The Internet Made Belarusians Independent, Minsk Sociologist Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Oct. 21 – The spread of the Internet gave Belarusians the chance to discuss and resolve their own problems in channels that the Lukashenka government does not dominate and for that reason one can say that the Internet made Belarusians more independent-minded and ready to oppose his regime, Minsk sociologist Gennady Korshunov says.

            The Internet gave Belarusians the chance not only to organize themselves without any involvement of the authorities but also the chance to “compare the effectiveness of various government systems,” something that led them to increasingly reject Lukashenka’s (thinktanks.by/publication/2021/10/13/kak-internet-sdelal-belorusov-samostoyatelnymi.html).

            Koshunov says that “the technical possibilities, resources and competences of people allowed them to raise for discussion in chatrooms, forums and social networks various problems, to search for ways to resolve them, and then to achieve these goals. People began to do all this without looking toward the state and even actively turning away from it.”

            Education of the young was the first place where this happened. Parents and their children learned many things from the Internet that the state schools were not talking about and that led to the creation of various “offline projects” and efforts at “informal education” in which the state had no role.

            Then, the very same thing occurred in the economy and in daily life “when people began to exchange things.” They increasingly moved to a kind of post-modern bartering that put them beyond the framework of the cash-based but government-controlled economy. And that reduced the role of the state both practically and ideologically.

            Belarusians, Korshunov continues, “began to organize their own alternative system of education, healthcare and economy. During the pandemic and then the ‘social revolution,’ people organized even their own alternative tax system which consisted of donations” from one group of people to others.

            All these developments, he says, could not fail to change the relationship of people to the state, with the former telling the latter, “Don’t interfere” with its life. Whatever happens in the future, this is a lesson that Belarusians at a minimum are unlikely to forget.