A Mediator’s Journeys to Belarus, Ukraine And the Post-Soviet World
In early 2014 Belarus passed a law establishing the practice of mediation and adopted rules for training and certification of mediators. In April of that year, through Community Connections, a U.S. State Department program, a group of ten Belarusians interested in mediation was hosted in Raleigh by International Focus and spent three weeks visiting with mediators in the Triangle. The group of Belarusians were about evenly divided between lawyers, psychologists and educators. After they returned to Belarus, I was invited to return the favor and come to Belarus to talk to mediators there about our programs and processes.
I left Raleigh on the last Sunday in March 2015 and arrived in Minsk late Monday afternoon, where I met Arseny Dzhanashia, one of the mediators who had come to Raleigh the previous spring. We took a minibus for about two and a half hours east to Mogilev, Arseny’s home near the eastern border with Russia. He took me to his one-bedroom flat, which was clean and neat, but not fancy, much like college student housing. He left to go stay with his parents but promised to pick me up the next morning to go to A.A. Kuleshov Mogilev State University where he teaches psychology.
The next morning, a university van carried us to campus. Mogilev University is like many city universities in that departments are in various buildings scattered across the city and the buildings are fitted in between other commercial and residential high rises. At the campus cafeteria a breakfast had already been laid for us. I came to find that this table was reserved for me for the rest of my stay.
That morning I was feted by the vice-rector and the dean of the Faculty of Psychology, both giving me gifts (a foot tall Belarusian doll, linen towels and a nesting Russian doll, my first of many presents) and tea so hot it did not cool enough for me to drink it. A local TV station taped my visit with the vice-rector, and we made the evening news. I was told that I was the first visitor from America to visit the university and that my being there was a tremendous honor, but I assured them the honor was mine. I spoke for two hours to a crowd of students and faculty of about 200 about the fundamentals of mediation, and the uses of its principles in law, psychology and education.
After lunch I spent the afternoon teaching a psychology class an overview of the range of dispute resolution techniques and various settings for the use of mediation. To mix things up, we did the Orange Auction exercise, which the students enjoyed immensely, although it was a challenge as I could not call out the auction numbers in Russian and had to use hand signs. The students were very attentive, asking the most challenging questions of any group to which I have ever spoken. For many questions, my answer began with “that is a hard question and will require a complicated answer.”
As we were leaving, I was introduced to Alisiya Baranova. She was a linguistics student who was to be my translator for the evening. Her English was impressive, and she continued to translate for me whenever I have been in Mogilev. We have become friends, and she teaches me weekly Russian lessons via Zoom.
Frank Laney mediates a role play with two students in a training in Minsk, with translator Ekaterina to his right.
The next day I went back to Minsk by minibus. This time the trip was in daylight, so I got to see the Belarusian countryside. The land is very flat and looks well-watered. The soil is almost black due to its richness. It was early spring, so no crops were growing in the vast fields. Any area not farmed was covered in tall forests of pines and birches. Everything was neat and well maintained. Although the houses and buildings were small and simple by American standards, everything was cared for – I never saw any trash along the roads anywhere I went. The people obviously care about and take pride in their land.
In Minsk, I was given a small but luxurious apartment at the top of a nine-story building for the rest of my stay. I was blown away by this generosity as my hosts stayed elsewhere with friends. Over the next three days, I gave a seminar for lawyers and psychologists on advanced divorce and family mediation skills, organized by Marina Boiko and Mila Vysotskaya. The students paid to attend, which was how they raised money to pay my airfare. My agreement was that they would pay my travel, provide me with food and a place to stay. That remains my agreement wherever I go to teach in the post-soviet world, except I quickly realized that I am phenomenally rich compared to my hosts and I do not expect them to buy my food. But the lodging has allowed me to spend several days at a time (usually sleeping on a couch, which is fine) with families, eating with them and having long conversations into the night – an opportunity I cherish.
In all of my seminars or speeches, I have been blessed with highly skilled translators, as I speak only English. Without my translators, I could not do what I do and I highly value and appreciate their skills. In Ukraine I had a translator named Olena who stunned me, sort of like those ballet dancers who do things you just cannot believe. We were at a law school in Odesa, and the rector was speaking, in Ukrainian, and for some reason he was talking very fast. Olena had an electronic translation setup. She was listening on headphones to the speaker, then translating as he talked into a microphone, which played into my headphones. And her English was faster than I could understand and comprehend all she was saying. She was hearing Ukrainian and translating it into English that was faster than I could understand. It blew my mind that anyone anywhere could do that, but there she was.
