Commenting on the volumes A Cross Too Heavy and Stolen Identities, literary critic Constantin Zarnescu mentioned the density of related facts, with deeply credible characters through the real support of avatars and humiliations in Stalin’s Soviet imprisonment; an imprisonment that no longer had anything classical (protection, isolation, decency, human dignity) and that was not concerned with Christian atonement, but with the chaos of a dictatorship of endless fear, terror and death.

Although it seems like a story from other realms, the Soviet communist ideology of those years sent the countries of Eastern Europe, like everything else it reached, to a backward stage of human civilization by at least a hundred years.

Seventy-five years have passed since. Can today’s generations have forgotten what their parents and grandparents went through? Hard to say, considering the crisis that is currently tearing Belarus apart. History repeats itself when you forget it or sweep it under the rug. And yet, unexpected help comes from where you don’t expect it, from Mother Russia herself. The last Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev voices his support for the people of Belarus, vehemently challenging the Lukashenko regime and the mass arrests of peaceful protesters on the streets of Minsk. “I respect the Republic of Belarus and love the Belarussian people,” says the eighty-nine-year-old Gorbi frantically.

Do Lukashenko and his camarilla understand nothing from what the experienced Gorbachev tells? Has nobody told him that all dictatorships on earth have been castles in the air, and dictators ended up, like all dictators, in the landfill of history?

O tempora, o mores! Cicero said two thousand years ago, lamenting the moral decay and high-level corruption of his fellow men.

I have already begun to “take pity” on “poor” Lukashenko.