The Echenevex Institute of Kremlinology

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[kremlinology]

BELARUS: The Fate of Europe’s Last Dictator

"Parasites of the world, unite!”

Alexander Lukashenko has been the president of Belarus since 1994. 

While nearby Eastern European nations have been shaken and even reformed by the voices of their citizens, Belarus remains an authoritarian state. Had its nominal elections been written into a novel, their glaring illegitimacy could have made for a witty satire on Putin’s Russia - and conveniently, Putin is one of Lukashenko’s closest foreign allies.

Lukashenko’s time in power has not been uneventful, nor have his dictator-like qualities gone unnoticed. In 2011, during a period of economic crisis, hundreds of peaceful protesters gathered in Minsk to demand Lukashenko’s resignation. Rather than chant slogans, the protesters simply applauded. 

Arrests followed, including that of a one-armed man for clapping, and of a deaf-mute for shouting anti-government slogans. Later, protesters arrived with their cellphone alarms set to ring at 8 a.m., directing the Belarusian masses to “wake up”. Observers spoke of a second Orange Revolution.

But by the end of the month, the government had banned assemblies and gatherings, making them illegal. 

The law has not been obeyed. For the past few days, so-called “angry Belarusians” have organized protests against a controversial tax on the unemployed - whom Lukashenko refers to as "social parasites," in chilling echo to another well-known European dictator.

Hundreds of protesters were promptly detained, mainly before or after demonstrations, so as not to attract criticism. Nevertheless, both the United States and the European Union have condemned the Belarusian government’s response to the protests.

The sequence of events is familiar, recalling Belarus’ 2011 protests, of course, as well as Russia’s of the same year: incarceration is all too potent an antidote to revolt. Yet such a pattern has never proven itself sustainable, as Ukraine’s political upheavals do not cease to demonstrate.

If the action were to prove successful, the imbalance resulting from Belarus’ realignment could change the political climate of its neighbouring “republics”, Russia in particular, forever.

Besides, for such protests to arise in 2017 - the centenary of two Russian Revolutions - seems almost prophetic. Though Belarus may not have its Euromaidan tomorrow, it is far from certain that change is impossible: no dictator, after all, lives forever. 

(Photo by Maxim Mirovich, maxim_nm.livejournal.com)

[kremlinology]

The 200-Year-Old Politics of the Bard of Ukraine

Rally near the Taras Shevchenko monument in Kyiv, 9/3/17

Yesterday, the 9th of March, was the 203rd birthday of a man oft compared with the Goethes and Dantes of other nations:  Taras Hryhorovych Shevchenko. Ukrainian author, painter, illustrator, sculptor, musician, philosopher, and actor, Shevchenko is best known for his poetry. One of his pieces, "Testament" (Ukrainian: "Заповіт", Zapovit), enjoys a domestic status second only to that of Ukraine’s national anthem.

The artist, convicted and exiled in 1847 for his writing in the Ukrainian language, promotion of the independence of Ukraine and criticism of Russian Imperial authorities, has become a prophetic symbol in the struggle for Ukrainian national statehood and cultural integrity.

Although, in Soviet times, the poet’s legacy was co-opted as that of a party icon, and his works bent to fit Communist ideals, Shevchenko is still a symbol of the Ukrainian resistance - against foreign as well as internal political forces.

His greatest political prominence is within circles in which the rhetoric of Ukrainian “independence” is prevalent. These represent sometimes the pro-European elements in an increasingly polarized nation tending towards alliances with Russia. But, perhaps more frequently, they correspond to nationalist groups whose ideologies focus on response to external threats.

As such, Shevchenko’s image has appeared in countless places - in artwork supporting Ukrainian military action in the East (especially in the paintings of Yuri Shapoval, a leading researcher of Soviet Ukrainian history), on the shields of Euromaidan protesters, and even in the monument onto which a bouquet was once laid by Victor Yushchenko, leading figure of the Orange Revolution and third president of Ukraine. 

This year, the official Facebook page of Ukrainian ex-Prime Minister and former Orange Revolutionary Yulia Tymoshenko, as well as the page of her party, Batkivshchyna (”Fatherland”), featured multiple posts on the poet. Reporters for Ukrainian media, most notably Euromaidan Press and uacrisis.org (both vehemently anti-Russian) but also for instance the (more moderate) Kyiv Post, write regularly, on an annual basis, of the poet’s birthday and its significance. 

He has been compared to Nadiya Savchenko, a pilot in the Ukrainian air force captured and held by Russian authorities in 2014, and another strong symbol of Ukrainian nationalism.

Some take alternative routes. For instance, Andriy Yermolenko’s “Shevchenkiana”, a project reported on yesterday on the Euromaidan Press website, aims, in the words of the artist, to make Shevchenko’s work “stop being relevant”. Yermolenko follows through with this aim by modernizing the symbolic image of the poet in his work, representing him as a rock star or a superhero, while urging Ukrainians to “rise up” against the enemy, “so that there would finally be no masters in Ukraine”.

Regardless of the approach, the symbolic power of the bard is undeniable. And such a power, in a heavily polarized climate like Ukraine’s, is quick to be politicized.