Sviatlana Haluza broke down on June 9. As an employee of Belarus’s state-controlled media outlet SB.by, she’d grown used to rewriting boilerplate propaganda mined from other state-controlled media outlets. But now her boss instructed her to recycle an item about the imprisoned opposition leader Siarhei Tsikhanousky. Haluza had a crisis of conscience. She secretly supported Tsikhanousky’s candidacy for president. “I realized I didn’t believe the stuff I was being told to publish and I didn’t want to say he was a criminal and a villain,” she said. “I cried for twenty minutes.”
Time: How small acts of defiance turned into a massive movement against Europe’s last dictator
Opposition supporters protest against disputed presidential elections results at Independence Square in Minsk on August 18, 2020.
