Unlike
other dictators, who speak of their love for “freedom” and “liberty,”
President Aleksandr Lukashenko of Belarus is admirably blunt about his
disdain for any trace of liberalism. “We have had so much so-called democracy that it has made us nauseated,” he said
in April, after a mysterious bomb struck the Minsk metro, killing
eleven in an attack which many Belarusians suspect was the work of the
regime itself. From that point forward, he declared, democracy would be
“limited to the square meter around where you are standing.”
But even
that much democracy would prove to be too much for the Belarusian
dictator, who has ruled the country for seventeen years. In late July,
his regime drafted a law
that would prohibit a “joint mass presence of citizens in a public
place that has been chosen beforehand, including an outdoor space, and
at a scheduled time for the purpose of a form of action or inaction that
has been planned beforehand and is a form of public expression of the
public or political sentiments or protest.” The measure, which in the words of the New York Times “prohibit[ed] people from standing together and doing nothing,”
was proposed in response to a series of weekly protests that had begun a
month earlier, whereby citizens gathered in public parks or on street
corners each Wednesday night and did nothing more than clap their hands
or synchronize their cell phones to ring at an appointed time.
There was
nothing overtly political about these protests, like the one I attended
in late June. Aware that such a demonstration was planned to take place
that evening in Minsk’s October Square, as it had occurred for the
previous three weeks, the government hastily scheduled a rock concert in
the space and mandated that students enrolled in state universities
attend. Undeterred by these cynical tactics, several hundred people
showed up on the sidewalk outside the heavily policed plaza and began a
slow procession, clapping their hands. Within minutes, dozens of
bullet-headed, plainclothes security officers began corralling
individuals into waiting police vans. Not a single demonstrator bore a
political sign or chanted a political slogan. There was no mention of
the name “Lukashenko.” Not even the word “freedom,” which has gained a
new global currency in the wake of the Arab upheavals, crossed anyone’s
lips. But then again, in Belarus, the last dictatorship in Europe,
politics does not have to be overt to earn the wrath of the authorities.
That
Belarus has been ruled for seventeen years by a regime that would
proscribe clapping is hardly the least of its problems. But as the
former Soviet republic faces the worst economic crisis since the
dissolution of the Soviet Union, Lukashenko’s ossified leadership is,
for the first time, actually beginning to threaten his near-two decade
rule. Belarus’s economic predicament is the result of several factors,
but was made inevitable once Lukashenko suddenly increased the salaries
of public employees by thirty percent just weeks before last year’s
presidential election, the results of which were declared on December
19th. In a country where little has changed since Soviet times and where
some eighty percent of the public is still employed by the state, the
move was Lukashenko’s attempt to literally buy support. Given his near
total control over the country’s media, domination of the electoral
commission, and harassment of opposition activists, however, he didn’t
need to resort to such a Peronist tactic. His regime rigged the ballot in a process widely condemned by international observers, dispatched violent riot police
to set upon thousands of peaceful protestors, and imprisoned seven of
the nine opposition presidential candidates, two of whom remain in jail
to this day.
A former
collective farm manager who won a democratic election in 1994 and has
withstood both Western sanctions and Russian pipeline politics to stay
in power, Lukashenko can definitely boast of possessing certain
leadership skills, but basic economic literacy is clearly not among
them. Artificially raising the salaries of the vast majority of the
country’s citizens was obviously going to boost inflation, which it
almost immediately did. By April, the country’s foreign currency
reserves had fallen by more than $2 billion to $3.7 billion. The
following month, the government devalued the ruble against the dollar by
thirty-seven percent. From the time I visited Minsk in December to my
return in June, the value of the ruble had been cut in half.
In the
aftermath of last year’s brutal post-election crackdown—which saw more
than seven hundred people detained—a pall of desperation descended upon
the country’s already beleaguered democrats. Many of the Belarusians I
spoke to that frigid December night, both those formally affiliated with
opposition politics and those who had never taken part but felt
inspired to gather outside the main government building and demand an
end to Lukashenko’s rule, genuinely felt that they had a chance to bring
down the man often described as “The Last Dictator in Europe.” The
large presence of international media and election observers (welcomed
by Lukashenko in a halfhearted bid to prove his democratic bona fides),
added to the perception that he would negotiate with the people on the
street. That naive hope came crashing down when Lukashenko unleashed
truncheon-wielding riot police, expelled representatives from the
Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, and held a series
of Stalinist show trials against his opponents. Many activists fled the
country, adding to the already sizeable Belarusian diaspora.
