Sergei and Svetlana Tikhanovsky, after he was freed from five years in prison isolation. Photo / Getty Images
For five long years, Belarusian opposition leader Sergei Tikhanovsky was held in total isolation.
When he was abruptly freed this June in a “miracle” prisoner release made possible by United States President Donald Trump, he returned to a world and a home he no longer recognised – and one that didn’t recognise him.
Since they had last spoken, his wife Svetlana, 42, once a self-described housewife with no political education, had transformed into a dogged and skilful stateswoman in her own right, leading the charge against Belarus’ longtime dictator Alexander Lukashenko from exile.
Sergei Tikhanovsky, 47, has since had to relearn how to be a husband and father, while struggling to find a new role within the political movement he inspired, as many Belarusians are losing hope for any political change in the country.
“She was a housewife, and now she’s a president,” he said in an interview with the Washington Post, recalling his shock when observing a meeting between Svetlana Tikhanovsky and European Union foreign ministers this northern summer.
“At home, she’s still my beloved wife, but at work it’s a nightmare,” he said with a smile.
”She’s like a businesswoman. I never saw this side of her before … I realised that she’s a different person.”
In an interview in Paris, where they were attending a French parliamentary meeting in support of Belarus, the tension was visible on the Tikhanovskys’ faces.
The couple talked candidly about five years of impossible choices, heartbreak and loss and the strain that recent events have put on their family.
They spoke about their mission to prove themselves reliable political partners for the West even as Trump describes their nemesis Lukashenko as “highly respected”, viewing him as a useful back channel to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Since Sergei’s release, the couple has been catapulted into a political whirlwind as Belarus has found itself back on the agenda following a wave of prisoner releases orchestrated by the Trump Administration as Lukashenko seeks to cast off his status as an international pariah and push for sanctions relief.
“Now that Sergei is beside me again, I’ve felt chaos and calm simultaneously,” Svetlana said. “But then you think about how many people are still out there [in jail] - we can’t stop, we have to keep working.”
As they try to convince the US and the EU to keep up their pressure on Lukashenko’s regime and fight to save more political prisoners, there has been little time for the family to rest and adjust to their new reality. Svetlana Tikhanovsky is constantly travelling across the world for meetings and conferences, returning home exhausted.
“Before, when I was in business, I would come home, and there would be a delicious dinner with my wife and children waiting for me. I had their undivided attention. Now it’s as if the roles are starting to reverse,” Sergei said. “I constantly tell my wife and children to hug me more often, because I don’t get enough hugs.”
The daughter of a truck driver, Svetlana first met Sergei at a nightclub in 2003 in Mazyr, a small town close to Ukraine. She was training to be an English teacher; Sergei Tikhanovsky owned the club while producing music videos and concerts.
They married after a year, and Svetlana later left her teaching career to commit herself fulltime to helping their deaf son learn to speak.
Lukashenko had already been in power for seven years after ending a brief window of freedom that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, and in the years that followed he clamped down on critics, while aligning Belarus closely with Vladimir Putin’s revanchist Russia.
In 2019, frustrated by bureaucratic red tape and pressure from officials, Sergei Tikhanovsky launched a YouTube channel called “Country For Life” interviewing ordinary people about social problems, corruption and Lukashenko.
The channel proved immensely popular, rapidly gaining over 100,000 subscribers and giving him a significant political following.
In 2020, he decided to prove a point and register for the upcoming presidential elections. He was predictably denied. But on the way home from the electoral commission, thinking of the number of people her husband had inspired, Svetlana Tikhanovsky had an idea – what if she did it?
Without discussing it with Sergei, she returned to the commission the next day and submitted her own candidacy, to the smirks of officials. “It was an act of love for my husband,” she remembers. And it worked.
“The dictator said that a woman couldn’t be president, so they calmly registered her,” Sergei Tikhanovsky said. “He was sure that no one would vote for her.”
It was a misstep by the regime. Thousands turned out to support Svetlana. On May 29, 2020, Sergei was arrested while collecting signatures for her candidacy.
Bloggers and opposition leaders were swept up, prompting hundreds of thousands of Belarusians to take to the streets in protest.
