This is a guest post by Anton Grinevsky and Alesia Grinevskaya

“There is no crisis in Belarus”. This is the official position, but it’s a long way from the truth. Everything started last autumn during the presidential race, leading up to the December elections.

Every day, the state media showed all kinds of positive coverage of the incumbent president, as well as television programmes which strongly denigrated the other candidates. Nevertheless, they were allowed to speak on television, and debates were even arranged for all the candidates (which, however, the president did not bother to attend).

Everything could have turned out all right, if not for the next populist step taken by the president. Belarus has a planned economy, and by the end of the last five-year plan (according to Lukashenka’s promises), the average salary should have reached $500, while in September it was only $360. A willful and shortsighted decision was made: average wages were artificially increased by almost 50% in December.

As a result, in March of 2011, only three and a half months after the elections, the country suddenly started to panic. First of all people bought all the sugar from the supermarkets; then sunflower oil started to disappear from the shelves. It is difficult to say why all the people suddenly decided that these products in particular would become more expensive, but they were proved right.

After a while foreign currency ceased to be available at exchange offices. People started lining up and literally sleeping there, waiting for the dollars and euros they so badly wanted. The strangest thing in this situation was the complete lack of attention paid to this problem by the authorities. Occasionally someone from the government would make some pledge or other, but these were quickly broken. There was almost no media coverage of this situation.

For obvious reasons, lack of foreign currency caused the appearance of a black-market in money-changing. While the official rate was 3150 Belarussian roubles to the dollar, the informal rate reached 8500 roubles to the dollar. In the end, the authorities had to respond somehow. Empty promises to deal with “temporary difficulties” began to appear on television and in official newspapers. But all that came out of it was a 54.4% devaluation of the rouble, and the black market rate was still 30% higher. There is still a chronic foreign currency shortage, so little has changed.

Tensions between the authorities and the people rose quite quickly in the wake of these events. Firstly, a protest called “Stop-Gasoline” was organized after petrol prices were raised three times in a month. Drivers on a go-slow almost blocked traffic on the biggest avenue in the center of Minsk:

After that, apparently inspired by Arab countries like Egypt, a movement called “Revolution through social networks” was created. It aims to bring together people who are dissatisfied with the status quo in Belarus. People come to the central squares of all the cities in Belarus every Wednesday evening. Unlike in traditional protests, there are no slogans or aggression. People meet, speak their minds and clap from time to time to support and encourage one another.

At first glance, there is nothing illegal in these actions. However, the authorities have their own opinion on that. Every Wednesday a lot of people are detained by men in plainclothes, in a very aggressive way. People, including photographers and accredited journalists, have been bundled into cars and taken to police stations.

The most common sentence for those taken to court was ‘disorderly conduct’, for offences as trivial as standing on the street, chatting and clapping. However, following these meetings and arrests, clapping is now almost forbidden during official public events. For example, on the third of July, which is the Independence Day of Republic of Belarus, it was unofficially forbidden to clap after the president’s speech. Some people who did were detained, and taken to police stations.

The Belarussian authorities have continued to deny there is an economic crisis in the country. Since the devaluation average income has dramatically decreased, while prices have increased. The reason for this is a heavy dependency on imports for almost all factories in the country, so companies need foreign currency, which they cannot get hold of. This leads to a deficit and high inflation. Protests are brutally suppressed, a lot of people are afraid to walk down the street on Wednesday evenings – any pedestrian could be arrested.

However, the behaviour of the authorities hasn’t led to the growth of indignation and protest in society. It may be that people expect help from other countries, or take the view that “as long as there is no war everything will be ok” for historical reasons (Belarus was one of the territories of the Soviet Union worst affected by the Second World War, facing terrible demographic and economic losses before being liberated in 1945). But the situation continues to spiral out of control while solutions are nowhere to be found. All we hear from the government are empty promises and propaganda.

Guest Post by David Rosenberg

“To be a Jew means always being with the oppressed and never the oppressors”.

The author of these words was the Bundist Marek Edelman who has just died aged 90. He was one of the commanders of the ZOB – the Jewish Fighting Organisation that led the Warsaw Ghetto uprising of 1943.

Edelman's funeral in Warsaw on Friday

To anti-fascists and human rights activists around the world he was a hero – plain and simple. He wrote one of the earliest Holocaust memoirs, The Ghetto Fights, which was published in Poland in 1945 and subsequently translated into several languages. It is an incredible text which pains and inspires the reader in equal measure.

After escaping the burnt-out ghetto through the sewers he continued underground anti-Nazi activity and then joined other Poles in the Warsaw Rising of 1944. After the war he saved countless more lives working as a cardiologist. In recent years he used the medical arena to make contact with Dr Mustafa Barghouti, director of the Union of Palestinian Medical Relief Committees.

