Belarus Incognita
I
Long before the protests that shook Belarus in the summer and fall of 2020, I was sitting in a restaurant of a Minsk hotel. It was a late afternoon after a day of intense meetings, and I had nothing more planned for the evening. Suddenly a singer came on stage and started a rather touching rendition of John Lennon’s “Imagine.” I noticed that I was the only person in the room. She was singing just for me! (The poor thing probably had it in her contract that if only a single customer appears, she must begin her act.) I was suddenly overcome by a strange emotion that almost made me tear up. I felt momentarily dislocated both in space and time. Where was I and, more impor tantly, when was I? Vertiginously I felt that I had been here before. Was this Belarus in the second decade of the twenty-first century, or was it Poland in the 1970s? Or Poland in an alternative timeline, in which communism survived and transformed itself into a brutal non-ideological dictatorship with a paper-thin façade of democracy? I felt, again, the bipolar mood swings of my youth: irony, swagger, excitement (“All this is too ridiculous to last!”) and bouts of depression (“Nothing will change here during our lifetimes!”) It was strange and familiar, disturbing and deeply moving.
I had gone to Belarus with low hopes. I envisioned grayness, monotony, repression, and stasis. A Soviet Jurassic Park, with a handful of brave dissidents fighting the noble battle against the totalitarian monster. This is the image that has dominated press reports, and also quite a bit of the Western scholarship about the country. Alexander Lukashenko, it is commonly said, is the last Soviet ruler, and Belarus is “the last dictatorship in Europe.” In attempting to understand Belarus, everybody has subsisted on a heavy diet of easy analogies. What about the history of Belarus itself? It presumably didn’t have any. Literature? Name a single Belarusian author. National language? Barely surviving in the predominantly Russophone population. The people in Belarus were supposed to be lacking in national identity and thoroughly Sovietized. Are they Europeans like the Poles, or even the Ukrainians?
The country made news almost exclusively in the geostrategic context, as an aspect of the larger problem of Russian expansionism. Its well-known violations of human rights were also noted and regularly condemned, but they were accepted as a matter of fact. It was its near-total dependence on Russia — punctuated by occasional quarrels over Russian oil supplies and the speed of the political and economic integration of the two states (Lukashenko’s initiative during Yeltsin’s rule that came to haunt him under Putin) — that made Belarus of some interest to Western politicians. Even a modicum of Belarusian sovereignty had to be protected because it created a fragile buffer between Russia and NATO’s eastern flank, and it introduced an element of unpredictability into Putin’s designs. Everything else about the place was fuzzy at best, and not particularly relevant or interesting. Nobody in the West marched for Minsk.
But now I was here, and everything looked somewhat different and quite a bit disorienting. The Soviet symbols were everywhere. Statues of Lenin still adorned city squares, likely the only place in the world where they can still be found in their old honorific locations. So were the red stars on the top of government buildings and gargantuan monuments. The good old KGB was there, proudly keeping its old name. There was the dreary communist-style official television, mostly in Russian, and a tingling sensation of being constantly under surveillance. Visually, Minsk is probably the most Soviet city in the world. Destroyed during the war, it was rebuilt from the rubble according to the best and most glorious Stalinist concepts, with miles upon miles of absurdly wide avenues lined with neoclassical colonnades. (At one point UNESCO wanted to declare it a world heritage site but found it too “contaminated” with Khrushchev’s drab apartment buildings and high-rise architecture of the later periods.) A gigantic upscale apartment building known as “the Chizh House,” from the name of its now disgraced oligarch-developer, looked like something out of a “city of the future” in a sci-fi movie of the 1950s. For someone driving from the airport after a sleepless flight, it all felt like a dummy city, a life-size movie set.
At a closer look, however, the scenery acquired an unexpected depth. It was a palimpsest, a compilation of half-erased outlines, shapes, and histories. Not everything here had been flattened by the Soviet steamroller, and the zeal with which the steamrolling was being done attested to the fact that so much in this land was totally non-Soviet. There is a memory living here, and one can sense energy and expectation. A growing elan was clear during my meetings and conversations with committed dissidents, and people hoping that their work (intellectual, artistic, technological) can speed up the changes, and people who just wanted to survive without selling out or doing something ugly. (Where was the line beyond which one should never step?) An independent literary life was flourishing, thanks to a handful of daring publishers ready to displease the regime (some of them have had to relocate abroad), surreptitious art galleries, music concerts, and theater shows. How did they survive in the minuscule market, against constant administrative and financial obstacles thrown at them by the government? There was also a lot of grassroots activity, or simply people huddling together in informal groups: a whole ecology of pulsing life trying to survive in the cracks of the seeming monolith — trying, failing, and trying again.