The
economic crisis, however, has given new life to anti-Lukashenko
sentiment, broadening it to sectors normally supportive of the regime
like pensioners and people living in more rural areas of the country.
This new protest movement, organized via an Internet-based entity
calling itself the “Revolution Through Social Networks,” is not tied to
any of the established opposition groups or political parties, rendering
it a new feature on the Belarusian political scene. Each and every
week, plainclothes policemen have violently dispersed the
gatherings, beating and arresting participants and even passersby who
happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Since the meetings
began last summer, nearly two thousand people have
been arrested, many of them released after just hours or days in
detention. While these protests do not represent a serious threat to the
stability of the regime, they do indicate that discontent is growing. A recent poll found that
Lukashenko’s approval ratings, which have almost always been fifty
percent or higher, now stand at twenty. In a study conducted last summer
by the Independent Institute of Socio-Economic and Political Studies, a
Belarusian think tank forced into exile in neighboring Lithuania,
respondents who say their personal finances have worsened in the past
three months jumped from 26.9 to 73.4 percent. More than eighty percent
polled believe the country’s economy is in “crisis,” and a similar
number blame either Lukashenko or his “government” for the country’s
predicament.
Though
there are certainly other regimes in the world that are more oppressive
than the one in Minsk, what makes Belarus unique is its geographical
location in the heart of Europe. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union
and the reunification of Germany, Europe has prided itself on being the
exemplar of democratic and humane values. Belarus is the only country on
the continent that holds political prisoners, a term which Europeans
thought they had relegated to the jungles of Latin America, the deserts
of the Middle East, or the Oriental tyrannies of Asia. That political
prisoners are still being held on the continent is something Europeans
rightly see as an embarrassment, and it poses one of the most
significant challenges to the grand ambition of European integration.
Like an unsightly boil too thick to lance, Belarus has been a pustule of
authoritarianism on the body of Europe for nearly two decades—an
obnoxious rebuke to that dream, repeated endlessly by presidents and
prime ministers alike, of a Europe “whole, free and at peace.”
Vladimir
Neklyaev bears a semblance to Vladimir Putin, but he sounds like Vaclav
Havel. Like the famous Czech dissident who led his people to freedom
without firing a shot, the sixty-four-year-old Neklyaev is a man of
letters, a poet who shares Havel’s unassuming manner. He entered
politics last year with the creation of a movement called “Tell the
Truth!,” from which he mounted his campaign to challenge Lukashenko for
the presidency. Already a figure of some national renown, he emerged as
one of the leading contenders, a prominence for which he paid a high
price: on his way to join his fellow candidates at the post-election
protest, he was savagely beaten by a group of unidentified men and then
kidnapped from the intensive care unit of the hospital where he had been
rushed by supporters.
As he was
dragged naked from his hospital bed, Neklyaev told me, he thought that
evening would be his last, reasoning that his captors would dress him if
they meant to keep him alive. So when he ended up in a jail cell
instead of a dark forest, he was relieved. (Such are the things that
pass for reassurance in an authoritarian state). He was tortured in
prison, forced into stress positions, and made to stand outside in
sub-zero temperatures. Neklayev was ultimately given a two-year
suspended sentence for organizing a mass disturbance, though the threat
of re-imprisonment on trumped-up charges continues to hang over his
head. Joined by his much younger wife, Olga, we sit on the second floor
of an expensive cafe not far from the presidential palace and across the
street from October Square, where opposition protestors had initially
gathered last December. Just a few blocks down the street is the
headquarters of the KGB (Belarus is the only former Soviet republic
whose security service has retained the name), run by Lukashenko’s
oldest son, Viktor, and looming over Minsk’s main thoroughfare like an
impassive ogre.
Neklyaev
tells me that he sees four possible outcomes for Belarus. The first
would be a revolution in which a mass of people storms the presidential
palace. The second would be the “Ceausescu option,” in which, faced with
large street protests, figures in the Belarusian security apparatus
decide to dispose of Lukashenko as their counterparts in the Romanian
army executed the communist leader and his wife. Third is the “Kuchma
option,” whereby Lukashenko, like the former Ukrainian president who
failed to orchestrate the fraudulent election victory of his successor,
stepped down peacefully. Finally, there is the “Jaruzelski option,”
named after the last Communist leader of Poland, who took part in the
negotiations with the opposition Solidarity movement that set the way
for the first fully democratic elections in 1991.
