Olga Kapustina | European Service

One of the most interesting encounters Olga Kapustina has ever experienced was the time she met Mikhail Gorbachev when she was 21 and just starting out as a journalist. "For me he is one person who managed to change the entire Soviet Union. I believe that he has shaped our lives more than any other politician."

Kapustina spent her childhood in Soviet Belarus, her youth in Russia and now she works in Germany. She was born in Antonowka, a village in Belarus and she grew up during a time of great transformation. The disintegration of the Soviet Union and the years that followed created many social and political questions that she still deals with today.

"The people in Belarus don’t believe they are living under a dictatorship," she says, "when I came to Germany many people confronted me with this question. But for us, this situation was normal. If you live within such a system, you don’t notice that something is going wrong."

Kapustina currently observes political developments in Eastern European countries with great interest from an outsider’s perspective. These issues are also the focus of her journalistic reporting. She places a lot of emphasis on exploring the stories and fate of ordinary people. "When I was a child I wanted to become a lawyer. I always sympathized with people who were less fortunate, like the old woman from my town who day after day would stand in the main square and try to sell sunflower seeds." Giving people like her a voice is something that Kapustina strives for.

These personal values along with her love for languages provided the perfect combination for Kapustina’s current career and she chose her path thoughtfully. As the winner of an international contest for Russian language and literature, she was given the option to study at a top Russian university. She decided to study journalism at Saint Petersburg State University, followed by a journalism workshop, a scholarship to Germany and then finally graduating from St. Petersburg with an additional degree from the University of Duisburg-Essen.

Kapustina started learning German when she was still a schoolgirl. "My parents insisted on it, even if there were only two pupils registered for the lessons. Learning German wasn’t very cool in the days of Coca-Cola, sneakers and the Backstreet Boys." Her parents’ insistence however seems to have paid off.

The 29-year-old feels very much at home in Germany. "For me, home is where my work desk is. But there is also another home that is only found in one place– a place connected to my childhood, my parents and the countryside in Eastern Belarus." Kapustina’s husband also comes from Belarus but they both met in Germany. "He is my first and most critical reader. His best evaluation yet of a text from me was 'interesting'."

As one of her greatest role models, Kapustina names the prize-winning Belarusian author Svetlana Alexievich, whose ability to let people have their say and express themselves in their own words really impressed her. An example of this is Alexievich’s work, "Voices of Chernobyl" Kapustina says that, "like no other she is able to document the pain and emotion felt by people. Sometimes she wrote so expressively that I had to skip parts of the book."

Kapustina sometimes wonders if she would have become the same person she is today had she stayed in Belarus. Surely she wouldn’t have met impressive personalities like Mikhail Gorbachev or Svetlana Alexievich. Importantly she may not have had the opportunity to write so freely about people and where they come from. For her, these encounters are a welcome challenge.

Lately, Kapustina has been working in Ukraine, where she worked on the DW project, Secrets of Transformation, that observed current developments in the country. The project, based on the Bertelsmann Transformation Index (BTI), measures how positively or negatively a country has politically and economically transformed. The major long-term winners and losers were highlighted out of a massive amount of BTI data. Olga Kapustina then went on an exciting multimedia search to find potential "secrets" of successful or failed transformation processes.

Text: Elena Isayenko
Edited by: Adelheid Lucas
Translated by: Wesley Rahn