Pen vs. Sword
Editor Iryna Vidanava Is Pushing Change in Belarus. The Government Is Pushing Back.

By Philip Kennicott
Washington Post Staff Writer
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/27/AR2005122701325_pf.html
Wednesday, December 28, 2005; C02

After more than a year in the United States, Iryna Vidanava says she doesn't feel like an idiot when she smiles on the street. In her homeland of Belarus, spontaneous good humor toward strangers just isn't done in public places. In the grimly efficient, Soviet-era subway and on the rattletrap buses that ply the drab streets of Minsk, almost every face is studiously expressionless. Even most young people put up a shell and stay nervously within it.

Changing that, in some ways, has become her life's work. And it may land her in prison.

Vidanava, a graduate student at Johns Hopkins University, holds down three jobs -- putting in long days including a commute between Washington, where she lives, and Baltimore, where she studies. She has two gigs with the university, where she works as a research assistant and a teaching assistant.

And then there's what she calls "my night job" -- as editor of Student Thought, perhaps the most edgy and professional publication left in Belarus, where the government has been ruthlessly shutting down all independent media. Although Minsk is almost 5,000 miles away, she still works -- with cell phone and e-mail -- to keep alive the magazine she has edited since 1998. But as Belarus, a landlocked country sandwiched between Poland and Russia, prepares for an election in March, things have never been more difficult.

Last month, the government seized all but a handful of copies of the magazine. And now Vidanava is under investigation for financial crimes and infractions against the country's draconian press laws.

If charged, the 27-year-old editor could face a huge fine and up to six years in prison. But it's hard to know exactly what's happening with her case in Belarus. One investigator is on vacation; another has given no word on where things stand..

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