User:Partizan Kuzya/Baginskaya, Nina Rygoranna

Nina Grigorievna Baginskaya (Belarusian Nina Rygoranna Baginskaya; born December 30, 1946, Minsk) is a Belarusian opposition activist.

Biography
Baginskaya was born in Minsk on December 30, 1946. From an early age, she was a competitive cyclist. In her younger years, while on a bike ride, she was involved in an accident that led to a collision with a car, which resulted in a head injury and led to post-traumatic epilepsy.

Baginskaya graduated from [[Minsk Radio Engineering Institute, specializing in radio equipment assembly. Following her childhood dream of becoming a geologist, she graduated from the Ivano-Frankivsk Institute of Oil and Gas (Ukraine) as a specialist in oil and gas exploration.

She worked as a geologist at the Belarusian Research Geological Institute (BelNIGRI). At the same time, she became a member of the Belarusian Popular Front, and at the institute she created a local association of the Belarusian Popular Front.

Since 1988, she has been actively participating in various protests, starting with the requiem meeting on the Day of Remembrance of the Ancestors. In 1994, after A.G. Lukashenko came to power in Belarus, she was dismissed from the institute because her project’s report was prepared in the Belarusian language.

She was detained dozens of times by police and spent many days in temporary isolation cells. On August 1, 2014, she was arrested for burning the Soviet flag near the KGB building in Minsk; her demonstration commemorated the August 1st, 1937, burning of tens of thousands of Belarusian cultural manuscripts, after which the authors of the work were executed. [2] [3] [4] [5].

In 2015, Baginskaya was arrested for protesting in memory of Mikhail Zhiznevsky, who died at the Euromaidan in Ukraine. After the events of March 25, 2017, when dozens of activists were arrested in Minsk (the “White Legion” case), and hundreds of participants throughout Belarus were detained on Freedom Day, Nina Baginskaya went out to the KGB building every day with a white-red-white flag and a poster that read "Freedom to the People."

On April 5, 2019, she took part in another protest. The point of this protest was to obstruct the so-called “landscaping work,” which on April 4th demolished 30 memorial crosses along the perimeter of the mass graves of those shot in the 1930s [6 ]. Pavel Sevyarynets, a politician and BCD’s co-chairman, and Nina Baginskaya, who came with a large white-red-white flag, were detained [7] [8].

In 2020, Baginskaya supported protests after the presidential elections on August 9. Because of her bravery, she became a symbol of the movement [9]. She gave interviews to BBC News, as well as journalists from Sweden, Poland, Germany, France.

Nina Baginskaya’s famous simple expression “I am just walking,” when she was stopped carrying white-red-white flag by the riot police, became a symbolic phrase of the 2020 protest.

In 2020, Baginskaya became famous for her meme expression “I am just walking,” when she replied this to the riot police who attempted to stop her.

Awards

 * 2017 - awarded with the Ivashkevich commemorative plaque;
 * 2018 - the first laureate of the medal named after Sergei Khanzhenkov (1942-2016), a political prisoner of the Soviet regime in the 1960s and 1970s.