abdymok - before the coup

Zaijchik and the Tsar

I should say at the outset that the zajchik — the little rabbit, as the Belarusian ruble was affectionately known — was not, by any reasonable standard, a strong currency. Its name alone was a kind of confession. Other countries named their money after eagles, lions, crowns, the abstract solemnity of the pound sterling. Belarus named its money after a small woodland creature that survives primarily by being fast and not drawing attention to itself. This was, in retrospect, an omen.

I arrived in Minsk in the mid-1990s as the director of the Belarus Soros Foundation, which is to say I arrived as a man whose purpose was to give money to people who wanted to build schools, newspapers, libraries, and civic organizations in a country that was, at that particular historical moment, developing a strong institutional allergy to schools, newspapers, libraries, and civic organizations. I had, in other words, chosen an interesting line of work.

The president of Belarus at the time was Alyaksandr Lukashenka, a former collective farm director who had arrived in office in 1994 on a wave of sincere anti-corruption populism and was now spending the proceeds of that sincerity on something he found more personally satisfying: the consolidation of absolute power. He was a compact, ruddy man of the sort that Abkhazian villagers would have recognized immediately — the man at the feast who always wants to make a toast, who speaks a little too loudly of his love for the people, and who, if you watch carefully, is always counting the room.

What Lukashenka wanted, it became clear to me over the course of 1996, was not so much power in the sophisticated sense that politicians of other countries pursue it — through influence, alliances, the slow accumulation of institutional leverage — but rather power in the more elemental sense that a man wants the sun to rise on his schedule. He wanted the newspapers to say what he said. He wanted the economists to confirm that his economy was performing well even as it was visibly not performing well. He wanted the judges, the generals, the television announcers, and the foreign foundations to all work in the same direction, which was his direction, and he was genuinely puzzled and somewhat hurt when they did not.

He had, you see, what I can only describe as a very sincere relationship with reality. That is, he sincerely believed that reality was what he said it was, and sincerely could not understand why reality kept sending delegations to disagree.

In the early months of 1996, Lukashenka announced that the goal of his economic policy was “market socialism.” He delivered this announcement with great confidence, as a man delivers a piece of news he has been saving. I remember reading the transcript and sitting for some time with it, turning it over, looking for the definition. The definition, I eventually concluded, did not exist. What the phrase meant, as best I could reconstruct from the subsequent months of evidence, was the following: that the state would control all significant economic activity, fix all significant prices, and periodically announce that this was the market at work.

The economy, not having read the announcements, continued to collapse.

The dollar-to-zajchik exchange rate — which the central bank was controlling with the gentle touch of a man gripping a steering wheel over a cliff — shot from thirteen thousand little rabbits to fifteen thousand little rabbits over the course of a single week in June, after two decrees increasing state regulation of commercial activity went into effect and every bank in the country simultaneously decided this was an excellent moment to suspend hard currency operations. Account holders, displaying the kind of practical economic reasoning that no university had taught them but life had, began withdrawing their savings in whatever currency they could find, which further depleted the reserves, which accelerated the devaluation, which increased the inflation, which meant that by autumn prices would be twenty to forty percent higher than they had been in spring. This is what economists call a feedback loop and what the rest of us call a disaster.

No one was getting paid. This too was a problem, though it received somewhat less theoretical attention.

What was remarkable — and I say this not in criticism but in something closer to genuine wonder — was how thoroughly the president maintained his equanimity throughout all of this. He had concluded that the economists were wrong, that the journalists who reported on the economists were enemies of the state, and that the state, properly governed, meaning governed by him, would eventually prove everyone incorrect. There is a type of confidence so complete that it becomes, paradoxically, a source of stability — not economic stability, but the more personal kind, the stability of a man who has decided that doubt is for other people.

He was, and I want to be fair about this, genuinely beloved. Not by the intellectuals, who despised him with an intensity that was itself a kind of tribute, but by the broader population, who found in him something they had not found in the reformers and the technocrats and the pro-Western democrats: the sense that he was one of them, that he understood what they wanted, that he would say plainly what they felt. He spoke badly — not in the diplomatic way politicians sometimes speak badly on purpose, but in the authentic way of a man who has never cared much for precision — and this too they loved, because it sounded like themselves.

