Maksim Znak, a 42-year-old Belarusian lawyer and writer, is serving a ten-year sentence in a penal colony after being convicted on spurious grounds. Znak was the electoral campaign lawyer of opposition presidential candidates Viktar Babaryka and Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, and a member of the Coordination Council for the Transfer of Power, which called for the resignation of President Lukashenko following the disputed presidential election held in August 2020. He is also a professor in the law faculty of the Belarusian State University, a poet and a lyricist. 

On 9 September 2020, Znak was arrested by members of the Investigative Committee of Belarus at Babaryka’s election headquarters and placed in pre-trial detention. He was subsequently charged with ‘inciting actions aimed at harming the national security of the Republic of Belarus’, ‘conspiring to seize power by unconstitutional means’ and ‘creating an extremist formation’. (In Belarus, six different types of action are identified as ‘extremist’. The wide definition is used by the authorities to target dissenting voices.) Znak was tried alongside Maryia Kalesnikava, who headed Babaryka’s campaign team. Their trial opened in Minsk on 4 August 2021 behind closed doors. They were both found guilty on 6 September, with Kalesnikava receiving an eleven-year prison sentence. In March 2022, Znak was added to the ‘list of persons involved in extremist activities’, and two months later to the list of those ‘involved in terrorist activities’.

During his early detention, Znak wrote The Zekameron: One Hundred Tales from Behind Bars and Eyelashes (it was translated into English by Jim and Ella Dingley and published by Scotland Street Press in March 2023). The book, smuggled out of prison, was shortlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize 2024. In it, Znak poignantly describes a hundred-day spell in a Belarus prison using different voices. The title derives from the Russian word zek, an abbreviation formed by two letters of the Cyrillic alphabet; it stands for zakliuchonny, which refers to a convict held in a Soviet labour camp (the word now signifies ‘prisoner’ in a general sense). The book’s title is also a play on Boccaccio’s Decameron.

Znak uses dark humour to portray the daily realities of life in a Belarusian prison. The absurdity of the banal and brutal circumstances in which the prisoners find themselves is conveyed in laconic prose. The following extract is from a chapter titled ‘The Babbleline’:

He could sometimes hear a synthesised robotic voice in his head. At first he thought that he was imagining it, next he thought he was going out of his mind, and finally he thought to ask: ‘What’s that noise?’ There was a straightforward answer: ‘It’s the babbleline’ … a kind of pneumatic service that used the prison plumbing for communication, and it wasn’t something that science fiction writers invented. It had in fact always been here. By means of the plumbing you could chat with any subscriber in any cell from one single riser pipe just as if you were on the phone. There were even receivers for you to use – OK, so they weren’t the type you get with telephones, they were corrugated pipes … One of the old lags – apparently he’d been an IT specialist in his past life – would cheerfully maintain that the babbleline let you hold multichannel conferences, but encryption was a bit of a problem. 

Worryingly, Znak was last seen by his lawyer in January 2023 and has been held incommunicado since 9 February 2023. The UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, PEN, Amnesty and other lobby groups have called for his immediate and unconditional release. 

Readers might like to send appeals expressing concern at the detention of Maksim Znak, urging the Belarusian authorities to release him immediately and unconditionally, and seeking assurances that pending his release he is held in conditions that meet international human rights standards, is given access to adequate health care and permitted regular communication with his family and lawyers. Appeals to be addressed to: 

Oleg Matkin 

Head of the Department for the Execution of Punishments

Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Republic of Belarus

Email: pismo@din.gov.by

Andrei Shved, Prosecutor General of the Republic of Belarus  

Email: info@prokuratura.gov.by 

Please ask the British ambassador to Belarus to raise the case: 

Her Excellency Jacqueline Perkins

britishembassy.minsk@fcdo.gov.uk

Update: On 16 May, a Turkish court sentenced Selahattin Demirtaş  (LR, June 2019), an opposition politician and writer, to a total of forty-two years in prison. He was found guilty of ‘aiding in undermining the unity and integrity of the state’, ‘incitement to commit a crime’ and ‘making terrorist propaganda’. A former co-chair of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party, Demirtaş was among 108 party members charged as part of an investigation into deadly protests that took place across Turkey from 6 to 8 October 2014. Demirtaş has been unjustly detained for seven and a half years. His short-story collection Dawn, written in prison, was published by Hogarth in April 2019. PEN and other human rights groups are appalled by the heavy sentence. Despite the European Court of Human Rights calling for his
release, Demirtaş remains behind bars.