Can two Chicagoans solve an international mystery of murdered Jews and stolen medicine?
Sam Jemielity asks
On a chilly evening, Christian Laine ushers guests into his North Sheridan apartment, crammed with Russian icons. The tall blond host makes a sweeping gesture to an antique dining table, where he's set out a traditional Russian feast of smoked salmon, deviled eggs, salad and bread. Around the table, guests nibble hors d'oeuvres, sip beer and get acquainted. But the gathering is not a party. It's an opportunity to learn more about human-rights violations in Belarus, a country roughly the size of Kansas.-including a string of murdered Jewish intellectuals and a heisted million-dollar medical shipment.
Tonight we will see a smuggled copy of "Ordinary President," a documentary by dissident Belarusian filmmaker Yury Khashevatsky. The ringing indictment of Belarusan president Alexander Lukashenko is effectively banned in that country, but it has won awards in Germany and Moscow. The film also earned director Khashevatsky a triple leg fracture, a broken nose and a concussion, delivered by two thugs who broke into his Minsk apartment last year on the first night of Chanukah.
"Lukashenko's a fascist," Laine says matter-of-factly. The Belarusan president is on record praising Hitler in a speech delivered after his 1994 election. During a visit to Belarus last December to investigate the theft of a humanitarian medical shipment he had organized, Laine learned of a string of seven recent unsolved slayings of prominent Jews. Many of the victims had openly criticized Lukashenko; Laine is convinced the Belarusan KGB is behind these crimes.
Although Jews make up only one percent of the Belarusan population, "they are clearly intellectuals, they are clearly affluent, they are visible, they believe in democracy," Laine says. Certainly, the murdered men fit that description. All were talented, outspoken, cosmopolitan Jews or half-Jews: TV producers Alexander Chulanov and Leonid Petrusha, both shot to death; State Theater director Alexander Kharkevich, stabbed on the street by two men last November; businessman and arts sponsor Gregory Figlin, shot and killed in Moscow; filmmaker Arkady Ruderman, shot to death; actor Yuri Averianov, stabbed in the back in his apartment; Jewish literature specialist Boris Feeh, assassinated in Moscow.
"I knew all of them very well," says Vankarem Nikiforovich, a 64-year-old Belarusan journalist who moved from Minsk to Chicago in 1993. Laine enlisted the journalist's help in the investigation both because he's a respected intellectual and because he has a personal interest in solving the murders. "I had worked together with Alexander Chulanov and Leonid Petrusha... my colleagues on [Belarusan State] TV. Petrusha was my friend from my school years."
Many of the victims were outspoken about the problems faced by Jews in the former Soviet Union. Ruderman produced films on Jewish topics, and investigated army corruption. Ruderman was killed in Tajikstan in 1992-before Lukashenko came to power-while working on a documentary about the Russian Army's support of the Tajik communist regime. Chulanov produced programs on corruption among Red Army personnel stationed in Germany until 1991. Chulanov "knew too much about the army before the collapse of the Soviet Union," Nikiforovich says. Petrusha, who worked with Chulanov, produced a show about a Jewish correspondent for Moscow TV whom Lukashenko expelled from the country.
Both men were murdered in the spring of 1995. "Alexander's wife and son were on vacation, and he was alone in his apartment when the killers came," Nikiforovich says. Petrusha's elderly mother returned from the family's dacha to find her son's body. Nikiforovich learned of the killings a short while later, when an ex-colleague from Belarusan TV broke the news. In the fall, when friends of the slain men tried to investigate, they were called in to KGB offices. "It is our deal, not yours," the KGB agents reportedly said. "I'm sure that it is their work," Nikiforovich says.
After dinner, Laine's guests retire to the living room for the screening. "Ordinary President" is in Belarusan, with awkwardly translated English subtitles. Footage of Lukashenko visiting Auschwitz is juxtaposed with a recording of the president's pro-Hitler speech. The camera pans from a close-up on Lukashenko, who resembles Burt Reynolds, to the German inscription above the gate: "Arbeit macht frei." ("Work makes you free," the slogan of the camps.)