Thousands were arrested, beaten, jailed and tortured as Lukashenko, backed by Russian President Vladimir Putin, rounded up his opponents. Belarus’ international isolation deepened as the West responded with sweeping sanctions.
“Ukraine and Belarus have one enemy: Putin’s Russia, which does not allow independence or freedom in either Ukraine or Belarus, considering them to be its sphere of influence,” Sergei Tikhanovsky said.
“This is the whole problem. If Putin had been reined in Minsk in 2020, there would have been no war in Ukraine in 2022. But Europe remained silent, and so did the US And now you see what mistakes lead to.”
Sergei Tikhanovsky was sentenced to 18 years in jail at the end of 2021.
Svetlana Tikhanovsky has since been recognised in the West as the true victor in Belarus’ 2020 presidential election.
“I wouldn’t say I chose this path, this path chose me,” Svetlana said. “When life itself puts you in a situation where you have to do something, either you do it or you don’t. Sergei did it. I did it without understanding the consequences … People in 2020 also followed their hearts.”
When Sergei Tikhanovsky finally saw his two children for the first time in five years, the couple’s 10-year-old daughter asked who he was.
Arrested as a burly, bearded man with a cheery smile, Sergei emerged from Lukashenko’s jails aged and emaciated; he had lost 60kg in prison.
“When he came out of the bus, I was shocked,” recalled Svetlana. “If he had walked past me on the street, I would not have recognised him. I was overwhelmed with happiness but also horror.”
With years in prison to think and plan, Sergei Tikhanovsky wasted no time getting back into the public eye.
He has plans to expand “Country For Life,” which currently has over 240,000 subscribers, and now travels to meet Belarusian diaspora in Europe and the US.
His return to professional life has not been easy for Svetlana Tikhanovsky.
A video capturing an argument between the couple and members of her delegation on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly last month hinted at frictions and competing visions.
“The most difficult thing was that Sergei immediately went public,” said Svetlana. “But the context had changed … and Sergei made several mistakes. We had to conduct some kind of anti-crisis communication.”
Sergei Tikhanovsky said that they now work as separate entities and acknowledges that he has much to learn before he can fully return as an opposition leader.
“I haven’t found my place yet … but we have the same goal – a free, democratic Belarus. It’s just that they are tackling this task with more diplomatic tools … my path is a little different.”
Sergei Tikhanovsky, always an outspoken figure with a penchant for controversies, said that one of the biggest shocks after his release was seeing how tired and defeated Belarusians are now.
“The mood that we had in 2020 – this spiritually emotional upsurge; it hardly exists,” he said.
“I tell people not to be heroes now, now is not the time, because when the moment comes, we will need each and every one of them, everyone in every enterprise, in the system, in every village, we will need people,” Svetlana Tikhanovsky said. “Do not overlook Belarus.”
Svetlana recognises that she will never be able to understand what her husband and thousands of other political prisoners have endured.
While criminals in Belarusian jails are permitted to watch TV, political prisoners are subjected to psychological torture. They are kept in cold cells without bedding, given scraps of food, denied even a toothbrush and toilet paper.
After his arrest Svetlana Tikhanovsky had to make high-stakes decisions for her family, alone.
As the threats from authorities mounted, she decided to send her two children to Lithuania fearing they’d be sent to an orphanage, like other children of political prisoners. She was forced into exile in August 2020.
“I also went through a very long and difficult journey. I had to learn everything from scratch right in the middle of the struggle. No one prepared me for this. Every day you live with huge anxiety, with pain for your husband, for other people, for new repressions,” she said.
For the first years of his imprisonment, Svetlana told their young children that Sergei was away on a business trip, but when all communication was blocked, she finally told them the truth.
“I told them, your Dad is in prison, he has bare walls, he doesn’t see the sun, he doesn’t see any colours. Draw a beautiful picture for Dad so he can remember what the colour red looks like, what the sun looks like,” she said.
“I explained that he was fighting for their freedom and their future, that he was a hero.”
Sergei Tikhanovsky is now working to make up for all the lost time with his children, taking them on bike rides and learning their likes and dislikes.
“I’m trying to find common ground with them. It’s such a long, slow process … there’s such a big gap,” he said.
“All children of political prisoners are traumatised.”
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