Ales Bialiatski
Ales Bialiatski (born September 25, 1962, Vyartsilya, Karelia, U.S.S.R. [now in Russia]) is a Belarusian human rights activist who, with the Center for Civil Liberties and Memorial, won the Nobel Prize for Peace in 2022.
Bialiatski had an unlikely journey to the Nobel Peace Prize. It began with his university studies in literature in the 1980s, as the Soviet Union entered a period of more open expression. In 1986 Bialiatski cofounded a group of young writers that amplified Belarusian literature and cultural thought and corresponded with a broad awakening of Belarusian national identity.
Even after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the leadership in Belarus lagged those in other post-Soviet states in liberalizing the country’s economy and political processes. Bialiatski remained active nonetheless, and, at first, Belarusian expression flourished. However, it soon drew ire from those in power as a vehicle for dissent. In the mid-1990s Belarus’s flirtation with openness ended. The government dismissed the Belarusian language as an underdeveloped variety of Russian and took action to suppress it. It was but one dimension in a series of power grabs that brought protesters to the streets—and resulted in a harsh government crackdown—in the spring of 1996. Bialiatski helped found Viasna-96 (“Spring-96”) to provide assistance to those detained for their participation in the demonstrations. Later that year Alexander Lukashenko assumed sweeping powers. Viasna-96 continued its work on behalf of political prisoners and eventually expanded its scope, changing its name to Viasna Human Rights Centre.
It was Bialiatski’s persistent activism with Viasna that led to his imprisonment in 2011. Early that year protests against a disputed election, a bomb attack in Minsk, and a sharply declining economy left the country in an unprecedented state of tension. In August Bialiatski was arrested and was later convicted on charges relating to alleged tax evasion in the funding of Viasna; Bialiatski denied the charges. He was released in 2014. When in 2020 Belarus again faced an unprecedented level of unrest—this time in response to Lukashenko’s dismissive handling of the COVID-19 pandemic and his overt interference in the run-up to the presidential election—Bialiatski was one of many Belarusian dissenters who were detained. By the end of his second year in detention, no trial had been held, and the charges were being kept under wraps. It was unclear, according to some colleagues at Viasna, if Bialiatski was aware that he had won the peace prize.