Lukashenko (left) and Vladimir Putin at an ice hockey match in Sochi in January. © Reuters
On the face of it, the revolution in Ukraine might easily have spilled over into Belarus. The two countries share a 600-mile border and their capitals are barely 300 miles apart. Both are former members of the USSR—buffer states caught between the democracies of the European Union to the west and authoritarian Russia to the east. Both were governed by repressive Moscow-backed regimes until Viktor Yanukovych’s government fell in February, prompting Russia’s annexation of Crimea.
In the event, nothing of the sort has happened. Some Belarusian opposition activists went to Kiev to support the protests, though many others were turned back by Belarusian police and border guards. A couple of thousand staged a demonstration of solidarity with Ukraine in Minsk, the Belarusian capital, on 25th March. A few Belarusians have launched their own private boycott of Russian beer, and laid flowers by a statue in Minsk of Taras Shevchenko, a Ukrainian nationalist poet, but that is about all.
Alexander Lukashenko, the Belarusian President, is instead preparing to celebrate two decades in power on 20th July, with his position as “Europe’s last dictator” seemingly as secure as ever. He remains the absolute and apparently unmovable ruler of a state of 9.5m people, a last remnant of the Soviet Union replete with its own KGB, show trials, political prisoners, penal colonies, collective farms, command economy and formidable propaganda machine.
“There will be no ‘Maidan’ (Ukrainian-style uprising) in Minsk. There’s no place for a ‘Maidan’ here,” Lukashenko declared recently. Just to be sure, he has ordered his puppet parliament to approve legislation making it easier to declare martial law and shoot protestors in the event of “mass disorders.”
In reality Lukashenko’s Belarus is very different from Yanukovych’s Ukraine. It has a much more formidable intelligence and security apparatus. Its parliament, judiciary, media and other civic institutions were neutered long ago. It has no split between a pro-European west and pro-Russian east, no oligarchs to support the opposition and no strong sense of national identity—70 per cent of Belarusians are Russian-speaking. The state provides better services and higher incomes, and is less overtly corrupt. Belarus also has a deeply traumatic history that has filled ordinary citizens with a horror of upheaval and a craving for stability that has rendered them more passive by far than their Slavic cousins in Ukraine.
For centuries the great plain in the geographical heart of Europe that comprised “White Rus”—modern-day Belarus—was overrun from east and west. It has been fought over by Poles, Russians, Lithuanians, Hitler and the Soviet Union. Belarus enjoyed a few months of independence after the First World War, but was swiftly subsumed into the new USSR. Then came the Second World War, and no country on earth suffered as badly as Belarus. The Nazis killed more than two million Belarusians—a quarter of the population. By the time the Red Army liberated Minsk in 1944 the capital had been reduced to rubble.
For most Belarusians the decades of Soviet rule that followed came as a blessed relief. Stalin named Minsk a “hero city” and used German prisoners to rebuild it in grand style. He turned Belarus into an industrial powerhouse and a relatively prosperous state. The Chernobyl nuclear disaster contaminated a fifth of the country and millions of its inhabitants, but Belarusians did not rejoice when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. They did not yearn for independence from Moscow. It was forced upon them. The security of the Soviet era was replaced by social and economic chaos, which is how Lukashenko won the only free and fair election ever held in Belarus in 1994. He promised to end the corruption and cowboy capitalism. He promised a return to old certainties, and the restoration of close economic ties with Moscow.
In the two decades since that watershed moment Lukashenko has used decrees, diktats and rigged referendums systematically to emasculate all potential centres of resistance: the judiciary and security services; a parliament to which no opposition deputy has been elected since 2000; the media, apart from one or two token independent newspapers that are routinely harassed and have tiny circulations; NGOs, which have been replaced by Orwellian creations dubbed GONGOs (government-organised non-governmental organisations); and the Roman Catholic church, which Lukashenko co-opted by allowing it to sell alcohol.
