Mikola Dziadok, born in 1988, grew up in the Belarusian district of Mogilev. After moving to Minsk to study law, he was active in the punk and anarchist scene there. In 2010, he was sentenced to four and a half years in prison for hooliganism in connection with an attack on the Russian Embassy. Dziadok denied the crime. After his release, he studied politics and graduated from the Belarusian University in Exile in Vilna. Until his re-arrest in 2020, he was a journalist and blogger.