.

Felix Dzerzhinsky’s creature, CheKa, or the AllRussian Emergency Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage, was an important tool of Red Terror, a campaign of mass killings, torture, and systematic oppression conducted by the Bolsheviks.

Dzerzhinsky, one of the initiators of mass repressions, defined the Red Terror as ‘intimidation, arrests and destruction of enemies of the revolution taking into account their class affiliation’. Independent experts state that the Red Terror is not only punitive measures of the Bolsheviks in the course of the Civil War (1917-1923), but during the whole period of existence of the Soviet regime.

Cheka was the first political terror body in the history of Soviet Russia, which was later converted into the NKVD and into the KGB after the Second World War.

belsat.eu

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