Beer Lovers Party (Belarus)
Beer Lovers Party of Belarus, or BLP (Russian: Партия любителей пива, ПЛП) was one of several Beer Lovers Parties created in some post-Soviet states, including Belarus. It was officially registered on December 30, 1993.
According to its statute, "the major goal of the BLP is the struggle for the cleanness and quality of the national beer, state independence and the neutrality of Belarus, freedom of economic relations, personal inviolability and the inviolability of private property"
The Chairman was Andrey Romashevsky (Андрей Ромашевский).
In 1995 Romashevsky was arrested and imprisoned for burning the flag of the Byelorussian SSR in public. He was detained for hooliganism (“злостное хулиганство, совершенном с особым цинизмом”, "malicious hooliganism, perpetrated with a pronounced cynicism"), and after 3 months of imprisonment, on July 19, 1996 he received suspended sentence for two years of prison. Romashevsky denies that it was he who burned the flag, referring to a video of the event. Later he emigrated first to Poland and later to the Czech Republic and became a Czech citizen.[1] After that the affairs of the party went into a disarray.
The party was liquidated in 1998 by the Belarus Superior Court. The declared reason of the liquidation of BLP (as well as of several other parties) was failure of the party to address the request of the Belarus Ministry of Justice about the membership statistics and management structure of the party.[2]
The logo of the Party is an allusion to the "drunken hedgehog" a stereotype from Russian jokes.
References
- ↑ An interview with Romashevsky in BelGazeta
- ↑ Journal Justice of Belarus, #1, 1998