SEER, 98, 4, OCTOBER 2020 794 Frear, Matthew. Belarus under Lukashenka: Adaptive Authoritarianism. BASEES/Routledge Series on Russian and East European Studies. Routledge, London and New York, 2019. viii + 197 pp. Notes. Appendices. Bibliography. Index. £120.00. When the USSR collapsed in 1991, Belarus became an independent republic. The governmental structures remained in place and the people in them, including Prime Minister Kebich and the Speaker of the parliamentary body, Shushkevich, continued in office. Shushkevich became de facto Head of State, and parliament drew up a new constitution envisaging a presidential system and, a sign perhaps of things to come, at some point altering a clause in the draft to enable candidates under forty years of age to run. Lukashenka, director of a State farm and a virtually unknown member of parliament, entered the presidential race. He projected himself as a Young Turk in contradistinction to the tired figures of the old regime and, picking up on what the people wanted, promised to deliver it. In Belarus’s first and last free election, he resoundingly beat Kebich in a run-off in July 1994 (a month before Lukashenka’s fortieth birthday) with over 80 per cent of the vote. He then set about concentrating all power in the role of the president and ensuring he kept the position for himself. In an extraordinary feat of single-minded energy he turned the country back into a kind of microcosm of the Soviet Union, unencumbered by an all-embracing Communist Party, with himself as leader for life. He put himself at the pinnacle of all the hierarchies in the system (the ‘vertikal’) and in the media became virtually the only show in town. Matthew Frear’s book is a beautifully succinct analysis of how he did it. Frear starts with a five-point definition of a consolidated democracy and demonstrates that the Belarusian regime is seriously deficient in all of them. He rightly maintains, however, that Lukashenka does not claim to rule by some kind of divine right but through the will of the people. Having won the first election in 1994 with an overwhelming majority, Lukashenka has rigged subsequent elections not, the author says, to deny his opponents a genuine victory — they are too weak for that — but to guarantee similar large majorities to ensure their defeat is perceived as both comprehensive and inevitable. Focusing primarily on internal politics in Belarus and eschewing the label ‘last dictatorship in Europe’, Frear argues in chapters one and two that Lukashenka’s non-democratic regime has followed a relatively consistent, expedient and pragmatic course of action which he defines as ‘adaptive authoritarianism’, a system capable of adapting and shifting the balance between different factors in order to allow Lukashenka and his supporting elites to maintain their privileged positions in power, containing opposition, encouraging popular support and tolerating indifference. REVIEWS 795 Subsequent chapters deal with the tools he has at his disposal. In the third, Frear looks at how Lukashenka extended control over all branches of government by personalizing power, circumventing and neutering parliament and exercising what Frear terms neopatrimonialism (patronclient relationships) which extends into the entire business sector too. Senior appointments based on loyalty (he officially ‘appoints’ and ‘dismisses’ senior people) extend his influence to lower levels. Despite creating joint stock companies (where the State is the majority stakeholder) and half-hearted attempts at privatization, he retains the economy within the state sector. Frear devotes the fourth chapter to the ruling elites who compete for Lukashenka’s favour, arguing that the frequency with which he moves them around provides further evidence of the adaptive nature of his regime. In the fifth he looks at how Lukashenka has cultivated support in the wider society through populist measures and the creative use of state funds, extracting economic support from Russia and espousing Belarusian sovereignty. He devotes chapter six to the changing ways in which Lukashenka has used repression, including disappearances in 1999–2000, to deal with disloyalty and to outmanoeuvre and pre-empt opposition. Later he looks at where political opponents could turn, but argues that the political parties have become subverted, fragmented or little more than vehicles for their leaders, bereft of grass roots support...