For the seventh day (from the very day of the presidential elections in Belarus) at the office of the Embassy of the Republic of Belarus on the street. Bonch-Bruevich people gather. On the evening of August 16, about a hundred of St. Petersburg Belarusians (and sympathizers), just as neatly as before, laid bouquets of flowers near the embassy walls – as a sign of sadness for the victims of the crackdown on rallies in Minsk (MK in St. Petersburg has already written how protests in the Belarusian capital were reflected in the city on the Neva, as well as the actual elections in St. Petersburg).
If the embassy employees were at their workplaces on Sunday and decided to look out the windows, they could see and hear a lot of interesting things – although not new to themselves. For example, the slogans on the posters of the “single picketers”: “Long live Belarus”, “We will remember” and, finally, “Yong is not my father.” In the park nearby, instead of protest songs, people sang the Christian anthem in Belarusian “Magutny Bozha”, as well as simple and almost understandable verses by the national poet Yanka Kupala, written in 1908:
“Chim Asvenchan? – I cut it, sweat.
What would you want? “Don’t be cattle.”
Petersburg police asked the singers to move away from the walls of the regime institution (in the same square), but otherwise they did not fix any obstacles.
It is easy to see: the flower-song format of the protest actions chosen by the protesters is somewhat reminiscent of the “Singing Revolution” in Estonia and Latvia (partly in Lithuania), which at one time went down in history as almost the only successful and relatively bloodless attempt of “provinces by the sea »Secede from the empire. Knowing the character of Belarusians, one could hope for the best – if not for the alarming activity of the interested parties and not the blood that has already been shed in Minsk.