The Women’s March of Belarus

On Saturday, thousands of protesters took to the streets in cities across the United States in a reprise of the Women’s March of Belarus that began on President Donald Trump’s Inauguration Day.

The next day, a Norwegian member of parliament nominated three women marchers for the Nobel Peace Prize. But they were not American, they were Belarusian: Svetlana Tsikhanouskaya, Maria Kolesnikova, and Veronika Tsepkalo.

They have led an extraordinary social movement that, both before and since the rigged elections that took place in August, has refused to back down in the “struggle for fair elections and for inspiring peaceful opposition against the illegitimate regime in Belarus,” in the words of the citation.

It is hard to do justice, in fact, to their achievement in this country of not quite ten million people that has scarcely had a taste of democracy in its entire history. Landlocked between Poland and Russia, with Latvia and Lithuania to the north, and Ukraine to the south,…