Edelman was never a Zionist, and he opposed Israel’s continued occupation of Palestinian territory. He met with Palestinian political figures and expressed support for their struggle against occupation while at the same time urging them to firmly reject terroristic methods. He angered Israeli leaders by pointedly addressing the Palestinians he made contact with as “leaders of the Palestinian Fighting Organisations”. In Tel Aviv they were indignant that such a prominent figure in the Warsaw Ghetto resistance would choose to continue to live in Poland (his homeland!) after the war – a place they regarded simply as a Jewish graveyard. Even worse, he had the chutzpah not to take his political lead from less heroic and far more reactionary Zionist spokespersons and cheerleaders.

Not that Edelman was worried. This hero of the Jewish people and of anti-fascists had long been treated as persona non grata by the Israeli political establishment and its mainstream media. Edelman would not countenance Israel’s attempt to appropriate Holocaust resistance to justify its political actions, and he said so on several occasions.

He refused to allow the historical experience of the Ghetto fighters to be claimed by any group/nation exclusively. On the contrary, he argued that this history belonged to everyone and carried a universal imperative to fight for equality, democracy, human rights and dignity wherever these were threatened or suppressed

He continued to repudiate the Zionist narrative of Jewish history with its blinkered ultra-nationalism. Instead he remained loyal to the Bund’s socialist political tradition which, as its 1938 manifesto had declared, rejected “one’s own and foreign nationalism”.

Throughout his life Edelman worked for human rights, democracy and egalitarianism. He remained sceptical of nationalism in general and critical of state power. He was a brave and forthright opponent of the Stalinist regime in Poland and, in the 1980s, actively supported the Workers Opposition Movement – KOR.

In 1988 – on the 45th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising – he snubbed the official commemoration in Poland attended by Stalinist dignitaries from Poland and Zionist dignitaries from Israel, in favour of an alternative ceremony at the Warsaw Jewish cemetery, attended by 3,000 people, where he unveiled a monument to Henryk Erlich and Victor Alter – Bundist leaders of the 1930s who had been captured and murdered on Stalin’s orders during the War.

I treasure the fact that I had the good fortune to hear Marek Edelman speak and briefly meet him in 1997 at a conference in Warsaw marking the 100th anniversary of the birth of the Bund. Naturally a lot of people wanted to speak to him. He sat, relaxed, making time for everybody. He was a hero, a fighter and a true mensch. Koved zayn ondenk (honour his memory)

The Anthem of the Jewish Partisans: Zog Nit Keyn Mol

The news has just come through that Marek Edelman, leader of the Warsaw ghetto uprising has passed away. Edelman cut his political teeth as a leader of the Jewish Workers Bund – a mass Jewish Marxist organisation – in prewar Poland – fighting against an authoritarian and anti-Semitic regime. In the Warsaw Ghetto he, along with others, lead the heroic last ditch uprising against the Nazis attempts to exterminate its inhabitants. By this point the ghettos population had been reduced to a fraction of what it had been – by death, starvation and deportation. The Nazis planned to liquidate the ghetto in 6 days. Yet a thousand Jewish fighters armed with pistols and home made weapons held out for nearly a month.

There is far more to be said than I can say right now, and I’m sure in days to come there will be a proper obituary to Edelman on The Third Estate. But for now, let us pay tribute to this brave partisan and comrade.

It never fails to annoy me when it’s claimed that some group or other is the ‘last’ group that it’s acceptable to be prejudiced about. Sure, there’s no denying we live in relatively enlightened times, but there are any number of marginalised sections of society that you can get away with offending without any fear of backlash. Don’t believe me? Well, off the top of my head, how about people who are mentally ill, or transsexual, or poor and white (yes, the whole chav thing – it’s just sneering at people who are worse off than you; stop trying to justify it)?  Or how about gypsies? If you doubt that they face prejudice, try taking a look at definition 6 (or definitions 1,4 and 7, to a lesser extent) on urbandictionary’s entry for the word. (Yes, I’m well aware that part of the point of urban dictionary is to try to be shocking, but there‘s a difference between pushing the boundaries of what’s acceptable for comedic purposes and simple bigotry. That’s clearly an example of the latter.)

Anyway, while I was vaguely aware that gypsies were marginalised and suffered prejudice, I knew very little about the context and origins of that prejudice, or indeed about gypsy culture at all, so a documentary on iPlayer that claimed to be about precisely that, I was pretty keen to watch it seemed a good chance to learn more. Admittedly it might have been a bit optimistic of me to expect so much from a documentary that had a title like Gypsy Child Thieves, but the blurb for the programme claimed it would show “the racism and discrimination suffered by the Romani people”. In fact there was far less background information than I’d have liked, and unfortunately – while I’m sure this wasn’t what filmmaker Liviu Tipurita intended – a worrying amount of ammunition for the bigots.

