However uncertain the road ahead, these protests show how authoritarianism ultimately subverts itself
Of all the moving scenes from Belarus, one sticks in my mind. A man, probably in his 30s, holds his child on his arm. “The election was … ” he says to the camera, pauses nervously for a long moment, glances sideways at his child, and then concludes explosively, “falsified!” There you have the exact moment, crucial for any protest movement against any dictatorship, when the individual breaks through the barrier of fear. Yesterday, he would not have dared to complete that sentence in public. Today, he will find himself among tens of thousands who are shouting the same thing at the top of their voices, waving the red and white flag that stands for a better Belarus. Speak out for the future of the child on your arm.
Events in Belarus now join a long line of anti-Soviet and anti-post-Soviet protest movements – some of which succeeded, some of which failed. “Colour revolutions” is a flimsy, politically compromised term that offers much too short a perspective. Since Belarus is the most Soviet of all the post-Soviet states, you can reach back even as far as the East German protests in 1953. When you see workers in large state factories confronting Alexander Lukashenko face to face, and reportedly forming an inter-factory strike committee, you are in Poland in 1980. Or perhaps it’s more like Armenia in 2018? Or Ukraine in 2014? Or – the unavoidable reference – the central European revolutions of 1989? And don’t forget that Belarusians themselves have tried several times before. This is not the first election Lukashenko has falsified.
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