Students in the Fall 2017 weeklong seminar at Mogilev State University are working on a collaborative mediation exercise.
One interesting aspect of teaching through a translator is that if others in the class also understand English well, there frequently breaks out a discussion in Russian or Ukrainian about what Frank really said and how it should be translated into the local language. I find these colloquies interesting, but I have no idea what is being said. Another insight was when I gave a divorce role play to two students for me to do a mediation demonstration. The role play was about two graduate students who were separating and needed to divide their humble possessions. Or I thought that was what it was about. As the mediation progressed, they moved from stuff to their relationship and with my help (?) decided to get back together. In the debrief I asked why they did not stick with the script and instead reconciled. The class said, here we have so little, that relationships mean a lot more than stuff.
In the evenings I would walk with my new friends around downtown Minsk, seeing sights and eating at wonderful restaurants. I learned to love vareniki – dumplings filled with sour cream, meat or cherries, potato pancakes with meaty gravy, and a salad called Olivier (pronounced like Sir Laurence’s last name) which is made with chopped meat, potatoes, green peas and other vegetables with a mayonnaise dressing. At the university in Mogilev, I was introduced to compote, which is a mixed fruit juice with bits of fresh fruit in it. I loved it and ordered it wherever I could. My hosts warned me that it was considered a peasant drink, but I did not care. I loved it. That and birch juice (yes, sap from birch trees).
After my stay in Minsk, I went with Oksana Shulga, another mediator who had come to Raleigh, to her home city of Grodno, near the Polish border. There I stayed with her family, taught at her university and met the elementary and middle school students to whom she had taught peer mediation skills. These students work with other students who are in conflict, helping them resolve it without involving teachers or principals. A great program where they are ahead of most schools in our state.
I also met Irina Ivashkevich, who works as the alumni coordinator for the U.S. Embassy with Community Connections people after they come back from the U.S. I asked why she had come to Grodno from Minsk just to see me. She explained that I was the first U.S. expert that a Community Connections group had managed to bring to their home country without U.S. government funding. My hat’s off to the mediators of Belarus. They had applied for government funding, but were turned down. But like any good mediator, they did not take that first “no” for the final answer and kept working until they came up with a plan to bring me there.
Seminar students at the 2016 Minsk Festival display yellow shirts which were provided as a gift for attending the class – “turning Belarus yellow, one mediator at a time.” Seated from left are Marina Boiko, Frank Laney, Mila Vysotskaya and Laney’s translator, Ekaterina, with Oksana Shulga standing behind Marina.
At the university, I spoke most all day to the psychology students and faculty. One professor in particular, Lena, asked many tough questions, but was genuinely interested in my answers. I later learned that despite Oksana’s passion for mediation, she was not always supported by her faculty. The next day I spoke in the library of a high school to students and teachers who were already trained in mediation. To my surprise, Lena joined us. I gave the students an opportunity to play the role of the mediator. Lena quickly volunteered to try, and she was excellent. As a skilled psychology professor, she understood the nuances of communication and how to ask good questions.
Belarus and much of Eastern Europe subscribe to a theory of law that says that one cannot do any act without a law specifically permitting it. Whereas we in the USA think we can do anything we want unless the government specifically prohibits it, and even then, we will push back. Thus, here we do not need laws allowing citizens to mediate. However, in Belarus and Ukraine, there was much reluctance to engage in mediation until a statute allowing it was enacted. Still, mediation was slow to grow. In America, we like to make our own decisions about our lives and resist administrators or authorities telling us what to do. Due to past experiences, in the post-soviet world, some people are reluctant to make decisions and live with the consequences or benefits. Instead, the preference is to take problems to an authority for a decision. And if you do not like the decision, go home, drink and complain about the stupid authorities. But at least I am not responsible for the decision.
Upon returning to Minsk, I spoke to a large auditorium of law, linguistic and psychology students on mediation at the Russian State Social University. A trick that made all these presentations go smoothly was that I had adapted my outlines and notes on a dozen subjects to PowerPoint. I then ran each slide thru Google Translate and made half of each slide English and half Russian. (After I got there, the first day, Arseny kindly went through the slides and corrected the grammar.) So, for each presentation, I just cued up the 3-5 slides I would use, and it helped the students follow along and helped keep my talks organized.