In January of 1996, during the visit of Chinese Premier Li Peng, Lukashenka praised his guest as “a great leader of the European mold, notwithstanding his Asian origin.” This remark, which managed in a single sentence to be both complimentary and catastrophically condescending, was reported in the foreign press with the fascination that people bring to the observation of rare natural phenomena. Earlier, he had declared publicly that it was impossible to say anything elegant in Belarusian, and that there were only two great languages in the world: English and Russian. The Belarusian nationalists and educated patriots received this observation with the kind of silence that comes before a decision.

I had, by this point, taped to the wall above my desk a quote from his interview with Nezavisimaya Gazeta in which he had said: “The fourth estate is financed from abroad — by the Soros Foundation. The fourth estate is the fourth estate. But I am the first estate, and they better remember it.” I kept it there partly as a reminder of what we were dealing with, and partly because I found it, in the way that a man in a lifeboat finds a good view of the storm, genuinely clarifying.[^1]

The libel case came in March. A Mr. Shkolnikov, representing his Party for Democracy, Social Fairness, and Justice — a party whose name contained so many admirable nouns that one began to suspect the nouns were compensating for something — had brought suit against me for remarks made on a television program, on the grounds that I had slandered both the communist party and Mr. Shkolnikov personally. Our lawyer presented the judge with materials documenting what Mr. Shkolnikov’s party had been publishing about the Foundation, as well as a recording of the television program in question, which, when played, demonstrated primarily that I had been on television and that Mr. Shkolnikov had feelings about this.

The case, as I explained in dispatches to colleagues at the Open Society Institute at the time, was not really about the libel. The libel was a genre, a form the pressure could take. The actual pressure was coming from the presidential administration, and it was coming from several directions simultaneously: forced polling of universities and scholars who had received Foundation grants, interrogations of faculty by security officials asking in great detail what the money had been used for, visits from the Presidential Office of Economic Crime to examine our accounting — which was, I should note, in excellent order, partly out of principle and partly because we had always understood that our accounting would eventually be examined by the Presidential Office of Economic Crime.

There is a technique that authoritarians use when they wish to destroy an organization without the inconvenience of a specific accusation: they audit. They audit thoroughly, patiently, repeatedly, and with the evident conviction that if they look long enough they will find something, and if they find nothing they will look again. The audits are not really about the accounts. They are about the hours spent responding to the audits, the staff whose work is disrupted, the donors who grow nervous, the partner organizations that begin to wonder whether their relationship with you has made them visible in ways they would prefer not to be. An audit, in the hands of a determined government, is not a financial instrument. It is a form of weather.

By June the weather had become remarkable.

Deputy Viktar Honchar — a member of the civil opposition, a careful man who chose his words with the attention that the times demanded — was shot at by a police patrol attached to the president’s security apparatus at three o’clock in the morning on June 13th. He was not hurt. His secretary was shot in the buttocks. The official explanation, delivered without apparent irony by the relevant authorities, was that the patrol had mistaken Honchar for a Chechen bandit. This explanation required the acceptance of several subsidiary propositions: that Chechen bandits were a known hazard of the Minsk streetscape at three in the morning; that the patrol had been patrolling specifically for them; and that their response upon spotting a Chechen bandit was to shoot at him once and then retreat when he turned out to be a parliamentary deputy. The explanation was not, in the technical sense, believed by anyone. It was offered and received in the spirit of a formality, like an invoice for a transaction both parties know has already occurred.

The same week, three large men visited the home of Halina Drakakhrust, wife of a journalist who had written a rebuttal of a state newspaper’s attack on George Soros and the Foundation. They beat her and told her to pass along their regards to her husband, who was, as it happened, in Poland at the time. I include this detail — the husband being in Poland — not because it changes the moral character of the event, which is not subject to revision, but because there is something about it that clarifies the nature of the communication. They had not come for him. They had come to leave a message. The violence was, in the technical vocabulary of the state, informational.

On Saturday of that same week, President Lukashenka delivered his state of the union address, during which he stated publicly that he did not suffer from schizophrenia and was not sick, and that if anyone didn’t believe him they could have it out man to man. A president’s insistence that he is sane is, as a rhetorical category, somewhat unusual, and I found myself wondering, in an idle way, what the occasion had been. No one had publicly questioned his health in terms he would have seen — which meant the comment was either a response to private information he had received about what people were saying, or it was a response to nothing, which raised different questions. Either way, the offer to settle the matter physically was, I think, sincere.

