In the winter of 2011, Inna Shevchenko, the 22-year-old Ukrainian activist who would soon catapult the protest movement Femen—the self-described “shock-troops of feminism” and “the watch-bitches of democracy”—to international notoriety, began hatching a plan.
She and her Femen colleagues in their burgeoning battle against sexism and female oppression, decided to hit a truly hard target: the regime of Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, Europe’s last dictator. “We spent two evenings talking over things in Café Kupidon, which was our office back then. We were pretty inexperienced, but we did know it would be dangerous.”
Getting into Belarus would be the first problem. Inna Shevchenko, Oksana Shachko, and Sasha Nemchinova took an all-night train to Bryansk, in Russia, to avoid the border post between Ukraine and Belarus. (The border between Russia and Belarus is open, with no checkpoints.) Femen had already won aF measure of notoriety, and the women didn’t want to be turned back at the frontier, Shevchenko told me.
“We got to Bryansk in the middle of the night and caught a bus to Minsk. We arrived at 4 in the morning, and rented a room in the bus station. We were nervous, and I couldn’t sleep. We woke up and called our contact, but as soon as she heard our voices, she said, ‘Say no more!’ and told us to meet her by the theater.” Shevchenko’s voice drifted, her glance diverted. I pictured the scene: the three young women, embarking on a mission that could cost them their liberty, if not their lives, riding on a cold, dark, creaking train north from Kiev through the snow-blanketed forests, the sky starless and black. Then catching a rickety, Soviet-era bus trundling down an icy, potholed highway toward Minsk, a city festooned with portraits of Lukashenko presiding over drab gray boulevards, spottily lit by streetlamps. A dingy room in the bus station. Full story...
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She and her Femen colleagues in their burgeoning battle against sexism and female oppression, decided to hit a truly hard target: the regime of Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, Europe’s last dictator. “We spent two evenings talking over things in Café Kupidon, which was our office back then. We were pretty inexperienced, but we did know it would be dangerous.”
Getting into Belarus would be the first problem. Inna Shevchenko, Oksana Shachko, and Sasha Nemchinova took an all-night train to Bryansk, in Russia, to avoid the border post between Ukraine and Belarus. (The border between Russia and Belarus is open, with no checkpoints.) Femen had already won aF measure of notoriety, and the women didn’t want to be turned back at the frontier, Shevchenko told me.
“We got to Bryansk in the middle of the night and caught a bus to Minsk. We arrived at 4 in the morning, and rented a room in the bus station. We were nervous, and I couldn’t sleep. We woke up and called our contact, but as soon as she heard our voices, she said, ‘Say no more!’ and told us to meet her by the theater.” Shevchenko’s voice drifted, her glance diverted. I pictured the scene: the three young women, embarking on a mission that could cost them their liberty, if not their lives, riding on a cold, dark, creaking train north from Kiev through the snow-blanketed forests, the sky starless and black. Then catching a rickety, Soviet-era bus trundling down an icy, potholed highway toward Minsk, a city festooned with portraits of Lukashenko presiding over drab gray boulevards, spottily lit by streetlamps. A dingy room in the bus station. Full story...
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