Belarusian Villagers Quietly Beginning to Protest against Lukashenka Regime, Satsuk Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, November 15 – Analysts of Belarusian politics have long assumed that Alyaksandr Lukashenka, the Belarusian dictator who began his career as a collective farm head, is an unbreakable hold on the rural population of his country and that he can withstand any challenge in the cities because of that.

            But there is growing evidence that Belarusians in the villages are beginning to protest, blogger Serhi Satsuk says, still quietly and without fanfare but to protest.  And that requires those who want to understand Belarus to revisit the question of Lukashenka’s base outside the major cities (ej.by/blog/sergey-satsuk/2018/11/15/pochemu-nikto-ne-zametil-tihiy-protest-sela.html).

            The blogger admits that he would not have taken notice of this development had “one grandmother not opened [his] eyes.”

            The story begins with the unprecedently good harvest of apples in Belarus, a harvest so bountiful that Minsk was certain it could displace Poland as the supplier of apples to the Russian Federation. But Minsk made a fateful mistake: it offered the Belarusian villagers only four or five kopecks per kilogram, an amount that it viewed as generous but they do not.

            Minsk television played up both the harvest and its offer to the peasantry, but on one program, a woman threw down the money because such an amount was an insult to those who grew the apples. The reporters did a voice over, but many Belarusians heard her cri de coeur. But despite that, “few understand what this means.”

            The blogger again admits he didn’t until he visited a local farmers market and asked how much a woman selling apples wanted for them. She said she was asking a ruble but “take as many as you want – it is all the same better than giving them to [the Belarusian state purchasing agency] for kopecks” and having it braf about how generous Minsk is.

                And then Satsuk noticed that people were putting out buckets in front of their houses filled with apples because “many residents of the country like the grandmothers in the television program viewed the price offered by the government organization as an insult to them. They decided that it’s better to give apples away for free than sell them to the state for five kopecks.”

            “What is this,” he asks rhetorically, “if not a protest against the system?”  To be sure a still “quiet” one and perhaps not completely recognized as such by those engaged in it. But it is “already a protest of the main electoral base of the president.”  Most have ignored this because they are so sure the peasants will vote for Lukashenka no matter what.

            But perhaps, Satsuk concludes, they are wrong.