The film scans the barbed wire and blown-up photographs of Jews imprisoned at the site some fifty years earlier. Lukashenko's words echo over a tape recorder's hiss: "The history of Germany is to a certain degree a mold of the history of Belarus at some stages... I stress: There can't be in a certain process or a certain person everything either only white or only black. There is positive as well. Hitler formed mighty Germany due to a strong presidential power."
The camera pans along the fences, zooming in on bunkers, a guard tower. "But the German order," Lukashenko continues, "had been formed for centuries. And it's that what is in keeping with our idea of a presidential republic and the role of a president in it." Settled into sofas and chairs, eating cake off Russian china plates, Laine's guests silently weigh the surreal pronouncement.
In December 1997, Laine braved the Minsk winter to track down a shipment of medicine intended for children in his homeland who were affected by the Chernobyl disaster. Although Chernobyl is just south of the border in the Ukraine, the fallout from the accident rained down all over Belarus. More than ten years later, the populace still suffers. On a 1993 visit, Laine had discovered that affected children especially required surgical intervention, but lacked the necessary anesthesia.
With artwork by the kids, he organized a "Children of Chernobyl" exhibit that traveled from the Chicago Athenaeum-where Laine serves as director of the Museum of Architecture and Design-around the United States and Europe. With help from charities and pharmaceutical companies, Laine also coordinated several shipments of medicine, each valued at about $250,000. "Operation: Support Freedom" went off without a hitch until last July, when a $1 million cache of medical supplies-the biggest shipment to date-disappeared before arriving at five Chernobyl area hospitals. Laine went to investigate.
Even in Minsk, Laine could learn little about the hijacked shipment. His primary contact, Alexander Sinkevich, director of the State's Nature and Ecology Museum, left town when Laine arrived. All he could learn from Sinkevich's documentation was that about 10 percent of the shipment had made its way to Lukashenko's private hospital; the rest was probably sold on the black market. The State Department told Laine that Operation: Support Freedom was the third humanitarian medical shipment stolen in Belarus in 1997.
Although committed to exposing human-rights abuses in their native land, Laine and Nikiforovich are an odd couple. The affable Laine is in his early forties, a Russian Orthodox Christian, the son of Russian and Lithuanian nobility from a town in what is now considered Belarus; he wears trendy clothes and speaks fluent, mellifluous English, hinting at his cosmopolitan education in France, Greece, Italy and the United States. The slightly built, gray-haired Nikiforovich speaks English hesitantly; he's shy, even in his native language, but he's a regular speaker at the Belarusan-American National Council at St George's in Wicker Park. On the lapel of his neat gray suit, he wears a red-and-white pin-the colors of the Belarusan flag. He's half-Jewish. Three months ago, this odd couple convinced the Union of Councils of Soviet Jews to investigate the seven killings. Laine says of the Union: "When we first told them of the murders, their people in Minsk denied it was happening." Part of the problem, both Laine and a spokesman for the Union agree, was that being half-Jewish often means not being considered Jewish. Also, "it was almost a crime to be Jewish [in the Soviet Union]," Laine says. "It is very difficult to tell who's a Jew and who's not a Jew." Eventually, the Union unearthed information about the slayings. In a January letter to the U.S. State Department's Belarus Desk, Laine and Nikiforovich joined Union representatives in stating that "the political situation in the former Soviet state of Belarus has raised numerous concerns regarding the safety of the country's Jewish and human-rights activists." The letter outlined the circumstances of each murder, the ethnic background of each victim and the possible reasons for the crimes. Although the Belarusan government's refusal to comment on the crimes led to an impression of a "plot against Jewish intellectuals," the letter concludes, "at this time, no plot as such can be verified."
At Synagogue Free on Devon Avenue, Nikiforovich drops off an article on architecture in synagogues for Shalom, the Synagogue's Russian-language magazine. It's early March, just a few weeks before Belarusan Independence Day. But back in Minsk, independence does not mean freedom, the journalist says.
Since his election in 1994, Lukashenko has, to paraphrase a November 1997 Washington Post headline, marched Belarus stalwartly into the Soviet-era past. Human Rights Watch reported numerous attacks on the press, the government has resisted privatizing industry, and Lukashenko has effectively removed the border between Belarus and Russia.
