Writer and researcher Mikhail Skobla believes that the Belarusian nation is still reeling after the Soviet terror, the reason here lying both in its scale and in the policies of the current authorities.
Eighty years ago yesterday, the tragedy called “the black night” or “night of the shot poets” took place in Belarus. On 29-30 October 1937, in the NKVD prison in Minsk, more than one hundred representatives of the national intelligentsia were shot.
Mikhail Skobla notes that it is necessary to speak about terror, and not repression. He also presents eloquent statistics: over several decades, the USSR authorities killed 2,000 Writers, and one in five of them was Belarusian.
“Today, the topic of repression and the terror is covered in schools and universities almost in a whisper, because school programs on literature require to shrink the theme of the 1930s repression,” says Skobla. In addition, “the younger cannot understand repression, as the terrorists’ names still adorn our signs and monuments. It cannot understand, who the heroes, the victims, and the punishers are”.