A partial explanation of the tendency among foreign observers to wrap Belarus in lazy clichés may lie in its tangled non-linear history. “Before 1991, Belarus was never a country,” I recently heard on CNN from an expert on Eastern Europe who should know better. In fact, Belarus has as much, or more, backstory than any European country. It is certainly true that before 1991 there was no sovereign state known as Belarus, the name itself — White Rus, Ruthenia Alba — being of relatively recent and unclear origin. There was, however, a whole sequence of states populated and ruled by the ancestors of today’s Belarusians. Some start with the legendary Kriviches, a tribe that settled in those parts of Europe around the time when the first Anglo-Saxons were disembarking on the coasts of Britain. They were most likely Slavs, though possibly mixed with Balts and Finns who also lived in those areas. Recorded history starts around the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, when several local principalities, using East-Slavic dialects and Cyrillic script, and professing an Eastern Byzantine brand of Christianity, were overrun by mostly pagan Baltic Lithuanians. Thus, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was born, stretching over the lands of today’s Lithuania, Belarus, and western Ukraine. The gigantic state kept its Baltic name throughout its history, but its population was predominantly East Slavic, or Ruthenian in the Latin exonym, and even Lithuanian rulers soon adopted their language and culture. A proto-Belarusian dialect, known as Chancery Ruthenian, became the official language of ducal courts, as well as of medieval religious and secular literature.
Things got even more complicated in the late fourteenth century, when a shrewd and ambitious Grand Duke of Lithuania, Jogaila, faced a dilemma. Threatened by the Teutonic Knights waging their Northern Crusade against pagan Balts and Eastern Orthodox “heretics,” he had to choose between a crown union with rising Muscovy or with Poland. Muscovy looked like a natural choice, since it shared a culture, a script, and a religion with much of the Duchy’s population. But Jogaila chose Poland, and sealed the union by marrying Poland’s fourteen-year-old queen Jadwiga. Together with his Lithuanian peers, he was baptized in the Roman rite and was crowned the king of Poland, Wladyslaw II Jagiello, while retaining the title of the Grand Duke of Lithuania. (You can see him in Central Park in New York, menacing Turtle Pond with two raised swords.) From now on, both Poland and the Duchy were ruled by the same monarch of the Jagiellonian dynasty, from two capitals in Krakow and Vilnius. In 1569, Poland pressured the Duchy to form a more permanent entity, the Commonwealth.
The union between Poland and the Duchy of Lithuania had not only political and military effects but also a significant civilizational impact on both countries, though mainly on the Duchy. It was pulled out of its East Slavic, Byzantine domain and into the orbit of the West. The new union blurred the cultural demarcation line that had existed since the division of the Roman empire into the Western part and the Eastern part. The move was never complete, and it was accompanied by the eastward slide of Poland, but from then on the Duchy was straddling almost every European border. It drew influences from Constantinople and Rome, from Latin and Old Slavic literatures, from the Baltic and Scandinavian north, and from the Balkan south. Never ruled by Tatars, it nevertheless had a sizable Muslim Tatar population, lured by Grand Dukes with land grants and titles of nobility in exchange for their military service. It also became the largest European home of Ashkenazi Jews after their oppressions in, and expulsions from, western Europe. As the only East Slavic domain, it experienced the Renaissance, the Reformation, deliberative democracy (in the form of often unruly noble gatherings, or sejms), and city self-government under the Magdeburg law. Roman Catholicism, Greek Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, Calvinist Protestantism, Judaism, and Islam were practiced openly, and the followers of these faiths lived in relative harmony. The country was huge, stretching from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea coasts, and seemed to have enough room for everyone.
Yet the Polish-Lithuanian union was never an equal one. Although many aristocratic families from the Duchy attained key positions in the politics and the military of the Commonwealth, Poland always saw itself as the dominant unit. Gradually, the Duchy upper classes started to adopt the Polish language and to convert to Roman Catholicism, which in the pre-nationalist era made them indistinguishable from Poles. This, in turn, split the population into two distinct socio-ethnic groups. Soon the once clear concepts of Poland, Lithuania, and the Commonwealth began to blur and change their meaning. In 1696, the Ruthenian language was forbidden in official business, which halted the development of native literature and degraded proto-Belarusian to the level of peasant dialects. More and more often, the Commonwealth was called “the Polish Commonwealth,” or simply “Poland.” There was now Poland proper, or the Kingdom of Poland, and the larger Poland which included the Duchy. (Imagine the term “England” being casually applied to the whole of the United Kingdom.) Disappearing as a notion is often a prelude to disappearing as a nation.
By the end of the eighteenth century, the once mighty Commonwealth had weakened, owing to a combination of devastating wars, internal dysfunction, and the connivance of its neighbors, and was divided between Russia, Prussia, and Austria. The Duchy fell to Russia, and the Russians hailed it as the “reunification of Russian lands.” The Russian nation, according to the official theory, has always consisted of three parts: Great Russians (Russians proper), Little Russians (Ukrainians), and White, or Western, Russians. Both parts of the Commonwealth disappeared from the map, but Lithuania disappeared much more completely than Poland. Its past was erased, its history was rewritten, and the names “Belarusian” and “Lithuanian” were forbidden in official documents. The country was renamed the Russian Northwestern Territory, and its non-Polonized lower classes were told to consider themselves Russians.
