Rebel with a cause

An unhoused rabbit aficionado and former political prisoner has become an unlikely local celebrity in Minsk

It’s early in the morning as a homeless man settles down on the ground next to the exit of a Minsk metro station. With him he has a sign, a backpack and a rabbit. Many in the Belarusian capital know 64-year-old Alexander Kutas, a former political prisoner who is now unhoused.

Kutas, a Minsk native, was detained 10 times in 2021 alone for picketing Minsk’s Akrestsina Prison, where detainees were being held for their part in the mass anti-government protests, sparked by the results of the 2020 election, which were falsified in favour of Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko.

At least half a million people have left the country since then, according to Belarusian human rights organisation Viasna, which estimates that hundreds of thousands of people were detained for joining the protests, and that as of late August there were still 1,371 political prisoners in Belarus.

When Kutas was detained carrying the white-red-white flag of the opposition and a placard written in Belarusian, the use of which is itself seen as a gesture of defiance, he was sentenced to a year behind bars. And when he shouted at staff: “Long live Belarus!” in Belarusian, he was immediately sent to solitary confinement for 50 days. He completed his sentence and was released in late September 2022.

But that wasn’t his first stint in prison — Kutas has been incarcerated for more than 20 years in total for 15 different convictions, mostly for theft and robbery. “The tougher the prison, the easier the sentence. Because if the guys know this isn’t your first time inside, they’ll support you. But … there’s none of that solidarity anymore,” Kutas explains.

At some point between prison terms, Kutas ended up homeless and now sleeps in the utility area of a multi-storey building, access to which was provided to him by a kind stranger. He spends most of his days sitting on metro station steps with his pet rabbit.

“What use is citizenship to a homeless person? I’m in the police database if anyone needs to know who I am.”

Kutas stretches out his arms to show me something. He has a bandage on one arm where you can just about make out a pattern.“White-red-white!” he says. But he has stayed out of politics since his last prison term, he says, although there is no love lost between him and Lukashenko. “He’s no father to me,” he says, referring to one of Lukashenko’s nicknames, Batka, which means father. He owes money to the Belarusian government, as each day in detention cost 18.5 rubles (€5), but he has no intention of repaying it.

“I wrote to the Interior Ministry to renounce my citizenship altogether,” Kutas says. “What use is citizenship to a homeless person? I’m in the police database if anyone needs to know who I am.”

Dubbed “the most fashionable bum in the country”, Kutas makes enough money begging — about €15–20 a day — to afford clean clothes, and even to go to the bathhouse with “some woman”. “You know what for,” he tells me. But he has little sympathy for others like him who have been struck a poor hand by fate. “I don’t give anything to bums,” Kutas says. “How come I can earn money but they can’t?”

Kutas has had rabbits for a long time, and this is his second in six months, a two-month-old female who loves grass. Kutas sometimes treats her to pear and banana. He sold one rabbit recently as he needed money. He had bought it for 35 rubles (€10), but sold it for 250 (€70).

“I get up around six, like in prison,” says Kutas of his daily routine. “I make tea … then make my way to the city centre. I buy a litre of beer from a vending machine for three rubles (80c). I go to a public toilet where I pay 90 kopecks (25c). I finish my beer and smoke in the toilet. Then I go down into the metro. … I get to my station, buy beer, drink it. I switch on some music, go down to the underpass. I give one of the shops my mobile to charge, for free, as they all know me. And I sit there until 10–11pm.”

Kutas never had a family of his own, and only ever had a live-in girlfriend. “If I’m in prison, and she needs a man, she’s not going to wait for me, is she?” he says, recognising that he doesn’t make for an ideal partner. He claims to have had a relationship with a woman from a well-connected Minsk family as a young man, though it is often hard to tell where the truth ends and fantasy begins in the Kutas back story.

Still, Kutas says, he needs a woman in his life, asking me to take his picture and post it online. “Take a picture of my sign and the rabbit — and me, of course — and post it… I don’t know where. I don’t know a thing about this internet,” he says, deflated.

Kutas doesn’t have a pension and doesn’t plan to apply for one so that “the communists don’t take the money”.

“And what if you fall on harder times? What will you do without a pension?” I ask in parting.

“Like the song goes: the main thing is a hard dick and money! By the way, I read in a medical journal that as long as a man doesn’t abuse alcohol or drugs, he’ll have a hard dick as long as he lives,” he says. His rabbit nibbles on grass nearby.