Last month, two Belarusan youths received harsh sentences (one to spend eighteen months in hard-labor camp) for spray-painting graffiti. The story led the March 2 issue of the International Herald Tribune. "You know what the boys said?" Nikiforovich asks. "They wrote: 'Belarus, our native land. We don't agree with Lukashenko.'" He pulls out the February 24, 1998 edition of Navimi ("News"), the Minsk-based opposition newspaper. In 1997, Navimi replaced Svoboda ("Freedom"), the former opposition paper, banned by Lukashenko. A front-page picture shows the fresh-faced youths, in dressy sweaters, behind bars a week before sentencing. The harsh treatment earned a bland rebuke from the U.S. State Department: "This case once again demonstrates Belarus' failure to live up to the human-rights standards." A recent update offers, "Societal anti-Semitism exists, but it is not usually manifested openly. Senior Government officials, including the President, and the State media used coded anti-Semitism in their attacks on perceived opponents." Somebody, it seems, has also been using guns and knives.
"Our mission is to tell the truth," Nikiforovich says. "The government of the U.S., the embassy in Minsk, they are very diplomatic sometimes. On the one hand, it may be realpolitik. But sometimes, it would be good to say more, more of the truth."
When he was a child growing up in Belarus, Nikiforovich barely escaped falling into German hands at the outset of World War II. Away at summer camp in German-occupied territory, the child had no way of rejoining his mother and father. "A counselor saved ten children," he recalls, smiling at the bittersweet memory. "One of them was me." In the current issue of Shalom, Nikiforovich writes about the drawings of Jewish artist Marc Chagall, a native of Belarus. The Soviet Regime considered Chagall's art too Zionist and difficult for the masses, prompting his exclusion from official Belarusan encyclopedias.
In "Ordinary President," the cameras capture the unveiling ceremony for the so-called "Tapestry of the Century," a thirty-foot high collage of important intellectuals, thinkers, politicians and writers, with God in the middle. "The artist... grasped the situation in time," the subtitles wryly note, "and added President [Lukashenko] on one side." The camera zooms in on the tacked-on image of the grinning president. Lukashenko comments proudly, "This is genuine art."
Lukashenko comes across almost as a Bond villain. Yet he is dangerous in a very real way, Nikiforovich insists. The film shows footage of Lukashenko sharing a dais with President Clinton, former British Prime Minister John Major and Russian leader Boris Yeltsin. The dissolution of boundaries between Russia and Belarus evinces Lukashenko's well-known desire to reunite with the mother country. Belarusan nationalists are the minority, and Russian and Belarusan are the dual official languages. "From the point of view of economic and cultural development," Nikiforovich says, "it's like the occupation of Belarus by Russia." The youngish Lukashenko anticipates the day when he might run for president not of Belarus, but of Russia.
"Ordinary President" documents an unsanctioned April 1996 march in Minsk commemorating the tenth anniversary of Chernobyl. Military police in white helmets and riot gear line the streets, but the demonstrators march on, crushing into a wall of shields and soldiers. Truncheons fly, demonstrators and soldiers clash, a young man is struck down with a club from behind by a soldier, another marcher attacks a helmeted soldier with a pipe. A camera-toting journalist is grabbed by a pack of police.
At the end of the documentary, a cameo of Stalin smoothing his mustache precedes a shot of Lukashenko making a similar gesture. Footage of the Belarusan president strolling the streets kissing children is juxtaposed with Stalinist parades and Nazi army marches under Hitler's maniacally self-satisfied gaze. It would seem over-the-top propaganda, were it not for the people in the room insisting the danger is real. "There are people being killed," Laine says, "because of who they are. This needs to be known." Recognition of the crisis might be building-on March 5, U.S. Representative Christopher Smith (R-New Jersey) introduced a resolution in Congress about human rights abuses in Belarus, citing the beating of Khashevatsky as an example. For Laine and Nikiforovich, U.S. pressure on Lukashenko can't come soon enough.
"The situation is more and more like Germany in '34 and '35, when Hitler grabbed more power," Nikiforovich says. "Nobody said that it was something dangerous for Jews. The danger is that every day could be like the Kristallnacht in Germany. Any day, Lukashenko could say, 'Jews are the No. 1 enemy of my regime.'"
copyright 1998 New City Communications, Inc.