Captive Nations Week

[1][2][3] After the collapse of Communist regimes in Eastern Europe, the week is also dedicated to supporting the newly democratic governments of these countries.

Members of the Belarusian American community have been constituting a major part of the participants of Captive Nations Week marches in recent years.

[6] In 2019 Marion Smith, Executive Director of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, has called for a resurrection of the Captive Nations Week because of a number of countries like China, Vietnam, North Korea or Laos still living under authoritarian and totalitarian Communist regimes along with Ukraine being the target of Russian military aggression.

[7] The American foreign policy expert George Kennan, serving at the time as ambassador to Yugoslavia, sought unsuccessfully to dissuade President John F. Kennedy from proclaiming the week on the grounds that the United States had no reason to make the resolution, which in effect called for the overthrow of all Communist governments in Eastern Europe, a part of public policy.

[9] The Soviet government reacted harshly to the establishment of Captive Nations Week with Nikita Khrushchev referring to it as a "direct interference in the Soviet Union's internal affairs" and "the most unceremonious treatment of sovereign and independent countries which are members of the United Nations just as the United States".