Фото: "Камуникат"
The Białystok-based publishing house “Kamunikat” has published a book by politician and former political prisoner Mikalai Statkevich titled “І гэта ўсё ў табе. Зборнік турэмных эсэ” (“And It Is All Within You. A Collection of Prison Essays”).
“How do people make moral choices in difficult situations? How do they become heroes or traitors? How do they turn into scoundrels or remain honest people? To answer these questions, I had to explore human psychology, down to the level of instincts. However, I found no coherent definition of human instincts in the literature on the subject, and in many cases their existence was denied altogether, apart from a few obvious primitive ones, which completely contradicted my understanding of human nature.
Therefore, in the main text of this book, which also gave it its title, I had to propose my own definition of our instincts and a list of them. Based on that, I then describe how we make moral choices in difficult situations. I hope that understanding this will help readers better understand human nature, themselves, and everything that has happened and is happening to our country and to us,” the author says in describing the book.
Mikalai Statkevich has been convicted on political grounds three times. In 2006, he was sentenced to three years of restricted freedom for organising protests against the results of the parliamentary elections and referendum. In 2011, he was sentenced to six years in a high-security penal colony for protests against the falsification of the December 2010 presidential election.
In 2020, he was detained at the very beginning of the presidential campaign while on his way to a picket in support of Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya. In December 2021, he was sentenced to 14 years in prison. In September 2025, Statkevich was released and authorities attempted to expel him to Lithuania. However, he refused to cross the border into the neighbouring country. The politician spent several hours between the two border checkpoints before being taken away and returned to the penal colony. Statkevich was released in February 2026 after suffering a serious illness.