Not surprisingly, Lukashenko romped to victory in the presidential elections of 2001, 2006 and 2010 with—he would have the world believe—75, 83 and 79 per cent of the vote respectively. On the freezing December night of the 2010 vote 40,000 Belarusians rallied in central Minsk to protest at his blatantly fraudulent re-election, and were attacked by riot police. Hundreds of men and women were beaten and arrested. Lukashenko’s presidential rivals were seized, imprisoned and tortured. Today a few toothless opposition parties are permitted purely for the sake of appearances, and for much the same reason an Orwellian law forbids them from boycotting elections.
This totalitarianism is not immediately apparent to the first-time visitor to Minsk, though if you arrive by train from Warsaw you experience a curious ceremony at the border when every carriage is jacked up and fitted with wider wheels for the Soviet-gauge tracks of Belarus.
The capital is attractive to look at provided you ignore the vast, monolithic Brezhnev-era apartment blocks in the suburbs. The city centre is a pristine example of classical Soviet architecture, with wedding cake buildings, huge squares and broad boulevards. Long-limbed Slavic beauties promenade through pleasant parks and along the river walks. The traffic is light, the metro is clean and efficient, and there is scarcely a scrap of litter or hint of graffiti anywhere. The accoutrements of capitalism are everywhere: fancy restaurants and coffee bars, night clubs and casinos, Hugo Boss and Adidas stores, Porsche and Harley-Davidson dealerships, and more Mercedes than Ladas.
Only gradually do you spot the signs and symbols of Soviet communism that have been swept away in most other parts of the former Soviet Union. A McDonald’s flourishes on Lenin Street. The British embassy resides on Karl Marx Street. Young Pioneers goose-step in front of the towering war memorial in Victory Square. A larger-than-life statue of Vladimir Lenin has pride of place outside the parliament building on Independence Square, his chest thrust forward and coat tails billowing out behind him. A bust of Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of Lenin’s secret police, stands opposite a huge columned edifice in the heart of the city which is the KGB’s headquarters and houses the infamous Amerikanka prison for political detainees. No attempt is made to conceal the building’s purpose. It is even floodlit at night.
Another prison, this one ringed by high walls, stands barely a mile away. Sizo No 1 is where prisoners are executed. Belarus is the last country on the continent of Europe to retain the death penalty, and carries it out in a particularly inhumane manner. Prisoners are given no notice of their impending executions, so they live in constant fear. On the appointed day they are taken from their cells, forced to their knees and shot in the back of their heads. They are then buried in secret locations so their families have no graves to visit. The 13 members of the execution squad receive a bonus every time they carry out a sentence.
Each 3rd July Minsk celebrates Independence Day with a huge military parade reminiscent of those staged for the Soviet gerontocracy in Moscow’s Red Square at the height of the Cold War. Thousands of hatchet-faced soldiers march past Lukashenko’s reviewing stand in inch-perfect squares, trailed by columns of tanks, artillery and missile launchers. Warplanes, helicopters and giant Ilyushin transport planes roar overhead.
Other abnormalities slowly become apparent. Minskovites tend not to catch your eye, or laugh, or congregate in public places—planned public gatherings of more than three people are banned without prior approval. There are laws against jaywalking, swearing, drinking on the streets, walking on the grass, taking photographs of public buildings, and even using non-Belarusian models on billboards. Clapping, a form of protest adopted by the opposition in 2011, is forbidden. So, in another Orwellian twist, is any unsanctioned “action or lack of action” in public places.
Any form of non-conformity is suspect. Minsk has not one openly gay bar, and in 2012 the city’s tiny gay community was forced to hold its Gay Pride march on a rented tram. “It’s better to be a dictator than gay,” Lukashenko once declared. “Homosexuality is not illegal. But it’s not legal either,” a rare gay activist observed. You see hardly any black faces, street artists, down-and-outs, or mentally or physically disabled people—just occasional drunks being bundled into a police van. It seems almost as if any conduct not expressly approved is prohibited, not the other way round. Certainly most Belarusians regard uniforms as a source of menace, not of protection.