Despite intense Russification by the tsarist administration and schools, and the Moscow-controlled Eastern Orthodox Church, the “Belarusian national idea” started to germinate at the end of the nineteenth century among the local poets and amateur ethnographers. At the end of the First World War, when the European empires started to crumble and Russia was in the throes of the Revolution, a group of Belarusian patriots declared the creation of the Belarusian People’s Republic, a democratic polity that purported to represent Belarusians of all social levels and political inclinations. It was hailed as “the first Belarusian state since the Grand Duchy of Lithuania,” but it existed mostly on paper. Its territory was still controlled by the Germans, and soon was to be contested between the Poles and the Soviets. No major power saw fit to recognize it or lend it support, and soon it faded away. But it left behind a powerful myth: the date of its proclamation, March 25, 1918, is now celebrated by the Belarusian democratic opposition as Freedom Day, and its now-forbidden emblems — the white-red-white flag and the “Pursuit” coat of arms (a knight on horseback with a raised sword) — have become the symbols of anti-Lukashenko protests.
At about the same time, Belarusian communists, with some help from their Soviet comrades, were busy constructing their own Belarusian polity, the Soviet Socialist Republic of Belarus. When, after the Polish-Soviet war of 1920, Belarusian lands were divided between the two countries, Soviet Belarus became the only de facto Belarusian polity. Now it could claim to be “the first Belarusian state since the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.” (Poles considered their part as “historical Polish territory,” and suppressed Belarusian national activities, and treated Belarusians as a national minority in their own homeland.) Soviet Belarus remained a theoretically independent state until 1922, when it became a founding member of the Soviet Union.
In the paradox-rich history of Belarus, one of the strangest paradoxes is the fact that Belarusians owe much of their modern national self-awareness to none other than Joseph Stalin. As the Commissar for Nationalities, he made Soviet Belarus the main test of his korenizatsia (indigenization) policy. According to the doctrine, which the Soviets implemented from the early 1920s to the mid-1930s, the best way to the hearts of an often reluctant population was to dress Marxism-Leninism in the national costume. In contrast to tsarist Russia, all things Belarusian were not only allowed, they were actively promoted, and if necessary coerced. Soviet party leaders and government officials were supposed to harken from Belarusian stock, and were expected to switch from Russian to Belarusian almost overnight. Practically for the first time in their history, the Belarusian population had free access to education, publications, and mass media in the Belarusian language.
Many among the Belarusian elites — scholars, writers, journalists, artists, left-leaning activists — declared their support. Some decided to return from exile, or to sneak in from the seemingly less hospitable “Polish Belarus.” Soon, however, the Soviet policy changed, and “indigenization” was replaced with “proletarian internationalism.” Belarusian elites were practically wiped out in the Stalinist purges of the 1930s. At the end of the Second World War, when both parts of Belarus were “liberated” by the Red Army and merged into one Soviet Socialist Republic of Belarus, they included practically all the lands of the former Grand Duchy, minus Lithuania and parts of Ukraine, but emerged from the war devastated, decapitated, and fully under Moscow’s control.
And yet Belarus in the years of communism was not the political and cultural wasteland it was taken for. Under Khrushchev’s policy of “de-Stalinization,” unofficial networks of Belarusian scholars and writers started to emerge. They set out to secure and to preserve the remnants of Belarusian past — historical artifacts found in abandoned manor houses, architectural items, old books and documents buried in private libraries. Moscow looked askance on these efforts. From time to time it intervened, forcing the local authorities to expel the “bourgeois nationalists” from their jobs or even to prosecute them.
Some have argued that Belarusian literature missed the modernist phase, since much of the literature written in Soviet Belarus after the war, both in Belarusian and in Russian, was horrible socialist-realist drivel. But in the 1960s several outstanding literary personalities began to make their presence known. One of the finest and most independent voices that emerged in the Soviet Union at that time was a Belarusian writing in the Belarusian tongue. Vasil Bykau (1924 – 2003), the author of harshly realistic war novels and short stories, became a phenomenon on the all-Soviet and soon international scene. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in literature by Czeslaw Milosz and Joseph Brodsky, among others. His books were translated into scores of languages, including English.
Incongruously, Bykau was often presented in the West simply as a “Soviet,” or even a “Russian,” writer. The story of the glorious and heroic Great Fatherland War was still a staple of Soviet literature and film, and here was a war writer of unquestionable talent, someone who could be proudly presented to international audiences. (Some of his translations were in fact financed by the Soviet Ministry of Culture). Never a member of the Communist Party, Bykau was showered with the highest Soviet honors — until it was discovered that in fact he was writing against the hallowed Soviet war genre. The war that he portrayed was neither glorious nor heroic. It was horrible and absurd. His commanders were callous and brutal, and there was the strong whiff of fear not only of the enemy, but also of the NKVD officers watching from behind the lines.
Bykau was also accused of, what else, Belarusian nationalism. His stories are universal, existential tragedies whose protagonists face impossible moral choices, and pay an absurdly high price for preserving even shreds of their human dignity. But his stories usually center around a Belarusian, or a group of Belarusians, who display a higher level of tolerance, compassion, and stoicism than their more hard-edged comrades-in-arms. And, as some critics noticed, they are often the last to die, or even to survive their ordeals. Bykau became a harsh critic of Lukashenko, who treated him with particular venom. He had to spend a few years in exile, but he returned to Belarus shortly before his death.
