Belarus: Passions for the Last Soviet Republic

The Soviet republic, which entered World War II in 1941 with a population of 9 092 000 people, lost more than a quarter of it, and by 2019 only slightly exceeded the pre-war number of inhabitants - 9 475 702. From the very establishment of the UN, Belarus was a member of these influential international structures. With a territory of 207,595 km², almost three times smaller than the territory of Ukraine, from the second half of the 70s, the Byelorussian SSR was not only not subsidized, but also transformed up to a quarter of its total GDP into subsidies to the rest of the Union republics.

The government of the republic in the second half of the 1990 abandoned the policy of "shock therapy" and moved on to creating a Belarusian model of a socially oriented market economy. This made it possible to revive the Belarusian system of the national economy. The Republic of Belarus was one of the first in the CIS to overcome the consequences of the economic crisis caused by the collapse of the USSR, and took a leading position in the pace of building up economic and social potential. The country has achieved undeniable success in social policy, while avoiding many of the costs of the transition period. The country's leadership has managed to ensure the normal functioning of education and health care systems, to establish high-quality infrastructure. However, at the present stage, undoubted stagnating trends in economic and social development have emerged, both in connection with the global economic crisis and pandemic, and, apparently, with the exhaustion of the innovative potential of the Belarusian political model.

There are no people and countries indifferent to Belarus: either you will be told a poem in prose about the nationwide state of prosperity, or they will tell you a terrible tale about the autocracy, headed by the last dictator of Europe, sliding towards totalitarianism. Forget the propaganda for a while, these assessments come from the very heart of the most renowned local and international bottling experts.

In relation to Belarus, there are no indifferent politicians and states: their assessments are also polar opposite, but they come from the depths of their understanding of the national interests of their states.

In political terms, Belarus has exhausted the potential of the technology of maneuvering between Russia and the West, and therefore there is an obvious problem of decisive correlation of the country's foreign policy. The fact that the time of such a correlation coincided with the next presidential elections makes the situation especially dramatic.

Actually, it is very difficult to call the upcoming elections as regular, since for the first time one candidate managed to rally almost all opposition forces around himself, and it seems that all the technologies of “victory” invented by A. Lukashenko personally and his security forces have simply ceased to function. Perhaps the current government  is trying to use extraordinary technologies that allow them, in the end, to resort to the scenario of canceling elections or their results.

Among these technologies is the so-called "Wagner's opera": the accusation of 33 persons from a Russian group of mercenaries of a private military company (PMC), which arrived in Minsk, of supporting the opposition in the upcoming presidential elections. It will take some time (after the elections) before we learn one of the three goals of the Wagner PMC members' arrival in Belarus: following to another hot spot through the airports of “non-pandemic” Minsk, supporting 37-year-old housewife Svetlana Tikhanovskaya in her aspiration to become president countries, or banal support for Alexander Lukashenko. Evil tongues generally assert that the mercenaries "were sent precisely to be detained." However, this is not so important to state that relations between Moscow and Minsk have reached the peak of their confrontation since 2014, when Belarus had to balance between Russia and the West, between Kiev and Moscow, which embarked on a policy of open expansion. This in conditions when the project of creating a Union Confederate State in the eyes of Minsk was increasingly turning into a procedure for the absorption of Belarus by a giant neighbor. One of the options for using "Moscow's interference" is to cancel elections in the event of a premonition of a bad outcome (or their outcome).

Kirk Bennett (a retired State Department employee who oversaw the post-Soviet countries) writes about Lukashenko (The American Interest, USA): “He had real popularity is among rural workers and voters from the working class, as well as among pensioners ...  Lukashenko became a symbol of the general Belarusian craving for the return of Soviet stability. In this capacity, Batka (a dad)  did not particularly need massive repressions to maintain his power. He has always had enough of a few timely, high-precision repressive actions. "But today, according to K. Bennett, an aura of vulnerability began to develop around Lukashenko, since at some point stability became stagnant, requiring reforms and a change of leader in Belarus.

This vulnerability is exacerbated by the growing discontent of Moscow, which has invested about $ 100 billion in the idea of ​​a confederation (more precisely, in Belarus) and is currently forced to look for forceful methods of coercing Lukashenko into a union. One of them is the stake on people from the former and current entourage of Lukashenko (Viktor Babariko - the chair of Gazprombank; Valery Tsepkalo - the former first deputy minister of foreign affairs and ex-ambassador of Belarus to the United States) was successfully repulsed. However, in return, Lukashenko received a united opposition front ... Thus, the Batka (a dad) gave up his trump card and now Putin will decide whether to leave Lukashenko as the protagonist of the post-Soviet reintegration drama or replace him with a more compliant character.

In this regard, analysts are considering a variety of scenarios, including Russia's military intervention in Belarus, destabilized by the results of the elections, helpfully reminding that, like in Ukraine in 2014, Russia has troops on the territory of Belarus and an open border between the two countries. Western analysts are also considering scenarios of military intervention in Belarus, although most of them believe that this is not a forecast, but a warning with the aim of consolidating society and the country's political opposition.

Nevertheless, it is obvious that the upcoming elections will be the most unusual in Belarus, both in terms of their results and the consequences of the near future. Even if Lukashenko wins the elections with votes of 20-25% of his supporters, he will still have a tough alternative, to continue the repression, the potential of which is almost exhausted;  or to start reforms about which this candidate has the faintest idea expressed in his campaign speeches ...    Political analysts believe that the current political leader of Belarus can offer nothing to those who want changes, and his appeal to the past no longer arouses sympathy in society.

The example that Belarus will demonstrate on August 9 will be a lesson for all post-Soviet states united in the CIS. Today in Belarus, a large number of people have joined the election campaign, who previously were not interested in politics, but were outraged by the arbitrary disregard of their opinion about who could be the president of the country. Repression, on the contrary, has revolutionized the generally law-abiding electorate, which can now turn its attention to far from legitimate methods of asserting its desire for change. Evidence is the understanding of the futility of yet another humility, the refusal to boycott the elections and the unification of the electorate around one opposition candidate, promising, if he wins, to hold new elections with the participation of all those who were deprived of this opportunity in various ways.

Independent analyst Sergei Chaly says, that after winning the election, Alexander Lukashenko is unlikely to be able to return the love of the people, and he has no money to buy.