In Minsk, heritage goes into hiding

MINSK, Belarus - At 9 in the morning, Maxim Rust and Yevgeny Volk, two 16-year-olds, knocked quietly on the door of an apartment in a nondescript building and quickly slipped inside.

Off the narrow hallway, where ordinarily the sitting room might be, Alexander Syadyaka was teaching physics to a group of 11th-graders squeezed along two walls. Farther along, opposite the kitchen, Tatyana Maguchava was teaching English.

"We are an underground school," Rust said. "Our government sees a threat from educated people. They are typical Soviets. Anything that doesn't fit the system, they want to destroy it."

"We're partisans!" Volk said.

This modest apartment and three others that have been converted are all that is left of the Yakub Kolas National Humanities Lyceum, a private high school that taught an international curriculum in the Belarusian language. Stocked with university professors who wanted to champion the Belarusian language while teaching a curriculum free from state interference, the school had established a reputation for excellence.

But in Belarus, where education is increasingly seen as the servant of a state ideology centered on perpetuating the rule of President Alexander Lukashenko, an independent, Western-oriented institution working in a language other than Russian amounted to three strikes.

"Education," the president said last year, "is the sphere that gives intellectual and spiritual life to a person. That's why it's no space for the opposition to make their nests."

In July 2003, 12 years after it was founded by a group of intellectuals, the high school, which had close to 200 students, was shuttered by the government. After first attempting to install a principal who didn't speak Belarusian, officials closed the school because they said its physical plant was unsafe and needed renovation.

The school was named after Yakub Kolas, one of the country's great poets and a leader in a 20th century revival of Belarusian language and culture. Lukashenko, however, seems determined to Russify the country and has, at various times, proposed a union with Russia.

"The Russian language will be in Belarus as long as I am president," he said this year. "The lack of the Russian language will be the death of the state."

For the democratic opposition, which includes the school's teachers and student body, the closure is emblematic of the slow strangulation of civil society in Belarus, where hundreds of nongovernmental organizations have been threatened or closed in the last 18 months.

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