Another writer of the war generation, Ales Adamovich (1927 – 1994), while collecting oral materials for what he was planning as a novel about Belarusian villagers slaughtered and burned alive by the Nazis, decided not to fictionalize his story but instead transcribed and arranged the recorded testimonies of witnesses and survivors. He thus invented a new kind of a non-fiction novel, a tapestry of interweaving real narratives. Svetlana Alexevich, the extraordinary Belarusian journalist who won the Nobel Prize in literature in 2015, adapted Adamovich’s technique for her own purposes, acknowledging her debt to him in her Nobel lecture.
A younger and very different writer, Uladzimir Karatkevich (1930 – 1984), who came from the old gentry, revived in his popular novels the deeper and more romantic past of the Belarusian lands, including the anti-Russian uprising of 1863, in which his ancestors allegedly took part. He picked up Yiddish on the streets of his native Orsha and would sneak into a local Jewish theater to enjoy plays by Sholem Aleichem. Bohemian, cheeky, and charming, he vexed the Soviet authorities and sometimes had to survive on his friends’ charity, but survive he did, which testifies to a measure of solidarity and mutual support among the Belarusian literary community. His slightly madcap Gothic novel, King Stakh’s Wild Hunt, is available in English translation.
Belarusian poetry has always been rather conservative, even conventional, in its form and its structure. But Ales Razanau, who was born in 1947, is a poet of unusual inventiveness and originality. In his later career he has perfected two different poetic forms: short gnomic statements resembling Zen koans, paradoxical and logic-defying puzzles or proverbs (he calls them “ellipses”); and slightly longer “versets,” equally paradoxical parables and philosophical meditations rendered in rhythmical and mesmerizing poetic prose. I cannot find much in contemporary European or American poetry to liken to his unique idiom.
In 1980s, during Gorbachev’s “perestroika,” an informal group of writers known as Tuteisha, or Locals, was formed around two powerful but antithetical personalities — the dark poète maudit Anatol Sys and the caustic, urbane ironist Adam Hlobus. The writers of Tuteisha were equally involved in literary innovation and political activism. Their generation produced several popular samizdat publications (samvydat in Belarusian) and formed unofficial pro-reform groups that led to the creation in 1989 of the Belarusian Popular Front, the first democratic political party in Belarus. (Their elders, Bykau and Adamovich, were also among its founding members.) It was the Front that persuaded the Belarusian Supreme Soviet to declare the “state of sovereignty” in July 1990, a whole year before official independence.
In terms of historical and cultural experience, then, Belarusians have a lot to build on. The problem, at least a problem for some, is that what we call today Belarus existed in so many different forms, and changed the course of its history so often, and was known under so many names. It was inhabited by people who called themselves Ruthenians, Lithuanians, Poles, or Belarusians, depending on circumstances or social status, and often irrespective of their actual ethnic roots. It was hard to distill from this multiplicity a straightforward national storyline that could serve as the foundation of a unique and easily recognizable Belarusian ethnic identity. Under the influence of the rising nationalisms of neighbors — Poles, Russians, Baltic Lithuanians, and Ukrainians — such attempts were repeatedly undertaken since the end of the nineteenth century. Each of them eventually failed, because each left out something valuable and important for at least a part of Belarusian population.
Having a strong ethnic identity with a proper foundation myth, a throng of “national heroes,” and a national literature allegedly testifying to a unique “national character” is still supposed to be a condition of true nationhood. It is obviously an anachronism, a holdover from the early stages of “nation-state” nationalism (which neatly coincided with, and was much helped by, the Romantic literary movement). Despite that fact, and despite many recent and awful examples of the glorification of ethnicity, ethnic nationalism is still viewed by many as the only nationalism worthy of respect. (Even by some belonging to such a clearly non-ethnic nation as the United States.) For this reason, Belarusians regularly receive bad grades for their national identity. We often hear that Belarus is at best a nation in the early stages of its formation, and at worst an example of nation-building efforts that were tried and failed. If only the Belarusians could go backward in time and retrace the steps taken by other nations nearly two hundred years ago.
Luckily, more and more people in Belarus have begun to notice the absurdity of this proposition. While some leaders of the “perestroika” generation still tried to fashion Belarus into a traditional ethno-linguistic entity, the generation born in the 1970s and later generally reject the notion. Most writers who started their careers in the turbulent, promising, and soon disappointing 1990s write in the Belarusian tongue and hold it dear, but some of them write both in Belarusian and Russian, or exclusively in Russian. (Almost all have their works eventually translated into Russian.) Prose writers in this generation have mastered a mixture of picaresque tale, fantasy,and grotesque which is described as postmodern fiction, but which is in fact modern Menippean satire. It is a perfect style with which to disparage the regime without sounding portentous, while at the same time poking fun at the believers in an abstract and sacred “Belarussianness.” What we see in the works of the best practitioners of the genre is the delightful confusion of myths, symbols, Soviet, post-Soviet, and Western codes that constitutes today’s Belarus.
