Reflections on the Revolution in Belarus

I spent forty-eight hours in Belarus once, at the start of March. The country was going through a freezing cold spell. Hrodno or Grodno was full of beautiful (Polish) baroque buildings, but was lifeless, empty and astonishingly cold in every sense. 

The pavements were dazzlingly clean and police cars sat at street corners. You had the feeling of constantly being watched.

There was almost no advertising. I opened one door in an important street to find a deposit for cleaning materials. The next door, unmarked, led me into a busy supermarket with mostly local products. 

In the one free presidential election, in 1994, Lukashenko won after making uncorroborated allegations of corruption against the Chairman of the Supreme Soviet (who now lives on a very meagre pension). 

Lukashenko promised to save Belarus from being pillaged in the name of privatisation, as happened in neighbouring Russia and Ukraine. 

It's a promise he kept and Belarus is in many ways like the Soviet Union. 

The biggest difference is that the USSR had an ideology, a reason for being different from and poised for war with other countries. Belarus has no reason for being the way it is and no very convincing reason for existing.

Like in most of Ukraine most people here and everyone in the towns speaks Russian. Will Belarus (White Russia) return to the motherland? 

Or model herself on the West? That would be very dangerous.

If there is a threat that Belarus may become a democratic state Russia is likely to intervene and she would argue that she has the right to do so under the CSTO treaty. 

It looks tonight that Lukashenkho may ask Putin to come to his aid and if he does that Putin will do so. He must be anxious about another domino falling. 

Armenia became democratic but remains a Russian satellite, because hemmed in by closed borders with Turkey and Azerbaijan. Belarus borders three NATO and EU states, plus the American satellite Ukraine.

Lukashenko will be a liability to Putin, but he cannot be replaced easily without holding fresh elections. 

It's a very perplexing chess problem. Putin is sometimes described as chess player, but the game he really plays is poker.

I chatted to a man in a bar in Grodno who complained that most of his friends had gone to the West.

How do they get visas? 

I don't know. That's why I'm still here.

Bucharest taxi drivers often tell me the old days were better than now and in some ways they were much better. In those ways Belarus is much better than her neighbours. Everyone has a flat, everyone has enough to live on reasonably decently. Prices are low. The unemployment rate is  between 4% and 5%. The unemployed have to pay a fine for parasitism.


80% of the economy is state-owned. Its assets were not stolen by crooks, as were those of neighbouring Russia and Ukraine. In the 00s the economy grew very fast, it had no poverty, one of the best public health services in the former USSR, the best roads and no foreign debt. During the 2008 and 2009 financial crisis the Belarussian economy didn’t shrink.

Belarussian GDP is $20,000 per capita p.a., which is more than twice that of Ukraine. Russia's is $27,000. The Belarusians make trucks, tractors, fertiliser and cheese, they are good at IT, but the reason they live well is because their gas and oil are subsidised by Russia - and  they sell them on at the world market price. 

But since 2010 Russia has been reduced subsidies sharply and the Belarussian economy has stagnated. This is why Lukashenko is unpoular.

There are no visible rich people. There are almost no foreigners, not even from the former Soviet Asia. 

Belarus was law abiding and safe and intensely boring, but boring is another word for peaceful. 

Now it is no longer boring or peaceful. 

The last twelve months have been a year of riots and protests, though not a year of revolutions, yet. 1968, not 1848 or 1989 or the Arab Spring. Chile, Iran, Hong Kong, the Lebanon, Black Lives Matter. 

These protests and riots were caused by very different things but they attracted the backing of big city dwellers, as protests and riots do.  

But in the case of Belarus the riots are not just or mainly happening in Minsk. Small towns are rioting.

Foreign intelligence services are active in Belarus, like in every country, but this does not seem like civil commotion engineered by outsiders.

It seems like a classic spontaneous revolution from below, the kind of classic revolution that rarely happens. 

The people arrested, held in prison and tortured by the police thugs are said to represent a complete cross-section of Belarussian society.

It resembles the Romanian revolution of 1989, which also began spontaneously but which got taken over by a bunch of reform-minded communists who had been planning a coup d'etat against Ceausescu, with the assistance of the Kremlin and the KGB.

What will the EU do if Russia moves or removes Lukashenko in some way? 

They cannot support him after the brutality of his police and they cannot support aggression by Putin. 

The coronavirus pandemic and Lukashenko's decision to ignore it no doubt played a part in these riots, just as it played a part in the BLM disorders. It has also reduced the power of petrostates like Russia and the Gulf states. In Iran large numbers of dead combines with the fall in the price of oil to weaken the government's position. The political and economic consequences of Covid-19 are going to be vast. 

I don't know how big a factor the virus was in bringing people out onto the streets. The official statistics suggest Belarus escaped lightly from the virus.

Belarus is not a hermit kingdom and people there know Poland and the Baltic States have higher standards of living and freedom. 

Lukashenko has quarrelled with Gazprom, which was up to some shady business with oil receipts. Are Gazprom and other Russian 'investors' involved somehow behind the scene of the riots? 

Are Russian agents involved, hoping to give Putin an excuse to intervene? 

I don't believe either of these ideas. Are the CIA or the EU involved? I doubt they want more trouble with Russia. 

Is George Soros involved? Conceivably, but he is not a James Bond villain scheming to take over the world. 

On second thoughts, perhaps he is. Still, I imagine his part, if he has one, is limited. Lukashenko stamped out his activities twenty years ago.

After Grodno we went to Minsk, a place almost levelled in the war and rebuilt. It has the charms and charmlessness of a Bolshevik city and in the centre a replica has been carefully built of the tiny old town. 

When I visited, the old town seemed eerily deserted, We found a huge bar in which we were the only customers, except for a tableful of army officers in uniform, epaulets gleaming. After some time first one and then all of them sang the Internationale, the Soviet anthem. 

I cannot claim any insight into Belarus based on two days, yet I am convinced that, unlike Ukraine, Belarus will always be essentially Russian. 

Perhaps the time will come when the Union of Russia and Belarus, created on paper long ago, will become a sovereign state headed by Vladimir Putin. That time might be soon. But for the time being there are many advantages for Russia from the status quo, not least as a way of avoiding sanctions.






Note: I learnt a lot about the Belarussian economy from this very interesting essay.