Culture minister says intelligentsia being cleansed of destructive elements

March 29, Pozirk. Belarusian Culture Minister Anatol Markievič has called on authorities to achieve a “moral victory” over “terrible spiritual threats,” state media reported.

He was speaking at the St Elisabeth Convent in Minsk, where the Council of the Republic held a presidium meeting today.

According to the opposition Belarusian Council for Culture, there were 148 political prisoners-cultural workers in December. It documented reprisals against more than 1,000 cultural figures.

Markievič said art galleries, projects and cultural spaces funded by “fake philanthropists and Western foundations” poured “spiritual poison” into the minds of young people.

“Some of them succumbed to this corrupting influence and became a thoughtless but dangerous, destructive weapon in the hands of their foreign puppet masters,” he added.

But the authorities have learned lessons from the 2020 protests and are “purging the creative intelligentsia of people who undermine the foundations of the state that raised and fed them,” he said.