Neklyaev
personally excludes the first option (he does not support, or even grant
the possibility of, taking control by force) and the Kuchma option
(“Lukashenko is not capable of rejecting power,” he tells me). That
leaves either an internal military coup or some sort of negotiated
settlement that opens up the space for a genuine democratic election.
Neklyaev says that the security services hold the power, and that
whereas they initially supported Lukashenko for ideological reasons,
today they merely want to protect their status. “If I were in
Lukashenko’s shoes, I would not count a lot on the security services
because their motivation is clearly financially driven,” he says.
This
renders the economy the most important factor. Lukashenko has no
economic vision, and has thus far responded to the crisis in an ad hoc
manner, begging for International Monetary Fund aid or loans from
individual governments. Making the necessary economic reforms is
anathema to Lukashenko, Neklyaev says, as it would require privatizing
huge sectors of the economy and thus reduce his stranglehold over the
country. Neklyaev told me that the situation would come to a head by
this fall, when citizens return from their summer dachas and “there will
be no money to pay wages and salaries.” Yet, far from take to the
streets in protest over the worsening economic situation, Belarusians
remain submissive as ever.
Neklyaev,
like so many of the opposition activists I’ve met in Belarus, is an
admirable man. But he is unable to explain to me why, instead of
rallying around one opposition figure and movement, opposition politics
remains so fractious. Indeed, the fact that Belarus is an authoritarian
state that ranks near the very bottom of Freedom House’s annual “Freedom
in the World” index is seemingly belied by the panoply of opposition
parties (albeit only a handful of which are legally registered) and
organizations. In addition to Neklyaev’s “Tell the Truth” campaign,
there’s the alphabet soup of the Belarusian Popular Front, the United
Civil Party, Belarusian Christian Democracy, European Belarus, the
Movement for Freedom, and the Belarusian Social Democratic Party, among
others. Though they may vary in their approach to specific policy
questions, it’s difficult to see what divides them from the primary goal
of bringing the authoritarian regime in Belarus to an end.
In this
sense, while they no doubt have had to endure under incredibly difficult
circumstances, the Belarusian opposition has contributed to its own
failures by stubbornly refusing to unite. One of the crucial features of
the national movements that helped bring down Communism in the former
Soviet bloc was that they were united around a single organization and
charismatic figure; Solidarity and Lech Walesa in Poland, Charter 77 and
Havel in Czechoslovakia. That no leader has galvanized opposition to
Lukashenko’s outmoded regime ranks as yet another of Belarus’s
misfortunes.
Viktor Martinovich, a journalist for the independent BelGazeta newspaper,
is as withering a critic of the opposition as he is the regime. “They
have been useless since December 19, 2010” he told me. A slim,
unassuming man in his early 30s, Martinovich is the author of a novel, Paranoia, about
a love triangle in an unnamed, post-Soviet state. Though the word
“Belarus” never appears in the novel, its theme was sufficiently
subversive to earn the wrath of the authorities; two days after its
release, the government banned its sale in shops. We’re sitting in BelGazeta’s
cramped, dirty office, right down the hall from a government agency,
the innocent-sounding Operational and Analytical Center, which monitors
Internet use and occasionally attacks antigovernment websites. The
opposition parties, Martinovich says, “Are infiltrated by the KGB and
manipulated by the KGB.” When I ask him what more the West can do to
help Belarus, his answer surprises me. “The more Western countries aid,
the more they help, the more corrupt receivers we have here,” he tells
me. It’s for this reason that he’s so pleased to see the development of
the Web-based movement Revolution Through Social Networks, as it’s not
affiliated with the hodgepodge of what he considers to be ineffective
opposition groups.
That
sentiment is shared Vital Rymasheuski, cochair of the Belarus Christian
Democracy party and its presidential candidate last year. “I think the
much bigger problem is the high number of Western sponsors and donors
that exist,” he responds when I ask why there is such a proliferation of
relatively small opposition organizations. “I think if those donors, if
they left Belarus, that would automatically trigger the elimination of
several political structures which you mentioned and that could make our
political life easier.” Of course, Rymasheuski isn’t offering to leave
politics. Iryna Vidanava, editor of the independent youth magazine 34,
says that, “personal ambition” is “everywhere” in politics, and in
Belarus the story is no different than it is in “the United States or in
any other big country,” except that there’s “a small pie” to divide.
But the pie has just grown substantially bigger; in response to the
election crackdown, Western donors committed more than $120 million to Belarusian opposition groups.