After about ten days there, I headed home, but I realized I was leaving a big part of my heart in Belarus and got a tear in my eye. I was eager to get home to my family, but sad to leave my dear mediator friends.
Attendees of the May 2018 Minsk International Mediation Festival.
Fortunately, I was able to return every spring until Covid hit in 2020. I was a few weeks from flying when the world shut down. Now the war in Ukraine keeps me from venturing to that part of the world. Starting in 2015, each spring, Marina and her friends sponsored the Minsk International Mediation Festival. She would get speakers to come from Moscow to England and all points in between – France, Italy, Germany, Poland, Petersburg, Yekaterinburg, Netherlands, Romania and other places where mediation was growing. From 100-150 participants would come from all over Eastern and Central Europe. I was able to speak at each one, along with going back to work with my friends in Mogilev and Grodno. To help fund my travel, I offered a one- or two-day seminar before or after the festival, which students paid extra to attend. While my wife has not been able to accompany me, my daughter Megan went with me in 2016.
About the fourth time I attended the festival, Oksana told me the true beginnings of the Minsk International Mediation Festival. After my initial visit, Marina was confident that I would come back. (Eventually, I began leaving a pair of dress shoes in her apartment rather than carry them back and forth across the ocean. They are still there.) She asked herself, “How can I leverage Frank’s next trip?” So, she started the festival. She invited speakers from all over Europe, hoping to attract students from all over Europe. She would only offer travel and lodging to the speakers. If any asked for a speaker fee, her reply was, “Frank Laney is coming from the USA. He has been mediating for over 25 years and has mediated over 4,000 cases. He is coming for free. When you are better than that, we can talk about your fee.” Thus, she used me to get speakers from all over to come for free. I am so proud of her.
In the fall of 2017, I was able to go to Belarus for three weeks, working in Mogilev, Gomel, Minsk and Grodno as a Fulbright Specialist. I taught a weeklong seminar with Arseny and Alisiya in Mogilev for university students. They were bright, dedicated and hard-working. I will never forget the young lady who came up to me after our last class and told me that before my seminar she was not sure what she wanted to do with her life and her degree. But now she knew that it would be something to do with mediation and dispute resolution. It would warm any teacher’s heart to know that you have affected a student’s life, that something you taught her was going to have a lasting impact.
During my several trips to Belarus and the festival, I met mediators from all over Europe. Several from Ukraine wanted to know if I would come to their country. My response was, if you fly me there, I will come. So, in February 2019, I went to Kyiv, Mariupol and Rivne, speaking at seminars and universities. Out of that, USAID asked me to come back to provide expert evaluation of the mediation programs that they had been working to establish. In April, I traveled with two law professors from Kharkiv and the former Slovenia Minister of Justice, to interview users and providers of mediation services both inside and outside of the court system. We went to Kyiv, Lutsk, Koval and Odesa, meeting with members of the Supreme Court, Ministry of Justice, legislators trying to pass a mediation statute (it was passed in early 2022), representatives of 25 Ukrainian mediation organizations, local courts officials, lawyers, mediators and schoolteachers. After our trip ended in Odesa, I stayed another day to teach a seminar to about 50 local mediators and lawyers.
Mediator Svitlana Stadnyk, Laney’s Kyiv host and trip organizer for his first visit to Ukraine, February 2019.
Then, in May, on my way back from the Minsk Festival, I stopped in Chernivtsi to work for two days at the university with students, lawyers and mediators.
During Covid, I could not travel to the other side of the world, but Zoom was a new opportunity. I continued to teach classes in both counties, as well as expanding into Kazakhstan, Siberia and Moscow.
Like many older lawyers, my hobby is traveling, but I have been very fortunate that I can link my travel with my lifelong passion for mediation and sharing what I know about resolving disputes with other people. I cannot wait for the day there is peace in Ukraine, as I will soon be on a plane to return to work with my dear friends, in building the capacity to manage conflict and resolve disputes.
Frank Laney is a mediator in private practice after serving as Circuit Mediator for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit for 25 years, mediating more than 5,000 cases before retiring in April 2022. After serving as an ex-officio member of the N.C. Dispute Resolution Commission since its inception in 1995, he was appointed as a Commissioner in 2021. He is also an adjunct professor at Campbell University and North Carolina Central University Schools of Law and is a Senior Lecturing Fellow at High Point University School of Law. He teaches the N.C. Dispute Resolution Commission-required trainings for mediator certification with CDSS. As a certified MSC and FFS mediator, he mediates North Carolina state and federal court cases.