Punishment Without Crime

I never saw a man who looked With such a wistful eye Upon that little tent of blue Which prisoners call the sky.' Oscar Wilde, The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898) 'Stone walls do not a prison make, Nor iron bars a cage...' Richard Lovelace, 'To Althea, from Prison: Song' (1649) In Belarus during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries many people were punished with imprisonment for the 'crime' of resisting hostile political systems or defending minority national and religious allegiances: under the Tsars, when Belarus was referred to as The North West Region of the Russian Empire; between 1921 and 1939 when Western Belarus was under Polish rule; before and after the Second World War in Soviet Belarus; and, of course, during the authoritarian reign of Aliaksandr Lukašenka.It is worth recalling that Stalin's purges of the Belarusian elite were more thorough in Belarus than anywhere else in the Soviet Union, with 90% of the leading Belarusian literary group 'Maladniak' subjected to show trials as early as 1930.As Andrew Wilson notes, during the great purges of 1937-41, 100,000-250,000 Belarusians were murdered and buried in the notorious Kurapaty site near Minsk (Wilson 2011, 205).For more detail of Stalin's victims see the comprehensive work of Lieanid Marakoǔ: Marakoǔ 2002-05, Marakoǔ 2007a, and Marakoǔ 2007b.This paper considers the poetry of those who suffered prison rather

Art · Criminology · Literature · Poetry · Political science · Prison · Punishment (psychology · Sociology · Eastern European Communism and Reforms · European Linguistics and Anthropology · Psychology · Social Psychology