Palchys urged not to rewrite the history of 2020: Do not look for false versions of the past

I've wanted to write this text for a long time, but today is the most appropriate date.

When you are detained in 2020 and released in 2026, one of the most shocking discoveries for all normal political prisoners is the mental changes in people.

Over these 5 months, I have read and heard a lot of outright nonsense at times: that the 2020 protests were organized by Russia, that someone was almost forcibly led out, that someone was deliberately used, etc.

Even in prison, I clearly saw how people rewrote the past retroactively to find their convenient justification for what was happening.

Those who were afraid to join a simple human chain in August, a couple of months later in a prison cell, were already discussing "we should have been tougher with them."

When the protests were brutally suppressed, and then migration, war, and internal conditions in Belarus began to resemble North Korea in places, naturally, many felt a deep sense of disappointment. And then "smart alecs" with their nonsense about 2020 emerged. And some began to look for a culprit, or create complex schemes of internal justifications, or convince themselves of something that was not even close to reality.

So, until mid-July 2020, I was for a complete boycott of the elections, although 99% at that moment thought absolutely differently. But then life took such a turn that I myself had to sit down as an organizer. And I remember how in early summer 2020, people wrote to me that I was an imbecile and understood nothing, and that we "would now go to the elections (vote, observe) and win according to the law."

It was naive, but sincere naivety. This naivety was the main fuel for the engine of those events.

Therefore, no matter how much it bothers anyone now — 2020 is a legendary, historical, and heroic period for the Belarusian nation. Neither 1991 nor 1918 can compare with it in terms of the number and degree of population involvement. It is also the purest movement in terms of organization, with not a single kopeck of any Western funding. And all of this is true because people themselves sincerely did what they believed was right.

If many of us now live in free countries, let's squeeze out the "sovok" (Soviet mentality) from ourselves and stop subconsciously looking for false versions of the past, which are essentially just an attempt to shirk responsibility for our actions and choices. Yes, everything is difficult now, but in history and with God, plans often differ from ours. And who knows what awaits us ahead.

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