The Belarusian philosopher and poet Ihar Babkou, who was born in 1962, writes in one of his essays about the strange resilience and potential of the Belarusian “transcultural tradition,” its “heterogeneous elements,” and various “cultural and civilizational formations.” The Belarusian nation, says Babkou, “hesitating, making detours, moving from one identity to another, travelling through languages, dialects, empires, and historical epochs” not only survived, but managed to achieve a kind of coherence of those “mutually exclusive diverse elements.”
Watching today’s Belarusians, for the most part rather unexercised by with such theoretical questions, one does notice signs of this resilience and this tendency to reconcile seeming contradictions. They consider themselves Belarusian and are proud of having a state of their own (only a minuscule percentage would accept a full absorption into Russia or the Soviet Union-redux). They often wax sentimental about the beauty of their countryside, which is, indeed, quite magical and captivating. Hospitable and friendly, they also seem more cautious and restrained then their Slavic brethren: Poles, Ukrainians, and Russians. (No bear hugs or multiple kisses on cheeks.) They value order and stability and seem to steer clear of all extremes. They appear naturally egalitarian and communitarian. A Norwegian colleague, with whom I travelled outside Minsk, surprised me by saying she noticed something Scandinavian about them. Lots of blond hair and blue eyes, to be sure, and an occasional biker with Viking braids, but also something deeper. Perhaps a touch of lagom — not too much, not too little, just the right amount.
It is possible that Lukashenko, a folksy “people’s guy” and anti-corruption firebrand, appealed to exactly those populist preferences in the turbulent first years of independence. Some people who are now struggling against him admit that they were deceived by him; some of them voted for him, and some even worked for him. His populism and his disregard for constitutional niceties was well known, but Belarus was a democracy, after all. If he goes too far, people said, we can vote him out. Unfortunately, he has gone too far. He turns out to be a natural-born, and quite skillful, autocrat. And he has moved quickly and effectively to assure that no democratic process will ever interfere with his rule.
Practically every country in the former orbit of communism faced this kind of temptation during the first years of liberation and transformation. Most dodged the bullet, sometimes narrowly. Some, like Poland or Hungary, are still grappling with a sudden upsurge of anti-liberal sentiments. Lukashenko was not inevitable, and he did not come to power because the average
Belarusian is an unreformed homo sovieticus. In fact, under different leadership the same characteristics of caution, moderation, and commonality would make a decent foundation for a democratic community.
Belarusians dwelled for over two hundred years in the political and cultural orbit of Russia, and the experience was not entirely negative. It was the Russian tsars who first started building railways and roads and increased the number of public schools. Even under the Soviets, despite horrific Stalinist repressions, the Belarusian lower classes for the first time had a chance to obtain an education and experience social mobility. Despite its rural public image, Belarus became one of the most industrialized and productive Soviet republics, hosting most of the advanced chemical and electronic manufacturers. It must be admitted that whatever material progress the Belarusians saw, it came with a Russian stamp. Practically all Belarusians are bilingual, although only a minority can use standard Belarusian correctly and fluently. (A mixture of both languages is a more frequent means of communication in smaller towns and villages.) Russian media are ubiquitous and offer, along with Putin’s propaganda, a great deal of attractive entertainment. Russia is a natural destination for ambitious Belarusians seeking better education and professional opportunities. (European alternatives have begun to emerge, but much more needs to be done.)
This “Russian dimension” is a problem because it exposes Russian speakers to Putin’s disinformation. But that is the result of Moscow’s policies and Lukashenko’s pro-Russian bent, though even he gets nervous about the influence of Russian media, which dwarf his own. Lukashenko used the attempts at rapid cultural “decolonization” undertaken right after the independence, including making Belarusian the sole official language, to instill a fear of exclusion among Belarusian Russian speakers. With a better leader and a more nuanced policy, the understanding of Russian language and culture may prove to be an asset rather than encumbrance. Obviously, the Belarusian language must enjoy full support, and one can hope that it continues to gain ground in all walks of life. (It has become a sociolect of the opposition and young people, and has recently acquired its own street jargon, which bodes rather well for its future.) But Russian speakers should be made to feel fully Belarusian, and not only under the questionable protection of an autocrat.
The Belarusian philosopher Valiantsin Akudovich has remarked that “Russia is not east of us. It is our east.” It is one of the poles of Belarusian identity, as important as all the others. But it is the multipolarity that distinguishes Belarusians from Russians. In Akudovich’s view, Belarusian activists and intellectuals, many of them his friends and colleagues, have overplayed their hand in their attempt to revive a monolingual ethnic entity. They were imagining a nation that simply did not exist. But it could exist as a civic nation, an inclusive, sovereign community united by common values of freedom, tolerance, equality, and individual rights. In fact, considering their diverse historical experiences and cultural points of reference, Belarusians are uniquely well-equipped to become such a nation.
II
Is that not what we saw in August 2020 — a new civil nation rising? How strong is it, and what is its staying power? And why now? Lukashenko has cheated before. Not a single election — presidential or parliamentary — since the one which brought him to power was considered “free and fair” by international observers. What was different this time?
