Three Features of Lukashenka Regime have Kept Its Officials from Joining the Opposition, Belarus Security Blog Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, December 1 – Belarusian protesters have expected officials to break with the regime and join them, but this hasn’t happened because of three features of the Lukashenka regime, according to the Belarus Security Blog (ej.by/news/politics/2020/12/01/pochemu-chinovniki-massovo-ne-pereshli-na-storonu-protestuyuschih.html).

            First, Lukashenka’s selection of officials and use of security agents to keep track of what they are thinking means that many of the officials aren’t inclined to break with the Belarusian leader and fear what might happen to them if they so. A few in fact have joined the protests, but far too few to break the regime.

            Second, Lukashenka has promoted a quasi-Soviet ideology which his subordinates are supposed to accept. Many in fact do at least for public consumption; and that ideology which holds that the supreme leader must be obeyed for the country to survive is one that many officials accept to this day.

            And third, the Belarusian president has set up multiple structures, including siloviki of various kinds and trade unions to keep people in line. Anyone who might be thinking about joining the demonstrators only has to look around him to see that most of his colleagues aren’t doing so and that those who have only thought about taking that step have suffered.

            The Belarus Security Blog expands on these points in two ways, Minsk’s Yezhednevnik says. On the one hand, the supervisors in the regions and in Minsk are subject to three systems of control, two of which are directly subordinate to Lukashenka. And the siloviki themselves are controlled by an even more ramified system of five kinds of subordination.

            As a result, “officials and siloviki themselves find themselves under the control much broader and harsher than even the political opposition,” controls that are often beyond the capacity of outside observers to imagine because they are much more stringent than those experienced by protesters in the streets.

            Underlying all of this, the Blog continues, is that officials in the Belarusian regime are accustomed to working in a vertical system in which someone gives an order and others obey while the opposition is above all organized along horizontal lines, something officials and siloviki find incomprehensible.

            “The absence of a hierarchy within the protest movement means that it is impossible for it to mobilize resources necessary for the supply and support of alternative structures of administration,” the Blog continues. That is something officials and siloviki see and feel and are alienated by.

            But the opposition bears some responsibility for the fact that employees of the state have not come over to its side. Up to now, the Blog observes, the protesters have not developed any special message for these people who need to be told what will happen to them once Lukashenka passes from the scene. They fear losing their positions if they lose their boss.

            And as much as many may not want to acknowledge it, the Blog says, “a significant part of the state apparatus sincerely believes in Alyaksandr Lukashenka and that he is defending the country from foreign aggression.” Overcoming those convictions without some special program is going to be very hard.