One of the
biggest structural challenges facing democrats in Belarus—aside from
their own inability to unite against Lukashenko—is the lack of a
coherent national identity. Anti-Communists in the former Soviet
republics, from Azerbaijan to Ukraine, invoked distinct national
narratives, conveyed to their people in a local language, and by this
fashion exposed the immorality and oppressiveness of what was in
actuality a newfangled Russian empire
that hinged upon the widespread collaboration of local opportunists in
Communist parties. But the Belarusian opposition’s task has been
complicated by the fact that the country—unlike Poland, Hungary, the
Czech Republic, the Baltics and most other nations of the Eastern
bloc—had never enjoyed genuine independence until 1991. Prior to its
becoming a constituent republic of the Soviet Union, the lands of
modern-day Belarus had always been part of other countries, whether the
Principality of Polosky (which lasted from the ninth to the
fourteenth century), the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (twelfthcentury to
1569), the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (1569 to1791), or the Russian
czarist empire, in which it was a part for some two centuries. While a
Belarusian language exists, Belarusians primarily speak and read
Russian. Throughout the country’s history, Polish and later Russian were
seen as languages of social advancement, with Belarusian widely
considered a rural, peasant tongue.
For most of
his tenure, Lukashenko attempted to clamp down on Belarusian identity.
He did so to prevent the development of a national consciousness that
might subsume his status as supreme leader (he is often referred to, not
always jokingly, as “Daddy”). Instead, Lukashenko has flattered Russia,
emphasizing the two countries’ fraternal relationship in the erstwhile
Soviet Union. In the 1990s, he actually went so far as to propose the
idea of uniting Belarus and the Russian Federation in an arrangement
that would have seen him replace Boris Yeltsin as leader. Yale historian
Timothy Snyder has written that, “the closest historical analogue to
Lukashenko’s ideology is that of Marshal Pétain’s Vichy France: an
idealization of hearth and home, an unequal and cloying alliance with a
powerful eastern neighbor, and a constant condemnation of outsiders.”
Under Lukashenko, the country’s official history begins with World War
II, emphasizing Belarus’s role as a front-line region against the Nazi’s
Operation Barbarossa. Belarus suffered more, on a per capita basis,
than any other nation during World War II, with nearly a third of its
prewar population perishing.
This
history of hardship accounts for a contemporary culture of political
passivity. Without being too culturally determinist, there is, as more
than one Belarusian expressed it to me, a “genetic memory” that inhibits
political change here, as Belarusians are raised on stories of the
adversity their ancestors endured. “We have two hundred years of
suppressed political culture,” Martinovich says, referring to the period
that began with Belarus’s incorporation into czarist Russia. “Every
Belarusian citizen who reads history books in school knows there is no
chance we could get freedom.” Perhaps it is this story of submission
that dulls Belarusians into compliance, instilling in them a belief that
life is a vale of tears to be endured, not improved. Indeed,
Belarusians have never enjoyed prosperity as they have under the rule of
Lukashenko, whose authoritarian social contact exchanged political
freedom for economic stability. While the protest last December was one
of the largest in the country’s history, the total number of people who
showed up—with estimates ranging from ten to forty thousand—is
negligible for a country of ten million, not nearly enough to overturn a
well-armed and legitimately popular regime. “It’s a contradiction,”
says Anna (a pseudonym), a twenty-four-year-old teacher as we met for
coffee late one evening at a cafe on Prospekt Nezavisimosti, Minsk’s
main drag. “Inside most of us, on the one hand, we are against this
system, and on the other hand, we are apathetic. The fear is deeply
rooted. Our grandparents told our parents: don’t get involved [in
politics]. And they tell the same to us.”
Walking
the streets of Minsk, it does not take long to figure out that Belarus
is a police state. The broad avenues in the center are spotlessly clean
in a way that the streets in democratic countries simply are not. Men in
uniforms walking slowly and sternly with batons affixed to their waists
are ubiquitous; their purpose seems solely to intimidate. But the
appearance of so many uniformed men on patrol, and the strong-arm
tactics the regime uses to disperse peaceful demonstrations, can be
deceptive. Belarus is not like Syria or Zimbabwe, where the government
regularly tortures and kills political dissidents with impunity. Due to
the Soviet-style economy, it doesn’t have to inflict violence on a wide
scale to keep the population cowed. It can merely threaten the
livelihoods of anyone who dare participate in a protest, never mind
becomes involved in opposition politics. Anna tells me the story of one
friend, “who was brave. But then one thing happened. Someone called her
father and said, ‘If you want to continue working where you do, calm
down your daughter.’ She quit all that opposition stuff,” and is now
planning to move to Canada, joining the steady migration of young
Belarusians who have decided they have no future in their country. “The
bravest, cleverest people decide to leave if they want a normal life,”
Anna says. Likewise, as practically all of higher education in Belarus
is state-run, students who become involved in opposition politics—or are
even spotted at an opposition rally—face expulsion. It’s for this
reason that Anna doesn’t even think about attending a protest, no matter
how badly she wants to. In exchange for her education, she must teach
in a government school for two years. Involvement in politics could cost
her not just her current job, but any future employment. She, too, is
starting the process of emigrating.