Belarusians are no strangers to mass protests. Presidential elections in 2006 and 2010 led to street demonstrations, but the equally fraudulent election in 2015 passed rather quietly. In 2017, Belarusians, mostly blue-collar workers, took to the streets to decry the so-called Parasite Law that imposed special tax on persons without regular employment. In 2018, large groups of people gathered at events organized by non-government organizations, sometimes with the tacit permission of the authorities, to commemorate the centennial of the Belarusian People’s Republic. Although not strictly political, these gatherings had a clear anti-authoritarian theme. But Belarusians seemed to be losing their appetite for street action. Only hundreds of people showed up for occasional “unauthorized” marches organized by more radical opposition leaders. Traditional political opposition — several pro-democracy parties that survived since early 1990s — was divided and melting away.
In attempting to explain the sudden and unprecedented mobilization of 2020, people have pointed to the looming economic downturn, the relative success of the anti-Parasite Law movement (the law was eventually shelved), the government’s negligence in the face of the coronavirus pandemic, and the removal of crosses placed by citizens at the site of the Stalinist mass executions in Kurapaty near Minsk. All these factors have certainly played a role, but even taken together they can hardly explain the magnitude of the recent “Awakening,” as the demonstrations came to be called.
What may explain it better is the so-called Tocquevillean paradox: revolutions happen not when things are getting worse but when they are getting better, and too slowly to meet rising expectations. In the last five years, things in Belarus were indeed getting better, although at a maddeningly slow pace. What prompted this change was probably the Russian invasion in Ukraine and the annexation of Crimea. Until then, Lukashenko believed that he could use Putin to his advantage while keeping him under control. Overnight, however, the eastern neighbor turned into someone with whom you would not like to be alone in a room.
In the past Lukashenko tried to “play” Russia off the West and vice versa, scheming to obtain concessions from both. This time, however, it was no longer just about the price of Russian oil or easing Western economic sanctions imposed after the fraudulent presidential elections of 2006. Minsk needed to create at least an appearance of being willing to “balance” its chief strategic partner with a stronger relation with Europe and the United States. Lukashenko did not recognize the annexation of Crimea and offered his capital as the site of negotiations of the “Ukrainian issue.” He released six remaining political prisoners and slightly relaxed the laws restricting free speech, assembly, and association. There was a bit more opportunity for independent civil activities. Those who pushed the envelope were still punished, but by hefty fines rather than long prison terms. In the otherwise state-dominated economy, small and medium-sized private enterprises, including in advanced technologies, were allowed to develop more freely, providing employment choices and funding sources for non-government organizations.
Right at the same time, a whole new generation of young, outward-looking Belorussians came to the fore. All these changes were visible to the naked eye. Chic cafes and restaurants started appearing under somber Stalinist colonnades. The Minsk Upper Town and the Trinity Suburb, two parts of the city with some preserved or reconstructed historical buildings, began to seem positively European. The Minsk art community transformed a decrepit, abandoned industrial area on Kastrychnitskaya Street into a neighborhood of galleries, art workshops, and music clubs, decorated with fantastic murals by local and international street-artists. Among the growing middle classes, foreign vacations became commonplace. This was the Belarus that I encountered on my first visit. A colleague returning to Minsk after twelve years of absence was positively surprised by the scope of the transformations. He immediately noticed the absence of the “Soviet posture”: stooped back, head in the shoulders, eyes fixed on the ground, an angry or contemptuous look on the face. On nice days people, especially young people, walked around looking up, smiling, and even enjoying themselves!
The West started to lift or to suspend many of the economic sanctions that were imposed after the election of 2006. There were talks with the United States about exchanging the ambassadors who were withdrawn in 2008 during a spate over the sanctions. All the while Lukashenko remained inaccessible, inscrutable, unpredictable. It was obvious that he could in an instant retract the freedoms that he was cautiously permitting. Nobody was fooled, but the West played along hoping to gain some time and some breathing room for Belarusian society. And Belarusians started getting used to their new, slightly more colorful life, to the measure of “normality” that creates its own expectation of permanence. These were Tocqueville’s “rising expectations.”
Another thing that separated the presidential election of 2020 from all previous elections was the appearance of three unexpected contenders, none of whom emerged from the “old” opposition. Valery Tsepkalo was a former member of the Lukashenko administration, a former diplomat (from 1997 to 2002 he served as the ambassador to the United States), and an entrepreneur. Capitalizing on the quick growth of Belarusian tech industries, he founded the Belarusian High-Tech Park designed as the country’s own Silicon Valley. Viktor Babaryko is a millionaire and philanthropist, a patron of the arts and the head of BelGazpromBank, which is a subsidiary of the Russian Gazprombank. His well-run campaign and meteoric rise in the polls made him an instant star among Lukashemko’s challengers. The third “new” candidate was Siarhiej Tsikhanouski, the producer of a political YouTube show called “A Country Fit for Living,” with over 330,000 followers. There were also candidates from the “old” opposition, but it was those three that electrified the political atmosphere. Something new and unexpected was in the air. Maybe this time…
The government must have sensed it too, because it quickly moved to put those people out of play. They were denied registration on technical grounds, and one by one they were hit with trumped-up criminal charges. Tsepkalo avoided arrest by leaving the country together with his children. Babaryko and Tsikhanouski were thrown in jail. The other contenders were allowed to run. Then something even more unexpected happened. Thikhanouski’s wife Sviatlana, a school teacher, decided to run in his place. Tsepkalo’s wife Veronika, who stayed behind in Belarus, and Maria Kalesnikava, Babaryko’s feisty campaign manager (and an accomplished musician), appeared at Sviatlana’s side. The three campaigns merged into one. Three young, strong, modern women with no political experience were challenging the old patriarch notorious for, among other abuses, his misogynist slurs. Thousands thronged their rallies, and their three smiling faces, as well as their three hand symbols (Tsikhanouskaya — the fist, Tsipkala — the V sign, Kalesnikava — the heart), became the mark of the “new” revolution.
