Last fall, while traveling from Warsaw to Brest, I had to make a prolonged stop at the Polish-Belorussian border, where I was given an entry form in Cyrillic and forced to wait as the train wheels were changed to accommodate the Soviet-era gauges still used in Belarus. As I waited, I looked from the entry form to the customs tally and it dawned on me how isolated Belarus remains nearly twenty years after its independence. The Belorussians preserve mementos of a bygone era on their trains and in virtually every other aspect of their lives. Belarus still celebrates the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, something even the Russians have forsaken. Soviet symbols are everywhere – some shockingly recent – and the state-run newspaper is still called Sovietskaya Belorussiya. In a country that maintains the highest number of police per capita in Europe, the state intelligence bureau still chillingly retains its Communist moniker, the KGB. (Time)
On December 19th, the citizens of what has been dubbed “Europe’s last dictatorship” will go to the polling booths and choose their next president: Alexander Lukashenko or Alexander Lukashenko. With a stable economy and disorganized opposition, it is certain that Lukashenko will win his fourth term in office.
Lukashenko, a former military officer whose self-professed idol is Felix Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Soviet secret police, first came to power in 1994 in an election widely considered free and fair. His law-and-order stance was widely popular in Belarus, then witnessing post-independent disenchantment and nostalgia for the certitudes of the Soviet Union. In a run-off, Lukashenko won eighty percent of the vote – an overwhelming mandate that enabled him to slowly dismantle the democratic system that put him in power.
Once Lukashenko was in office, the brief economic reforms the Belarusians enjoyed in the early 90s were replaced by a Soviet-style planned economy. Although Lukashenko’s personality cult is negligible compared to that of former Turmen dictator Saparmurat Niyazov (“Turkmenbashi”), it is still illegal in Belarus to criticize him. Lukashenko, moreover, won a referendum in 2004 that would allow him – and only him – to run for unlimited number of presidential terms. In this half-Kafkaesque, half-Orwellian state, the Orthodox Church pledges allegiance to Lukashenko as well as Moscow patriarchy and the president appoints everyone from ministers to village store managers. Over the past few years, many opposition leaders and journalists have “committed suicide” under mysterious circumstances, or simply disappeared.
Mr. Lukashenko has been a devoted Russophile; as a Belorussian apparatchik, he was the only deputy to vote against the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the Belorussian Soviet. He later entertained a vision for a pan-Slavonic state encompassing not only Belarus and Russia but extending from the Adriatic to the Bering Strait -- and with himself as president. During the Balkan wars in the late 90s, he suggested that Yugoslavia join the Union State, a loose confederation between Russia and Belarus.
Because of these credentials, Lukashenko enjoyed immense popularity in Russia in the 1990s. He unsuccessfully maneuvered for the top position at the Kremlin as the former Russian President Boris Yeltsin floundered. Although far-right elements in Russia perennially consider Lukashenko as a potential presidential candidate, he seems an anachronistic caricature in Putin’s Russia. With his ambition hampered, Lukashenko came to view the subsequent occupants of the Kremlin as adversaries, even though Belarus increasingly depends on Russia for much of its trade.
Vladimir Putin might be the main reason Mr. Lukashenko seems to be slowly turning against Moscow. In 2009, the Belarussian government ignored a Russian gas price increase and underpaid the bill; when Russian cut gas supplies to Belarus, Lukashenko countered by a cut of his own, preventing transit shipments of Russian gas to the EU. Other signs as well indicate that Moscow is slowly losing control of its protégée: Lukashenko refused to recognize the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, and also offered shelter to Kurmanbek Bakiyev, the deposed leader of Kyrgyzstan, a figure loathed by Moscow. Lukashenko delayed a customs union among Russia, Kazakhstan, and Belarus, an agreement much wanted by Russia, and threatened to deny Russia a lucrative contract to build the first nuclear power plant in Belarus.
In October 2010, on his video blog, President Dmitri Medvedev spoke out on the issue: “The Belarusian leadership has always been characterized by a desire to create an external enemy image in the public consciousness. The United States, Europe, and the Western countries acted as such 'enemies' earlier. Now Russia is declared the enemy." Moscow also fought back by banning Belarusian exports, and then by hypocritically denouncing the lack of media-freedom and democracy in Belarus. The upcoming presidential elections may provide Russia’s biggest weapon: its state-controlled media has been airing documentaries critical of Alexander Lukashenko, and it has been speculated that Moscow might fund Andrei Sannikov, a Belarussian opposition leader skeptical of the West.
The elections also come at a crucial time for the international community, which recently abandoned its isolationism towards Belarus. When Russia cancelled its $500 million aid to Belarus in 2009 , the IMF stepped in with an additional $1 billion loan. Later that year, Belarus was included in the EU's Eastern Partnership Initiative, aimed at strengthening economic and political ties between Europe and six former Soviet states. Lukashenko's travel ban to Europe was also lifted. In return, Lukashenko released a large group of political prisoners.
For the last fifteen years, Belarus served as a Russian buffer state; Russia maintains electronic warning stations and radar systems in the country, as well as a nuclear submarine control center. Russia would benefit from a friendly leader in Belarus, and thus previously supported Lukashenko, despite allegations by the West that he engaged in vote rigging in the last presidential elections in 2006.
In the coming election, however, Russia may be forced to make the unpalatable choice between Lukashenko and any of his less mercurial but also less-Russophilic opponents. It is likely that Russia may merely threaten Mr. Lukashenko rather than actually transfer their support. Although it is unlikely, it would also be a bold personal move for Mr. Medvedev to refuse to recognize the election results. But the Russian leadership has always considered Belarus to be in its own backyard, and it will do everything to prevent any unfavorable outcomes there, even if it means creating yet another volatile political situation in the region.
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