The fear was gone. If you take that first step to cross this boundary, there is no going back. You have to keep going onwards, ever onwards
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Vyacheslav (Vyachka) Andreyevich Krasulin was born in Minsk on 14 May 1988. Conflicts with teachers and school administrators led him to attend various schools in Minsk. In 1995 he started Year 1 at School No. 140 in Minsk, but he switched to several other educational institutions and ended up receiving his secondary-school final certificate in a distance course in 2007. From 2005 he took part in youth protests and was an activist of the Young Front, a Belarusian opposition youth organisation registered in the Czech Republic. In 2006 he attended peaceful demonstrations to protest the falsification of the presidential election. Vyachka was repeatedly detained by the police for attending protest events and demonstrations, but after the report was filed, he would always be released as a juvenile. In 2006 he was expelled from his second year at the Minsk State Polytechnic College. He finally completed his secondary education through a distance course in 2007. He then studied at the Belarusian State University of Culture and Arts, which he graduated from in 2012. He continued his studies and research activities in the field of folklore and cultural anthropology at the Institute of Scientific Preparation of the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus. From 2013 he worked at the Department of Ethnology and Folklore of the Belarusian State University of Culture and Arts, where he taught subjects related to cultural anthropology and Belarusian folklore; he created a course programme on the technical methods of folklore collecting. In 2013–2017 he studied for a doctoral degree at the aforesaid university, which he did not complete because he was forced to leave Belarus. While studying he also worked at the Museum of Folk Architecture and Life in the village of Strochitsy (he had participated in events organised by this unique open-air museum from 2009 and had been employed as a junior researcher there from 2015). Since his childhood, he has played on the recorder and the bagpipes (a traditional Belarusian instrument), and when he was 18, in 2005, he started his own folk-punk band Kashlaty Voh. The band recorded several studio albums and singles. On the night of 10 to 11 August 2020, he was detained in Minsk and brutally beaten several times in a prison van and in the Akrescina Detention Centre, where he was held for four days (he was sentenced to 11 days but was released early due to the on-going chaos that had engulfed Belarusian prisons and detention centres). Based on a medical report of the injuries he had sustained through the beatings and torture, legal proceedings were opened against him by the Investigative Committee of Belarus according to Article 293 Paragraph 2 of the Penal Code (participation in mass unrest). He is facing 3 to 8 years of prison. In early September 2020 he managed to leave Belarus thanks to humanitarian access mediated by Lithuania. He has been living and working in Lithuania since autumn 2020. His colleagues from the music community found him work as an organ restorer. Following the general strike in Belarus on 26 October 2020, he officially resigned from all his job positions in Minsk. The Office of the Prosecutor General of Lithuania acknowledged his status as a victim and launched an investigation of Belarusian security forces within the framework of universal jurisdiction.