In light of this repression, where the consequences of resistance are so great, fear is not hard to find. When
I asked the owner of a music store who or what is responsible for the
fact that his sales have been cut in half, he simply smiled at me. “I am
a bit shy,” says Lilia, a fifty-seven-year-old woman whom I met at one
of Minsk’s most popular markets, where she complained to me about the
skyrocketing prices for produce. “I think you’re aware if you open your
mouth and say something you will be taken to prison. There is no
democracy here. It’s wrong.”
Sviatlana
Harohavik, twenty-four, is one of the few Belarusians who have chosen to
opt into politics, and knows the costs of that decision more than most
of her fellow oppositionists. Both she and her fiancé, Pavel Vinahradau,
had been involved with Neklyaev’s campaign and participated in the
protest on December 19th. On the evening of January 5th, Sviatlana heard
“a heavy knock on the door” of their apartment, a detail that opens so
many of the stories one hears in Belarus. Pavel asked who was there, and
when “KGB” came in response, he replied he would not let them in. The
men, five in all, summoned the landlady and managed to enter the
apartment. Pavel was taken away and, for the next six hours, the KGB
agents rummaged through the apartment, eventually absconding with
notebooks, a computer, mobile phone, and money. Sviatlana was left
alone.
She didn’t
see Pavel until four months later, in a courtroom. On May 5th, a judge
sentenced him to four years in prison for helping to organize “mass
disturbances.” Pavel was ordered to serve his time in a prison about a
hundred and fifty miles outside of Minsk, near the Polish border.
In
the early evening hours of a recent Sunday, a group of about fifty
young Belarusians gathered at a decrepit house on the outskirts of
Minsk. An old refrigerator, worn tires, and a broken bicycle littered
the backyard, which was surrounded by a wooden fence. Inside the house, a
narrow hallway led to a rectangular room, where styrofoam boards
covered the windows to block out the light, and, one presumes, the
prying eyes of passersby.
For
Belarusians with an independent mind and more than a bit of courage,
this clandestine gathering is just a regular night out at the theater.
The Belarus Free Theater, that is, which was founded in March 2005. Over
the past six years, its performers have been fired from their jobs in
state theater companies, others have been forced to flee the country,
and entire audiences have been arrested. It is for this reason that the
theater must perform in the living room of a dilapidated home. Other
venues have included the woods or apartments. Invitations are sent by
text message; there is no admission fee though a donation box sits at
the door.
The production I happened to attend, Zone of Silence,
was not agitprop. One act satirized figures living on the fringes of
Belarusian society, like a woman who parades around Minsk in a red dress
while bearing the flag of the Soviet Union, or a black, gay man who is
routinely harassed. There were no fiery monologues denouncing
Lukashenko. Everyone in the audience knows about the nature of the
regime, as evidenced by the fact that we were being forced to sit very
uncomfortably, riveted but nonetheless crammed together in a secret
location, just to watch a theatrical production. The people in the room
understand that they don’t live in a democracy. What they might not
know, however, are some of the statistics flashed on the screen in the
third act, “Numbers.”
For
instance, that thirteen “modeling agencies” participate in sex
trafficking. Or that eight out of ten pregnancies end in abortion. Or
that sixty percent of women report domestic violence. As these grim
figures confront the audience, the actors dramatize them in pantomime.
These
social problems have little to do with the repression of the Lukashenko
regime per se. But they address the ugly realities of a country whose
people hear little else but the sunny news typical of Soviet-style
propaganda. These are the sorts of social problems that are simply not
discussed in the state-controlled media, theaters, or other venues of
public discourse. “I had never seen anything like that before,” my
twenty-two-year-old friend Sergei says as he walks surreptitiously onto
the street, alternately spellbound and shocked by the performance he had
just experienced.
