The Belarusian writer Sasha Filipenko visited HSG

"We hear less and less about Belarus. The situation there is so dire that we don't even know when Russia effectively occupied us, but we know and can see that it has."

Belarusian writer Sasha Filipenko began his lecture as part of Dr Gulnaz Partschefeld's course on Russian cultural history with this statement. This sentence marks a turning point: occupation does not only refer to territory; it also has an insidious character. The lack of knowledge about the moment of loss of sovereignty itself becomes a symptom of an authoritarian reality in which history is distorted, language is manipulated, and responsibility is systematically shifted.

Openly opposing the regime in Belarus

Sasha Filipenko's outspoken opposition to the regime and his support for the 2020 protests in Belarus forced him into exile. He has been living and working in Basel ever since. The fact that Filipenko is considered an "extremist" and "terrorist" in Belarus and Russia, and that his works are banned there, highlights the paradoxical logic of repressive systems. Literature is not banned because of its actual power, but because of its potential to stimulate thought and challenge established narratives.

"People don't want to hear the truth; they tend to repress it. With my works, I make it difficult for them to sugarcoat history."

Based on this, the discussion turned to why societies do not primarily believe in lies, but rather in convenient versions of the truth. Here, repression is not seen as an individual failure, but as a collective, learned mechanism and, at the same time, as a central instrument of power in authoritarian systems.

The topic of repression in Filipenko's latest novel, "The Elephants"

Filipenko's latest novel, The Elephants (due to be published in German in 2026), deals with the topic of repression. The elephant represents the obvious yet ignored, repressed or trivialised issues of war, violence, oppression, family and social trauma. At first, the elephant does not seem threatening; it is almost familiar. However, what is truly disturbing is how quickly people learn to live with the elephant, navigate around it and accept it.

The brutality of the system in Filipenko's novel Kremulator (2022) was also discussed, along with the fact that it is not violence that is at the heart of the system, but bureaucracy and routine. Pyotr Nesterenko, the head of the first Moscow crematorium during Stalinism, exemplifies the functionaries of an autocratic state: a precisely working cog in a machinery of terror. During the discussion with the students, the focus was therefore less on guilt in the moral sense and more on responsibility within a system that relies on participation, silence and conformity. Where is the line between survival and complicity? When does function become complicity? And how much decision-making power does the individual actually have?

The lecture made it clear that authoritarian systems not only function from above, but are also stabilised by countless small acts of conformity. It was also made clear that literature picks up where political language fails, addressing the uncomfortable, the conflict and the morally irresolvable.

Image: Corinne Riedener