The film certainly delivered on the promise of the title; there was plenty of grainy footage of attempted robberies by young Roma children in Spain and Italy, as well as interviews with the same children back at the camps where they lived. And there was some genuinely shocking material as well: the way that the titular child thieves are beaten and coerced into a life of crime by their handlers (or their own parents), and the disturbing revelation that Romani girls are traditionally married off (and the marriages consummated) when they’re just 12 or 13 years old. There was also some footage of a street party held by the Lega Nord (a populist right-wing political party in Italy) to celebrate the destruction of a Romani camp, at which one man openly spoke of his desire to kill Gypsies. But if this film is all you’ve got to go on, antipathy towards Gypsies is almost made to seem understandable, as so much is left unexplained. Why do so many Romani people steal for a living? Why do they live in squalid camps on the outskirts of cities? Why do they so often refuse help from the Social Services? Why is it that they’re so marginalised all over Europe?

Even when Tipurita travelled to Romania (where many Roma who emigrate to Western Europe arrive from) with the supposed aim of finding answers to some of these questions, he didn’t really seem to get anywhere. The best we were given was an extended interview with Breliante, a Romani organised criminal who provided the illuminating insight that “the thieving is no longer a national problem. It’s happening on an international scale.” Liviu Tipurita is clearly a talented documentary-maker, but this felt like a serious missed opportunity.

You can watch Gypsy Child Thieves on iPlayer before 8pm on Wednesday the 9^th September, as long as you’re in the UK.

Good to see some habits die hard in the Jewish Quarter of Krakow

Bush's visit to Europe in 2003 inspired demonstrations across the continent

Pracownicza Demokracja (Worker's Democracy) is a small group affiliated to the International Socialist Tendency. Their Anti-Capitalist Weekend looked decent.

 Pracownicza Demokracja

Various bits of graffiti, including 'stop lukashenko', referring to the Hitler admiring President of Belarus.

An Iranian run shop in Krakow expresses solidarity with the demonstrations. They run this blog: www.glosiranu.blog.pl.

 www.glosiranu.blog.pl

A tribute to a proletarian hero

Monument at Birkenau

How much should we memorialise tragic events? Poland is home to many of the landmarks of horror associated with the Nazis. But of these arguably the two most notorious are memorialised in very different ways. Auschwitz-Birkenau is the concentration and extermination camps where over a million Jews, gypsies, communists, trade unionists and lesbians and gays were worked to death, or simply executed. It is preserved perfectly, Auschwitz converted to a museum with each block dedicated to a different aspect of either life in the camp or of the wider holocaust, whilst the larger Birkenau is simply preserved as a monument and memorial to the horror. Over the years as historians have uncovered different aspects of the story the Auschwitz Museum has gained exhibits about the experience of Roma and Sinti communities, and now has dedicated exhibitions on the particular experience of the Jews of France, Holland, Belgium, Poland, Romania and Hungary (A little known fact is that Hungarian Jews were the single largest national group executed at Auschwitz, comprising 500,000 of the 1.1million).

Extraordinary Story

A stark contrast to this is about 200 miles north in Poland’s capital. The Warsaw Ghetto is the sight of some of the greatest tragedies and greatest acts of heroism of the holocaust. All of Warsaw’s Jews, 30% of the population, where forced into an area comprising 2.4% of the its size. Tens of thousands of people died of starvation and disease. In 1943 an extraordinary armed uprising challenged the Nazi military (documented extraordinarily in this book). This remains, for me at least, one of the most inspirational single acts of the 20^th Century. Yet to look at modern Warsaw it would be hard to find traces of this story. One small section of the wall exists, hidden in a private courtyard. An old monument, built by the Soviets, stands in an obscure section of central Warsaw, attended by an old Jewish man with a stall selling dog-eared history books and odd badges. In contrast to the day trips and tours to Auschwitz that blossom around Krakow, there is no way of getting the Ghetto story, except to wander round yourself.

Ghetto Memorial

Clearly there are a number of reasons why these two sites are so different. Warsaw is a city of nearly 2million, whilst Oswiecim (OZ-VEE-TSIM – the Polish town that became Germanised in to Auschwitz) is a small town of 48,000. Clearly space was at more of a premium in post-war reconstruction. Very few remnants of the ghetto survived the reprisals of the Nazis, and the 1944 fighting in Warsaw, whereas the fleeing Nazis were unable to destroy most of Auschwitz, only able to reduce the gas ovens to piles of rubble before leaving. Clearly there was more of Auschwitz to preserve. Most people would have a sense that Auschwitz was significantly worse, that the industrial slaughter of millions is of a degree worse than the ghetto.

