Svetlana Tikhanovskaya
ON A HOT SUMMER DAY LAST AUGUST, SVETLANA Tikhanovskaya was pacing up and down her empty apartment in Minsk, the capital of Belarus in Central Europe, her life—and her country—in turmoil. With her husband in jail, she had sent her two small children out of the country, to safety, and now faced a stark choice, bluntly handed to her by the nation’s security forces: flee into exile herself, or face arrest. “I had a couple of hours, but I could not pack anything, because I was so overstressed,” she recalls. “It was a shock. I was not prepared for this.”
It is hard to imagine how Tikhanovskaya could have prepared for the jolting transformation of her life. Within the space of a few months, she
