Before the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, that small region between Lithuania and Moldova was known as the Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic — one of the 15 that comprised the USSR. Afterwards the world welcomed, in addition to the newly named Russian Federation, 14 smaller sovereign nations, each struggling to create its own identity and find its place in the world.
Of all of them, Belarus has maintained the closest ties to Moscow. It didn’t start out that way. Stanislav Shushkevich, who served as the first head of state of the newly independent (and newly renamed) Belarus, was a social democrat in favor of reforms. But in the first presidential election in 1994, he was opposed and defeated by Aleksandr Lukashenko, who campaigned on a platform of anti-corruption (pause for derisive laughter) and closer ties with Russia.
Throughout the next several years, Lukashenko consolidated his power, expanded his executive e authority, and instituted Soviet-style “reforms,” even making Russian an official language alongside Belarusian.
And in 1999, when Vladimir Putin took the reins of power from Boris Yeltsin in Russia, Aleksandr Lukashenko jumped onto Putin’s wagon and never left. The government of Belarus is now a full-blown dictatorship, and has aided Russia’s war against Ukraine from the very beginning.
It even has its own KGB — still named and patterned after the notorious Soviet-era Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti: the Committee for State Security. (Which, by the way, is still very much alive and operating in Russia as well, but as two units with new names: the FSB and the SVR.)
And, like its Russian forebear, the Belarusian KGB has its own academy. Known as the National Security Academy, it has recently begun construction of a new campus in the capital city of Minsk — a huge complex whose main structure is a six-story, 36,000-square-meter “academic building with a dormitory,” designed for 1,250 students and beds for 627. The plans include, below ground, space for a shooting gallery; separate warehouses for storage of weapons; radiation, chemical and biological protection equipment; and other military supplies. In another section, there is to be a canteen with three dining halls, and an elaborate sports complex.
By now some of my readers have surely asked, “So what?”
And the answer is this:
It is the Roman Catholic Church of the Holy Trinity (Saint Rochus), also known simply as Saint Roch, built in the 14th or 15th Century, and located on a protected property on Minsk’s Zalataya Horka (Golden Hill). And adjacent to the church is the plot of land on which the Academy is being constructed.
Apparently — aside from the nature of the construction having been kept secret until a recent discovery of the plans by Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty’s Belarus Service — the law protecting the property was overridden by Lukashenko’s executive order.
RFE/RL has been unable to coax a comment from the appropriate officials, who have said the information is “restricted.”
But the main problem seems to be, not merely the construction of a KGB facility, but the fact that the plot of land is the site of a cemetery — an historic cemetery, long occupied by centuries of ancestors of the people of Belarus. It was closed to burials around 1920, and over time the gravestones were destroyed. It is not clear what has happened to the bodies of those who were buried there.
According to one parishioner, the parish should be told of the fate of the human remains on the construction site:
“When Christian cemeteries are destroyed, it is an insult to both the dead and the living. There should be a clear memorial, and there should be a Christian reburial of those people who were found beneath the excavator buckets. That’s why this looks very shameful and unacceptable.” [Steve Gutterman and RFE/RL’s Belarus Service, October 18, 2026.]
I should say so. But when you’re dealing with a tyrannical, murderous, totalitarian leader, human decency doesn’t merely take a back seat; it flies out the window.
Just sayin’ . . .
Brendochka
10/19/26
