Paul
Goble
Staunton, March 28 – In Gorbachev’s
time, many Russians told an anecdote about a man who, having stood in line for
hours to buy meat and toilet paper without success, starts grumbling and is
approached by a Soviet militiaman who tells him he shouldn’t be complaining and
that in the old days, he’d have been
shot, but now, he’ll be let off with a warning.
The man goes home and says to his
wife: “Masha, its worse than we thought. Not only have they run out of meat and
toilet paper, but apparently they are running out of bullets as well!” That
anecdote may become more truth than poetry in Belarus if stories coming out of
Minsk are true.
In the wake of protests across
Belarus – for an interactive map of them, see belsat.eu/ru/news/hronika-protestov-netuneyadtsev-v-belarusi-interaktivnaya-karta/
-- there are two reports that Lukashenka hasn’t run out of bullets just yet but
that he is now unable to pay his siloviki what they think they deserve, a
potentially fatal problem for a dictator relying on them.
The first report, by Vladimir
Kovalkin, a Belarusian activist who tracks government spending, the Belarusian
security services raised a hullabaloo in advance of March 25 and overdramatized
what they did in the hopes of getting more money for their work (belaruspartisan.org/politic/374749/).
Since 2014, he says, spending on the
Belarusian siloviki has fallen every year, from 1.289 billion US dollars in
that year to only 808 million US dollars in 2017, a reflection of the budget
stringencies Lukashenka is acting under given the collapse of his relations
with Moscow and the absence of any new sources of revenue.
According to Kovalkin, the employees of
Lukashenka’s interior ministry do not do much except disperse opposition
meetings and so they have to use those events to justify their existence. In
fact, he says, there is no justification for Belarus having as many interior ministry
officers as it has.
The second comes from Nikolay
Statkevich, the head of the Belarusian National Congress. He said that “Lukashenka
[now] has no money to support the siloviki establishment” he has created
because he has created a situation in which he has to rely on force alone, his “social
contract” with the people no longer in place (charter97.org/ru/news/2017/3/28/245123/).
The opposition leader continues that
he and his colleagues “had underrated the level of panic among the bosses … The
country has been seized by a group of bandits. We must do something. I am not
calling you to armed struggle. That isn’t necessary. But peaceful protest shows
that we are a people.”
Three other stories coming out of
Belarus in the last 36 hours confirm that the situation there has fundamentally
change. First of all, a psychologist says that Belarusians have lost their fear
of the authorities and even their fear of imprisonment and so are prepared to
risk far more than in the past (euroradio.fm/ru/psiholog-lyudi-osoznayut-do-peremen-ostalos-ne-mnogo-poetomu-ne-boyatsya).
They have the sense, she says, that
things are moving quickly and that the Lukashenka regime is not long for this
world. One piece of evidence of the changed attitude of Belarusians: they are
now expressing their solidarity with those who have been arrested by writing
letters to them (belsat.eu/ru/news/vyrazim-solidarnost-napishite-zaderzhannym-v-tyurmu/).
Second, at least some longstanding
players in the regime are positioning themselves as supporters of things the
opposition cares about. Pavel Yakubovich, perhaps Lukashenka’s most prominent
journalistic supporter, says he wants people to remember that he was behind setting
up memorials at Kuropaty (belaruspartisan.org/life/374793/).
And third, the Lukashenka regime is
scrambling to figure out how it can track the organizers of protests, something
it has proven extremely bad at in recent weeks, especially given the solidarity
of the population and the unwillingness of ordinary Belarusians to turn other
Belarusians in (belaruspartisan.org/politic/374754/).
No comments:
Post a Comment