In August 2020, a leading figure of Belarus Free Theatre, the renowned company based in Minsk, found herself in a choke hold. “A policewoman put me on my knees and choked me with [the crook of] her elbow,” says Svetlana Sugako. “I said, ‘Now you will kill me and you will live with that for the rest of your life.’ She was very angry because I had to sign a protocol [with falsified details] of my arrest and I said, ‘I will not sign it because it’s not true.’”
Sugako and her partner Nadia Brodskaya, the administrative figureheads of Belarus Free Theatre who are both in their early thirties, were detained on the evening of the election on 9 August. There was much optimism that, after 26 years, President Alexander Lukashenko would finally be voted out of office. Because his despotic government had shut down the internet, Sugako and Brodskaya were waiting for the results at a polling station in the capital’s largest public space when a policeman approached and ordered them into a van.
