Belarusian blog “My grandmother, the regime and me” received a CNN award

“What is this, a dictatorship?” - 75-year-old Alevtina Peregud asks her granddaughter Irina Shpakovskaya. A young journalist came to the Polesie village of Vorotyn to interview her grandmother about how she lived during the Soviet era and how she lives now.

Alevtina Peregud - with gray tied hair, lean, in a colorful scarf and a light sleeveless dress - does not sit idle for a minute: she either lights the stove in the house where she lives alone after the death of her husband, then fries pancakes, then feeds the chickens. Having survived famine and war, a fire and the depreciation in the early 1990s of the accumulated wealth accumulated over 26 years of work without vacations or severance pay, she does not complain about fate. The woman never really thought about the fact that her youth fell on the heyday of totalitarianism: her main concern was to earn a piece of bread and educate her only daughter. Moreover, she does not perceive the current President of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko, as a dictator. Those who come out to protest against him have not seen, in her words, “hunger, cold and bombings.” “I’m ready to eat only once a day, if only there would be no war!” - she exclaims in response to her granddaughter’s question.

While working on the project, Irina Shpakovskaya accompanied her grandmother everywhere for several days. “What was very surprising to me was how calm she was in front of the camera. Only for the first 20 minutes I was embarrassed, and then I just started minding my own business,” the journalist notes. Irina is not surprised by the woman’s restrained attitude towards the political cataclysms experienced by her generation: she knew about this even before the interview. “I think this is typical of our older people: they believe that they shouldn’t be upset if something went wrong in life. So in front of me was, on the one hand, my own, and on the other, an average Belarusian grandmother,” the girl reflects.