Political non-conformity is the most serious offence. Lukashenko’s most prominent opponents almost invariably end up imprisoned, exiled, disappeared or dead. An irrepressible young dissident named Pavel Vinogradov is lucky not to be one of them. He was arrested in 2012 for placing 15 teddy bears bearing pro-democracy messages in Independence Square. A Swedish advertising agency heard of the stunt, hired a plane, and dropped hundreds more teddies on Minsk. Lukashenko was so furious that he fired two top generals for their failure to protect Belarus’s air space.
It is tempting to mock Lukashenko—though insulting the President is a criminal offence. He is the bastard son of a peasant woman and the former head of a collective pig farm—people joke that he learned to run Belarus there. He has a coarse tongue, huge hands and a faintly ridiculous moustache, and, to conceal his comb-over, state television may not film him from behind.
He calls himself Batka (“Father”). He refers to himself in the third person. He claims to be a man of the people, but lives on a private estate in an affluent suburb of Minsk from which he ejected all foreign ambassadors in 1998 by cutting off their water and electricity supplies. Most Belarusians glimpse only his motorcade speeding through the cordoned-off streets of the capital.
He is a self-styled scourge of corruption who has been described by the US State Department as “among the most corrupt leaders in the world.” He has residences scattered around the country, a Boeing 767 once owned by Turkmenistan’s former dictator Saparmurat Niyazov, a Maybach limousine and a Patek Philippe Calatrava watch worth several times his official salary.
He is obsessed by ice hockey. He has constructed 26 indoor ice hockey arenas around the country, and has his own presidential team whose games are always televised and which hardly ever loses. He is also obsessed by Kolya, 10, the youngest of his three sons and the product of an affair with Irina Abelskaya, his personal doctor (Lukashenko’s estranged first wife now lives in a small village far from Minsk). Kolya accompanies his father everywhere—to official meetings, on state visits abroad, to the Winter Olympics in Sochi and, in 2009, to meet Pope Benedict XVI in the Vatican where, according to Lukashenko, his son moved the elderly pontiff to tears. Kolya has also started appearing in his father’s ice hockey team, wearing the same number: 1.
But the Belarusian leader is easily underestimated. He has survived while numerous dictators and authoritarian regimes around the world have fallen. He has survived as the European Union and Nato have advanced through Poland, Lithuania and Latvia to the very borders of his small, landlocked state.
He has survived through ruthlessness, animal cunning and a keen understanding of the national psyche. Lukashenko has offered a tacit deal to a country whose traumatic past is engraved on its collective memory: social and economic security, including free education and health care, in lieu of human and political rights. It is a deal that most Belarusians seem content to accept. “They’ve always been quiet, undemonstrative and obedient,” one western official lamented. And if life becomes too oppressive they either drink copious amounts of vodka, or they escape to their dachas and vegetable patches in a country of forests, lakes and pristine rivers. Or both.
Lukashenko enforces that deal by giving one-year contracts to the 80 per cent of the workforce that is employed by the state so they can be swiftly dismissed for disloyalty (prostitution is one of the few obvious private enterprises in Minsk). He finances it by obtaining large quantities of subsidised oil and gas from Russia and reselling it to the outside world at a hefty profit. He bolsters it by using the state-controlled media to peddle endless propaganda portraying himself as the sole guarantor of his country’s peace and tranquillity.
The horrors of the Second World War are still constantly evoked through television films, memorials in every town and school trips to the impressive and moving national memorial complex at Khatyn, the site of a village in a forest north of Minsk whose 150-odd inhabitants were burned alive in a barn by the Nazis. Meanwhile, Kurapaty, a site on the edge of Minsk where 300,000 of Stalin’s victims are buried in mass graves, is neglected and forlorn.
When not reporting Lukashenko’s speeches verbatim, the state media portrays the country’s opposition as fifth columnists in the pay of sinister external forces, and the outside world as a place wracked by conflict, revolution and general turmoil. By contrast, Lukashenko boasts, Belarus is a “cosy home where peace and harmony reign.”