It is anybody’s guess why Lukashenko allowed Tsikhanouskaya to run. It was probably out of sheer contempt. But run she did, until the election day of August 9. What happened on that day was shockingly predictable. According to the official results, Lukashenko won with his favorite “around eighty percent.” Tsikhanouskaya allegedly got just above ten percent. The other three contenders gathered less than two percent each. Protests erupted almost immediately — a surge of anger and disbelief that despite all the mobilization, the enthusiasm, the sense of strength, everything was to be exactly as it always was.
The day after the elections, Tsikhanouskaya went to the Central Election Commission to file a protest and request a recount. She was admitted into the building alone, and then she disappeared. She reappeared a few hours later in Vilnius, in Lithuania, in an obviously coerced video looking traumatized and defeated. She said that she was “just a weak woman.” For her, she said, children were the most important thing in life, and politics wasn’t worth it. In another video, presumably shot still inside the Central Commission, she called on her followers to accept the results and stop protesting.
According to some sources, the head of the Central Commission, Lidia Yermoshina, one of Lukashenko’s key enablers, “introduced” Tsikhanouskaya to two gentlemen from the KGB who had “a long conversation” with her. With her husband in jail and her children seemingly still within the government’s reach (the deprivation of parental rights is one of the regime’s most potent tools of intimidation), she was forced to emigrate and abandon politics. Game over? Not quite. Soon after the two videos, there was a third one, in which Tsikhanouskaya defiantly called on her supporters not to recognize the results, and on various opposition groups to form a Coordination Council to push for a new election under international supervision. Her office in Vilnius, which recently obtained diplomatic status, serves now as a legation of “democratic Belarus.” Surrounded by a team of prominent Belarusian activists and experts, she incessantly travels Europe calling for robust economic sanctions, diplomatic pressure on Lukashenko, and material help for the Belarusian opposition and victims of the repressions. She has met with practically every European leader at least once, and in July 2021 visited the United States where she met with Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, and President Biden. Serious, composed, and well prepared, she is taking considerable risks with her husband still hostage in a Belarusian prison and herself on the Belarusian most wanted list.
Of the remaining members of the trio, Tsipkala decided to join her family in exile, and Kalesnikava remained active and visible until she was kidnapped in Minsk on September 7, 2020 in broad daylight. She was being driven with others towards the Ukrainian border for a summary deportation. She apparently resisted, after which she was “properly” arrested by border guards. The dissident Coordination Council was formed, but its presidium members were either arrested or, like Svetlana Alexievich, had to leave the country. As protests grew in strength and started to spread across the country, including to smaller towns and villages, Lukashenko pulled out all the stops. Earlier festive demonstrations, many organized and run by women, became scenes of horror. Smashed faces, broken limbs, bodies blue from truncheon blows. Men and women brutalized during arrests, inside police vans, and in detention centers. Prisoners kept for hours in “stressful positions,” horrid reports of rape and torture.
The demonstrations continued through the summer and the fall. “Keep beating us. You’ll beat out all our fear,” proclaimed one defiant song. But the marches were growing smaller and more localized, turning into neighborhood gatherings, sing-alongs, courtyard poetry readings. Those, too, were brutally dispersed. A young artist who went to argue with police over the removal of red and white ribbons from the courtyard of his apartment building was arrested and beaten to death. With the coming of cold weather and the intensifying repression, the protests eventually subsided, and did not return, as some expected, in the spring. The government continues with its brutal crackdown — arresting remaining leaders, charging them with “actions against state security,” and slapping them with long prison terms. (Babaryko has been sentenced to fourteen years.)
Most notoriously, Roman Protasevich, the young founder of an internet platform used to coordinate the protests, has been snatched from an Athens-to-Vilnius flight that was forced to land in Minsk. In a spectacle reminiscent of Stalinist show trials, he later appeared on state television confessing to everything, performing self-criticism and naming names. At the same time the regime is eliminating the last remaining independent information outlets, ransacking and closing editorial offices and arresting journalists. Independent publishing has come to a virtual standstill. Even Belarusian publishers operating abroad have problems with importing their books into the country. There are over six hundred political prisoners recognized by international human rights organizations. Reports from detention centers and prisons continue to horrify. Ostracized by practically everybody except for his nemesis-friend Putin, Lukashenko seems ready to rule by fear alone.
