I’m just back from a softball game at Duke. Before that we had a nice party at my professor’s. I could not expect I would have to read something that bad when I get back home:

    Right before Easter, Nasha Niva had gotten a letter from Minsk city executive committee. According to it, the allocation of Nasha Niva in Minsk was inappropriate because the editor-in-chief Andrej Dynko had been put under administrative arrest for 10 days”.
    It is worth while reminding that the editor was detained while getting off bus #100 at Kastrychnickaja square on March 21, at the time of post-election protests, later he was convicted of “foul language”. Read more at the newspaper’s website.

It is hard to imagine Dynko, this new-generation intellectual, swearing in public. In fact, he was carrying some warm food to protectors of the tent-camp when he was stopped by the riot policemen and taken into custody. And now his imprisonment serves as a cause to ban one of few remaining independent newspapers in the country.
Br23net put it precisely:

    The authorities are cynically closing down Nasha Niva on the eve of its 100th anniversary. This legendary newspaper was founded in 1906, and it was the first ever newspaper published completely in Belarusian language. In 1915 the original Nasha Niva was closed after Vilnius was occupied by German troops. In 2006 the attempt to close it is ordered by the Lukashenka administration. We don’t have any German occupation in 2006. It’s Lukashenka’s Russian-Soviet occupation. And they’ve advanced very far. Read more at Br23.net.

Nasha Niva is more than just an independent newspaper. There is a whole culture around it. It is like a voice of the epoch, a tribune for authors writing in Belarusian, a gate-keeper of the civic society, an agenda-setter, and the most intellectual product on the print newspaper market in Belarus. Always an excellent read, this is probably the only Belarusian newspaper about which I can recall a song – “The Epoch of Nasha Niva” by Zmicier Bartosik. I was reading it from 1991, and I don’t wanna believe that this epoch of Nasha Niva is coming to an end.

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