Ales Pushkin, a maverick artist, iconographer and civic activist who once deposited feces outside the office of Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, died in a prison hospital under “unclear circumstances”, his wife, Janina Demuch, reported in a Facebook post July 11. He was 57 years old.
Pushkin was detained in a prison known for his brutal conditions in Grodno, western Belarus, after being sentenced to five years in 2022 to represent a post-war Belarusian anti-Soviet guerrilla fighter with a machine gun. This was considered a crime committed “deliberate actions aimed at rehabilitating and justifying Nazism”.
Mosta Belarusian opposition news site based in Poland, reported on July 12 that Pushkin died of multi-organ failure after the prison failed to treat his perforated ulcer in time. The artist’s Facebook page has been flooded with tributes to his art and his bravery.
Pushkin was one of many Belarusian artists caught in a wave of oppression following 2020 protests challenging Lukashenko’s claim to have won the presidential election against Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, the wife of a blogger from the imprisoned opposition. More recently, Lukashenko has been a self-serving ally of Vladimir Putin in Russia’s war on Ukraine, and Lukashenko’s heavy-handed tactics against opposition activists, including artists, presaged the Kremlin’s domestic crackdown on freedom of speech.
Tsikhanouskaya tweeted on July 11after the announcement of Pushkin’s death, that he “used his art to fight for freedom” and to build a Belarus without tyranny, for which he was such a threat because “dictators fear artists” who ” have the power to express thoughts and ideas that challenge the lies of the regime” and “hold up a mirror to the world, a mirror that tyrants dread to look into”.
Pushkin, who had promoted the revival of Belarusian culture, saw where the Lukashenko regime was heading in 1999, responding with the delivery of manure to his gift for the president performance. He was also known as an iconographer and restorer and depicted a man resembling Lukashenko in a Last Judgment scene that he painted for a church in his native village of Bobr.
