VASIL BYKOV’S LAST ROAD :: Charter'97 :: News

Thousands came to the mourning procession of Vasil Bykov. At 2.30, when the civil funeral ended, the coffin with the writer’s body was taken out of the Palace of Literature by Bykov’s colleagues and friends – Vladimir Neklyaev, Sergei Zakonnikov, Vladimir Orlov and others. The column slowly moved out along the Skarina prospect. Bykov’s best friends Rygor Borodulin and Gennady Buravkin were carrying the cross in front of the procession. The people raised white-red-white flags. The coffin was also wrapped up in the national flag’s colors. People threw on the pavement thousands white-red-white flowers… Cars, passing by, were signaling to Bykov, paying him their last tribute.

However, even on such a tragic day for the Belarusian nation, police didn’t refrain from interference. Today there actions looked especially outrageous.

First of all, the plain-clothed operatives were present at all mourning events, keeping an eye on the situation development and talking to their chiefs through walkie-talkies. The Interior Minister Vladimir Naumov and riot police commander Yuri Podobed, both dressed in civilian, also turned up at the place of mass gathering.

Second of all, the traffic policemen and agents in civilian were making obstacles on the way of the movement. They couldn’t tolerate a huge crowd, walking along the country’s main prospect under white-red-white banners. And so, all along the way they would provoke artificial traffic jams, not letting the vehicles turn to the adjacent streets, calling on the action’s participants not to interfere with traffic, but occupy only two lanes of the prospect, et cetera.

In the Yakub Kolas square the coffin with the writer’s dead body was boarded into a catafalque. The crowd kept slowly strolling in the direction of the Eastern cemetery of Minsk, where the great Belarusian national writer will soon be buried. But our memories of him will never die…