 Another, more cynical reason is the fact that Krakow, the nearest town to Auschwitz is Poland’s traditional tourist destination, whilst Warsaw is still developing its tourist industry. Perhaps the Ghetto tours will spring up, just like the Auschwitz ones. None of these reasons seem enough to me though. Whilst no-one expects them to go to the extremes of rebuilding the Ghetto to remember it (though that’s what they did with much of the rest of Warsaw), surely there could be more done. So, and I’m really interested in your thoughts, why is it that some things are memorialised in such detail, and others not?

Eastern Europe is a land of myths and legends. I don’t mean the sorts of myths that the guide books harp on about, like how Duke Gediminas founded Vilnius after being told to in a dream in the 1320s. Rather I mean the myths of the twentieth century, the successive narratives and histories that have been imposed upon the region, through revolution, Fascism, Stalinism and finally the new nationalisms.

Duke Gediminas

Lithuania’s history is fairly typical of these countries. An independent Duchy for centuries, it was briefly conquered by Sweden, merged with Poland, and by the mid 19^th Century was incorporated into the Russian Empire. Following the October Revolution and the Brest-Litovsk Treaty it became occupied by Germany, and in 1918 became an independent state following the end of the first World War. Throughout the 20s and 30s it quarrelled with Poland over control of Vilnius, before in 1940 it became the victim of the Hitler-Stalin Pact, and the Red Army rolled in. In 1941 Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, and the German Army marched quickly through it, into Russia. In 1944 the victorious Red Army marched back in. In 1945 Lithuania became the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic (LSSR), and was incorporated into the the USSR. In 1991, in the death throes of the Soviet Union, Lithuania, and the other Baltic States, became independent again.

Throughout this period many different myths were created. The myth of the Workers’ State and the fabulous development it promised, the myth of the proud ethnic Lithuanians against the degenerate Jews and Gypsies or the cunning Russian occupiers, the myth of the salvation of the free market from state planned paralysis, and many others. But what is of particular interest, and particular concern, is the creation of the post 1991 national myth. If the stories the country’s museums tell is anything to go by, there is a deeply problematic story being told.

Memorial to Victims of 'Communism, Collaborators and the Red Army'

The ‘Museum of Genocide Victims’ in Vilnius is a clear example of it. This is a museum housed in a former KGB building, which offers an account of the history of the period 1940-91 which is as exaggerated as it is incomplete. For a start you would expect something called the ‘Museum of Genocide Victims’ to have something to say about Genocide; but there is nothing. The museum’s story begins in 1939, has a brief gap from 41-44, and starts again in 1944. During this period, 300,000 Lithuanians, 200,000 of them Jews, were executed by death squads or in camps. This accounted for 94% of Lithuania’s Jewish population. These figures are acknowledged, but despite the fact that they dwarf the numbers imprisoned, executed or deported by the KGB the story of the holocaust in that country is not told.

Instead there is room after room dedicated to telling the story of the repression under the USSR. Now, there was genuine repression under this regime. There was suppression of the national culture and religion, and intrusion into all sorts of aspects of people’s lives. However this begins to border on the ridiculous. The KGB had prisons! They recorded people’s conversations! They were organised hierarchically! The level of hysteria around the sorts of operations actually carried out by almost all security services creates a lot of heat but very little light on the real history.

Possibly the most objectionable bit is the section dedicated to celebrating the national resistance to the Soviet Occupation in the years immediately after the war. Again, I should stress, the creation of the LSSR and its incorporation into the USSR was not a glorious democratic process. It was a combination of sham elections and military occupation, and the people of Lithuania had every right to resist it. However, as the exhibition admits entirely without comment, most of these national heroes of the resistance had only a year earlier been fighting on the Nazi side. Much of the Lithuanian army, that took up arms against the Soviets as they invaded, had been happily collaborating with the Nazis as they executed hundreds of thousands. As you walk round you get a queasy feeling as the museum informs you that the literature of these national heroes emphasised ‘national culture and spirit’. It’s pretty clear that whilst many brave people joined this resistance, its core was fascist.

A more uplifting section is dedicated to the popular uprising which eventually won independence from the USSR. This was a genuine popular movement, including an extraordinary demonstration where people held hands from Vilnius to Tallin (602km). But it seems that those who ended up in power after these demonstrations set about creating a national myth based on anti-Russian hysteria and a blind spot for fascism. As we see fascist parties on the rise across the region, this kind of national myth can’t help.