Belarus's Season of Discontent

Abstract

Belarus's Season of Discontent Cyryl Ryzak (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Opposition rally in Minsk in August 2020 (Valery Sharifulin\TASS via Getty Images) [End Page 140] Last August, Alexander Lukashenko claimed victory over Svetlana Tikhanovskaya in Belarus's presidential election, securing his sixth consecutive term since rising to the office in 1994. Belarus's central election commission said he won over 80 percent of votes. While international monitors have found election irregularities and violations in every presidential race in the country since 1994, the 2020 results spurred unprecedented street demonstrations. Lukashenko responded with violence, deploying the OMON, Belarus's special police, against protesters. The crackdown only intensified the struggle between the people and the president. Hundreds of thousands demonstrated in the capital, Minsk, as well as in the provinces. Major industrial enterprises went on strike. The protest wave continued for several months, earning the admiration of many around the world. Much of the movement's momentum dissipated as winter set in, and protesters faced a savage wave of repression, including police killings and harsh sentences or loss of employment for the smallest acts of protest. An activist minority continues the struggle today both within and outside the country, but large protests are no longer taking place. Lukashenko has declared victory over what he called a "blitzkrieg." On February 11 at the All-Belarusian People's Assembly, a mass gathering of loyalist delegates held every five years, Lukashenko and his current governing team reiterated the basic theme that underpins his claim to rule. Prime Minister Roman Golovchenko warned that proposals to "reform the Belarusian economy on the liberal example" led to the "economic crash and default of many states." This is Lukashenko's claim to legitimacy: that he is the only force that stands between the employees of Belarus's state-owned industrial enterprises and mass unemployment. Belarus has virtually no poverty at the World Bank's line of $5.50 per person per day, among the post-Communist states a condition met by just Slovenia and the Czech Republic. The Soviet educational inheritance has been largely preserved, which provides the foundation for Belarus's highly competitive IT sector. State-owned enterprises, which are less [End Page 141] prone to layoffs than the private sector, employ about 40 percent of the labor force. Yet the 2020 demonstrations expressed not just opposition to an authoritarian government but a very deep social anger. Among the protesters were industrial workers from those large state-owned enterprises, who, like private-sector workers, face exploitation and repression from state managers, bureaucrats, and domestic and foreign businessmen. The level of deceit involved in the falsified elections of August 9 had insulted their intelligence, and they were repelled by the violence leveled at the early protesters. The old line repeated by Lukashenko and his loyalists—that they protect the welfare state and job security—had by then lost its propagandistic power, even if it remained partly true. While Belarus has avoided the more neoliberal course of neighboring post-Soviet states, it has generated its own antagonisms over the past thirty years. By focusing on what is distinctive about the Belarusian model, we can better understand the sources of opposition to the Lukashenko government today. ________ Capitalism in Central and Eastern Europe developed after 1989 with the support of two elite social groups: the intelligentsia, which favored a neoliberal program, and the more entrepreneurial cadre of the old communist parties, which wanted to be a really existing capitalist class. Belarus's early post-Soviet development was dominated by this latter group. When the independent Republic of Belarus replaced the Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1991, there was little turnover of leadership. While the formal structures of the Communist Party were banned, the administrative and managerial cadre, at whose helm stood Prime Minister Vyacheslav Kebich, remained the same. The only significant change was the appointment of Stanislav Shushkevich, a physics professor, as speaker of parliament—a move meant to appease the Minsk intelligentsia. Belarus's socioeconomic development in the early 1990s was driven almost exclusively by a gradual process of nomenklatura embourgeoisement, with a strong accent of vestigial Soviet forms. There was little incentive to...