A few days
after this performance, I meet with Alexander Feduta, a journalist and
intellectual who had served as an adviser to Vladimir Neklyaev’s
campaign. He had been arrested in the initial roundup of political
activists last December, and held in prison for three months. We meet in
a cafe just a block from Minsk’s massive World War II memorial, the
place where Lukashenko would, in a few days, hold court over the
country’s Independence Day celebration. He sets down his briefcase and a
book about Russian theater, and begins to chat.
“The effect
he’s had on the culture of this country is similar to that of tropical
rain,” Feduta told me, in what might be the only positive aspect, albeit
unintentional, of Lukashenko’s rule. “Because it’s under a lot of rain
water and damp weather, you get a lot of weeds growing and these are not
interesting to anyone. But this is not to say that these weeds do not
prevent nice plants from growing. By his attempts to kill this
independent culture he’s in a way stimulating its development.”
Feduta is
fond of these lush analogies. “It’s kind of like telling them what an
exotic fruit tastes like,” he says when I ask him if he thinks
Belarusians are aware of the responsibilities and challenges, not just
privileges, which democracy entails. That said, he sees no other option
but the path of political and economic liberalization, though he shrugs
his shoulders and sighs when I ask him if there’s anything more the West
could be doing to help his cause. “I don’t know. I don’t know what the
West could do to Castro, to put pressure on Kim Jong-il. I have no
answer to that.”
On
July 3rd, Belarus celebrated its independence. Not the twentieth year
of its independence from the Soviet Union, but the sixty-seventh year of
its liberation from fascism. As part of his campaign to simultaneously
smother a distinct national identity and revive nostalgia for the Soviet
past, Lukashenko changed the country’s independence day from August
25th (the day Belarus succeeded from the Soviet Union), to July 3rd,
when the Soviets liberated Minsk from the Nazis. When I visited in late
June, the city was festooned with the national flag of green and red,
and giant billboards featuring the smiling faces of World War II
veterans next to the phrase “Together, We are Belarus!” were everywhere
in sight.
Lukashenko
delivered a usual tirade about foreign conspiracies threatening to
destroy Belarus. “We must strongly and consistently oppose the
unconscionable scenario of the ‘colored revolutions,’ which are written
as a blueprint in the capitals of other countries,” he thundered, the
recent turmoil in the Arab world no doubt on his mind. What followed was
a Soviet-style military parade, with soldiers and missiles and tanks on
display. Positioned on the reviewing stand next to Lukashenko, dressed
in a matching military uniform, was the dictator’s six-year-old son
Kolya, whom the Belarusian president takes everywhere from diplomatic
meetings abroad to public ceremonies at home. The obvious resemblance to
Dr. Evil and Mini-Me seemed to have been lost only on Lukashenko and
his inner circle.
In early
September, Lukashenko announced that he would pardon all of those whom
had been arrested for their involvement in the events of the December
19th protests last year, including presidential candidate Andrei
Sannikov, who had been imprisoned since that evening. The announcement
came as part of a dribs-and-drabs release of political prisoners,
including Pavel Vinahradau, the twenty-three-year-old activist who
married his fiancée
while serving time at the Volchyi Nory penal colony. Though Belarusian
democrats are obviously pleased by the release of their comrades, they
warn the West not to read too much in Lukashenko’s moves; he has
attempted to trade political prisoners for concessions in the past. And
lest there be any doubt that the pardoning of opposition figures might
eventually lead the regime to negotiate with them, Lukashenko ridiculed
such hopes. “I’m not going to talk with any of them,” he declared.
Despite Lukashenko’s promise, Sannikov, as well as Social Democratic
Party chairman and presidential candidate Mikalai Statkevich, remain in
jail to this day.
“I think
Lukashenko, by his own intuition, wants to drag all of the people into
his madness, to bring them to his own state of mind and to create this
impression of societal madness,” Neklyaev told me. And so the nation of
Belarus, the bloody battleground of the twentieth
century’s dual totalitarian systems, a victim of both Nazi and Soviet
occupation, is now daily subjected to the whims of a collective farm
manager. An apocryphal story about Joseph Stalin recounts how the
apparatchiks at party conferences would applaud endlessly after his
speeches in the knowledge that “Dear Father” would execute the man who
stopped clapping first. Alexander Lukashenko’s paranoia has driven him
to do the complete opposite: at his nationally televised Independence
Day speech, standing before tens of thousands of citizens whom he had
bussed in from across the country, he forbade his beloved people from
applauding him at all.
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