Belurus in winter - crumbling economy; hapless President Alexander Lukashenko

National Review, Feb 12, 1996 by Radek Sikorski

Mr. Sikorski is NR's roving correspondent. He observed the Belorusian parliamentary elections as a guest of the British Helsinki Human Rights Group.

MINSK

SCIENTISTS have recently established the theoretical possibility of time travel, and you don't have to be an astrophysicist to know that they are right. A slow train from Warsaw to Minsk, the capital of Belarus, will do. You board in bustling, neo-capitalist Warsaw in the mid 1990s and you disembark in Brezhnev's Soviet Union in the mid 1970s. Comrade Lenin still beckons from statues, a bronze Felix Dzerzhinsky still faces the KGB headquarters, red stars still adorn the caps of militiamen and soldiers. Switch on the television, and Communist Party hacks will harangue you for hours. For those who miss the good old days of the Cold War, this is the perfect destination for a nostalgia tour.

In Belarus the dream of Soviet social engineers, the breeding of Soviet Man, succeeded. Soviet Man was supposed to be hard-working, ahistorical, fiercely devoted to the class struggle, and, whatever his nationality, Russian-speaking. I encountered one specimen on a collective farm outside of Minsk. His face was unshaven and tired of toil and vodka. Beneath his flat forehead, characteristic of the species, his eyes were dull and apprehensive. "Will you vote in the parliamentary elections?" I asked.

"Of course," he replied emphatically. "You have to support authority."

I caught sight of another the following day, coming out of a voting station. He was middle-aged, in a fake fur black coat. "How did you vote?" I enquired.

"For the Communists, naturally."

"Why?"

"Because the Communists will take all those democrats in hand and bring back order," he thundered. "Without order, there is no prosperity, and without prosperity, there is no culture." Soviet Man is far from extinct.

In fact, the most Soviet of Belarus's Soviet Men is the president himself, Alexander Lukashenko, a former collective-farm manager. His public persona is that of a mad peasant crossed with Colonel Qaddafi: ranting, unpredictable, self-contradictory. He had recently issued a decree stating that Soviet-era history textbooks should be brought back into use in schools. Belarusian children would no longer have their minds poisoned with such slanders as the history of the purges, or the 1930s man-made famine, and could instead exult in the miracles of five-year plans. When it transpired that the old textbooks had been trashed and the children would be getting a glimpse of the truth for a little longer, Lukashenko denied ever signing such an order.

Lukashenko's oft-repeated ambition is to consign the country's four-year-old independence to oblivion. His big idea has been to unite his country with Russia. The ostensible reason is that the country has few natural resources, so it might be advantageous to acquire raw materials and energy at subsidized, internal Russian prices. The real agenda is that in such a neo - Soviet Union, it would make good PR sense to appoint a non-Russian president, so as to deflect charges of Russian imperialism. Who better than a man who paid his dues with his own country's independence? Unfortunately, Lukashenko's courtship of Moscow has so far been unrequited. Even Vladimir Zhirinovsky, not exactly an opponent of Soviet restoration, has dismissed him as "a goatherd."

Much as in the European Community, a customs union with Russia was to lead to a currency union, but, again, Moscow balked. Belarus is even poorer than Russia, and its market reforms have barely started. A currency union would have amounted to a never-ending Russian subsidy to a bankrupt enterprise. After much soul-searching, Russia refused to pay the price. This decision, or rather lack of it, may prove to be momentous. If it means that the Russian establishment has at long last learned to count money, and is no longer willing to sacrifice Russia's prospects for the sake of imperial illusions, then Russia's neighbors should not be the only ones to rejoice.

Meanwhile, the Belarusian economy is in free fall: most enterprises are working a curtailed week; the backlog of unpaid wages fluctuates between three and six months; the average pension suffices for little more than bread and salt; hard-currency reserves are running out. Reformist governments in Central Europe may have suffered the pain of economic adjustment, but those countries have now been rewarded with growth. Belarus has yet to find out the price of not carrying out reform. When the inevitable day of reckoning arrives for Belarus the recession that usually accompanies structural adjustment will begin from a much lower base.

For the moment, Lukashenko's control still holds, helped by the results of the elections I observed. They were not rigged, not exactly. It is just that the spending limit on the campaign was $50 per candidate, not enough even to photocopy leaflets with one's manifesto to hand to each voter in the constituency. Opposition candidates were virtually barred from the mass media, which remain largely government-owned. As for the "independent" candidates, on closer inspection many proved to be representatives of the president's own power structures. In the military garrison which I visited as an observer, where 100 percent of registered voters had already gone to the polls by 2 P.M., the candidate turned out to be, quite by accident, a colonel from the divisional staff. I was not surprised that the final count gave no seats to the opposition Belarusian National Front.