That is how the state media has reported the revolution in Ukraine. It has focused on the violence and disorder, largely ignoring the politics while accepting Russia’s annexation of Crimea as unfortunate but inevitable. “It’s saying ‘look at the chaos. Look what happens if you have massive protests. Look at the anarchy and how the standard of living completely deteriorates’,” Yarik Kryvoi, Editor-in-Chief of the independent, London-based Belarus Digest, said.
As things stand, Lukashenko could remain in power for many years yet. He will be only 60 this year and is physically robust. He enjoyed a big boost to his legitimacy by hosting the World Ice Hockey Championships in May—to ensure their success he decreed that there should be no empty seats. Since the crackdown that followed the 2010 presidential election the opposition has been divided and demoralised.
Lukashenko is widely disliked, hated even, but not enough for the mass of the people to rise against him. In a poll carried out last year by the Independent Institute for Socio-Economic and Political Studies, a Belrusian think tank, 46 per cent said they preferred well-being to freedom, while only 38 per cent valued freedom more. In another, 54 per cent said they sometimes or always needed a firm hand to rule them, while only 38 per cent thought it dangerous to concentrate all power in one man.
Economically, Belarus is struggling. It finds it hard to sell its outdated tractors and trucks to former Soviet countries. By all accounts Vladimir Putin loathes Lukashenko, who has repeatedly played Russia off against the EU and frustrated Russian attempts to gain outright control of Belarus’s state gas company, pipelines and refineries. The Russian President could easily engineer Lukashenko’s downfall by stopping his country’s sales of subsidised oil and gas to Belarus, but it is unlikely that he would ever do so lest Lukashenko be replaced by a pro-western liberal. As one western source noted, the Belarusian leader may be a maverick but “he’s Russia’s maverick.”
Nor is the EU likely to make any serious attempt to force Lukashenko from office. The Belarusian leader may be a dictator, but he is not on a par with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, Syria’s Bashar al-Assad or Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe. He eliminates opponents, but not on an industrial scale. He suppresses civil liberties, but not absolutely—Belarusians are free to travel, for example, and have largely unrestricted access to the internet. Opposition activists feel betrayed by the EU, but it has much more pressing priorities and no desire right now to make its relations with Russia even worse. As one European official candidly admitted: “Belarus is a nasty smell in the corner we all have to ignore.”
Whether, or how, the revolution in Ukraine will affect Lukashenko depends on its outcome. But, in the short term at least, it looks more likely to strengthen than weaken him.
The emergence of a genuinely democratic, western-orientated government in Kiev would, on paper at least, leave Belarus surrounded on three sides by free countries and provide a measure of inspiration to its opposition. “The Maidan is an example of our common fight for freedom and democracy in the European region of the former USSR,” Andrei Sannikov, a former diplomat and exiled opposition leader, said. “Ukrainians are real heroes in this fight in the eyes of Belarusians. We admire them and weep for the innocent victims along with them.” Moreover Putin’s annexation of Crimea on the pretext of protecting its ethnic Russians has triggered serious economic repercussions that could yet undermine Moscow’s ability to subsidise Belarus. However, there is scant chance of Russia ever having to intervene militarily to keep in Belarus within its sphere of influence, though Putin could seek to exert much tighter economic and political control over its puny neighbour.
Conversely, prolonged turmoil and the fracturing of Ukraine would fuel Belarusians’ deep fear of instability. Ukraine’s escape from Moscow’s sphere of influence would leave Belarus as Russia’s sole buffer against Nato and the EU and undoubtedly boost Putin’s resolve to keep Lukashenko in office.
In short, Belarus is likely to remain Europe’s dirty little secret for the foreseeable future. The status quo will endure because, to most Belarusians, it is bad but not insufferable. They like to tell a joke about their stoicism. The Nazis hang three partisans in the forest—a Russian, a Pole and a Belarusian. Days later they cut the bodies down and find the Belarusian still alive. “How did you survive?” they asked. “I got used to it,” he croaked.
