Unexpectedly, Tsikhanouskaya was a success-not despite her inexperience, but because of it. “You feel this responsibility, you wake up with this pain for those people who are in jail, you go to bed with the same feeling.” Which was, though she doesn’t say so, incredibly brave. She woke up “so scared” every morning, she told me, and sometimes she stayed scared all day long. Because what harm could she do, this simple housewife, this woman with no political experience? And so, in July 2020, she registered as a candidate. Tsikhanouskaya ran in his place, with no motive other than “to show my love for him.” The police and bureaucrats let her. The regime, recognizing the power of Siarhei’s mirror, would not allow him to register his candidacy, just as it had not allowed him to register the ownership of his house. “But step-by-step, slowly, they realized that Siarhei isn’t afraid.” He wasn’t afraid to speak the truth as he saw it his absence of fear inspired others. “At the beginning it was really difficult because people were afraid,” Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya told me. People saw themselves in that mirror and responded with the kind of enthusiasm that opposition politicians had found hard to create in Belarus. Siarhei Tsikhanouski held up a mirror to his society.

He went around the country, recording the frustrations of his fellow citizens, driving a car with the phrase “Real News ” plastered on the side. These videos yielded a YouTube channel the channel attracted thousands of followers. Exasperated, he started making videos about his experiences, and those of others. Then her husband bought a house and ran into the concrete wall of Belarusian bureaucracy and corruption. On an ordinary day, she would take them to kindergarten, to the doctor, to the park. She has two children, one of whom was born deaf. Before the spring of 2020, she didn’t have much time for television or newspapers. Here is the first thing she said to me: “My story is a little bit different from other people.” This is what she tells everyone-that hers was not the typical life of a dissident or budding politician.

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Black male cartoon making bed