What will happen next? History likes surprises, and Putin may still decide to replace Lukashenko with someone equally subservient but less infamous, and task his new puppet with putting a “human face” on the regime. Or he may be quite satisfied with the present state of affairs — a completely isolated and weakened satrap totally dependent on him. The movement has been pushed off the streets, but not necessarily defeated. In 1981, Polish Solidarity was crushed by the communist regime in Warsaw, but it survived because during its brief heyday it managed to create an institutional network. The Belarusian movement, with its flash-mob quality, seems to be much less structured. This may be its weakness or it may be its strength. Despite government efforts, information and ideas still flow freely. Today’s Belarussians are happy not to have to print their leaflets on homemade mimeographs and carry them around in easily spotted bulky bags. We are probably in for a “silence, exile, cunning” stage — the words belong to Stephen Dedalus, the non-conformist hero of Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, in which he called these strategies “the only arms I allow myself to use” — when the work of dissent is primarily conceptual, developing coherent programs and building up the broadest possible consensus among various social groups. (Acknowledging that such a consensus does not yet exist would be a good starting point.) We are talking about Belarusian liberty’s second chance.
Then there is the inevitable geopolitical aspect. If the Polish and Central European example may be invoked again, the breakthrough of 1989 happened only because Gorbachev casually dismissed the “Brezhnev Doctrine,” which stipulated that the Soviet Union will intervene in any Warsaw Pact country where the monopoly of power of a pro-Moscow communist party is threatened. As long as Putin, or someone like him, holds power in Moscow and relations between Russia and the West are as adversarial as they are now, Belarus is of too much strategic value to Moscow to be simply let go. Losing Belarus might be the final blow to Putin’s already shaky internal position based on skillfully maintained great power illusions. The Belarusian opposition is extremely cautious when it comes to Russia. During the recent protests, there were scarcely any openly anti-Russian slogans. Neither were there openly pro-EU or pro-NATO declarations. A strategic reorientation of the country does not seem to be on the agenda. One can only speculate, but it is possible that Belarusians would accept an “in-between” status, a Moscow-friendly neutrality, if Russia finds a way of securing its interests without treating Belarus as a satrapy. Could Belarus attain at least the status of Finland during the Cold War? As for now, there is no indication Russia would be ready to accept such a solution. (And the Finns had the good luck of never being treated as part of the larger Russian nation.)
But it is almost certain that things will not go back to what they were. The sheer brutality with which Lukashenko is clinging to power is a portent of its end. Each wave of repressions creates new opponents — some vocal and visible, and some quiet, waiting for the right moment. To quote Akudovich again, “Lukashenko is our great pause. To seize the highest power and hold it for so many years, he had to stop time, to freeze it in the forms and patterns that lingered in Belarus since the Soviet era.” But time, once unfrozen, cannot be refrozen. It is obvious that Belarusian civil nation will not accept a life of absurdity, of preposterous historical anachronism.
There is a long list of things that the West can do to hasten the end of Lukashenko’s dictatorship. Most importantly, we must be clear about why we should be doing it. Belarus is an important piece on the global strategic chessboard, but it is infinitely more than that. It is a piece of our shared history and shared destiny, a part of our constantly emerging world. Without it we are incomplete. That is why we need to make it a subject of our conversations, to make it — however cynical it may sound — interesting for our thinking classes. That is what happened in 1980s with Central Europe in the throes of its own transformation. I observed it among the intellectuals of New York. Suddenly Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia, and the rest became a part of their world. This happened largely thanks to writers from the region, such as Czeslaw Miłosz, Zbigniew Herbert, Leszek Kolakowski, Adam Zagajewski, Stanislaw Baranczak, Vaclav Havel, Milan Kundera, Georgy Konrad, Miklos Haraszti, Danilo Kis, and others, whose work became available in English translations. They presented their native realm not as an abstract political issue, but as a rich, often deeply conflicted human universe, less lucky than ours but not unlike it in many respects. It is fortunate, therefore, that the Belarusian Free Theatre, the creation of an indomitable couple, Natalia Kaliada and Nikolai Khalezin, has gained much deserved recognition for its innovative form and sharp political messages. It performs internationally, and until recently staged stealthy shows in private apartments in their native country. Many of its members in Belarus have been recently arrested. A fine Belarusian-American poet, Valzhyna Mort, has also made her mark with an excellent English-language (but very Belarusian) volume entitled Music for the Dead and Resurrected. But I find it quite incomprehensible that today’s Belarusian writers — Uladzimir Niakliaeu, Valancin Akudovich, Pavel Seviaryniets (currently in prison), Uladzimir Arlou, Artur Klinau, Alhierd Bacharevic, Victor Martinovich, Ales Razanau, Barys Piatrovich, Tania Skarynkina, Yulia Tsimafeyeva, Ihar Babkou, Andrei Khadanovich — the list could go on — are virtually unknown in America.
“The most important thing has already happened — in 2020 we won the war against a discourse that took no notice of our existence,” wrote the poet, translator, and essayist Maryja Martysevich. I hope she is right. Among the many battles that the new liberal Belarus is fighting today, perhaps the most crucial is the campaign against the invisibility and the inattention that it suffered for so long in the eyes of the West. The worst kind of isolationism is the cognitive kind. We cannot do the right thing in circumstances that we refuse to see.