He also announced that beginning July first, controls would be tightened on the movements of all Belarusians leaving the country and on all foreigners traveling within the republic. This was accompanied by a cabinet edict requiring all non-governmental organizations and foundations to provide detailed monthly financial reports to the central tax inspectorate.[^6] We understood these measures as a system, which is what they were: a slow tightening of the space in which independent life could be conducted, applied with the patience of someone who is not in a hurry because they have no deadline.

I wrote to my colleagues at the time that events were proceeding as expected and that I did not want anyone to panic. This was true. It was also the kind of true that requires some maintenance.

In late July, approximately fifteen thousand people attended the Independence Day rally. The police behaved themselves and there were no incidents. I noted this in my dispatches with a lightness I did not entirely feel, because what I was noting was essentially: they did not shoot anyone today, and this seemed worth recording.

Lukashenka announced shortly thereafter that he would be employing a new tactic for dealing with pickets, marches, demonstrations, and strikes.

He would ban them by decree.

I had been, up to this point, maintaining a kind of professional equilibrium about the situation — the equilibrium of a man who understands that his job is to continue working and that continuing to work requires not catastrophizing, even when there is material available for catastrophizing. But there is something about the simplicity of that decree — the sheer unornamented directness of it, the willingness to say out loud, in the form of law, you may not gather — that broke through the professional equilibrium for a moment and left me sitting at my desk with a feeling I can only describe as clarified. Not surprised. Clarified.

The August press conference, in which Lukashenka had been reflecting on his two years in office, produced a statement I have turned over many times in the years since. He said: “There is nothing wrong if the people vote on four or five questions every two years, because a referendum is the highest form of democracy. And how can it be that someone who comes to power democratically can be a dictator? It is impossible.”

The question was not a rhetorical question. He appeared to mean it genuinely. He had arrived at his position through an election — a real election, the results of which were not contested — and he could not see how the word that came after an election could be anything other than its opposite. The logic, if you follow it charitably, has a certain coherence. What it leaves out is the interval between the election and the present, what happens in that interval, and what kinds of power one may accumulate during it while remaining, technically, elected.

Lukashenka may or may not have been familiar with the way Hitler consolidated power using national plebiscites in 1933, 1934, and 1935. I noted this in my dispatches at the time, and I note it again now not to perform a comparison but because the mechanism is genuinely instructive: a plebiscite, stripped of the institutional context that makes it meaningful, is not democracy. It is the performance of democracy in the service of its destruction. The audience is the people, who are also the material.

The president reaffirmed his intention to hold a referendum on November 7th — the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, which was either a coincidence or an aesthetic choice I found difficult to admire — during a two-and-a-half-hour nationally televised address from Hrodna, during which he cancelled parliamentary elections scheduled for November 29th. A mass media campaign of Orwellian proportions had been underway for approximately ten days. A later analysis by the European Institute for Media would find that of the two thousand minutes devoted to referendum reporting on state television, ninety percent openly supported the president’s position, and the remaining ten percent was considered non-biased. Radio coverage contained no opposition viewpoints whatsoever.[^1]

On the economic front, nothing had changed. We remained in a state of collapse. Everybody to the fields.

The tax inspectorate arrived in August, acting on instructions from Colonel Uladzimir Zamyatalin — who held the title of ideology chief of the presidential administration and had recently been elevated to deputy prime minister, a promotion that contained within it a certain editorial comment on how the administration understood the relationship between ideology and governance. The inspectors descended simultaneously on every significant non-governmental newspaper in the country: Belorusskaya Gazeta, Belorusskaya Delovaya Gazeta, Imya, Narodnaya Volya, Svaboda. Inspectors told people privately, in the way that inspectors sometimes confide in you when they feel a small human sympathy for the situation they have been sent to create, that they had been instructed from above to find something, anything.[^6]

At the same time, the deputy minister of communications sent a fax to Radio Station 101.2 informing it that programming would not be aired after midnight on August 31st, due to “technical reasons.”

Radio 101.2 was the only non-governmental station broadcasting in Belarusian to Minsk. It was the only station that broadcast objective news, including the BBC and Polish Radio. It had been born out of a Foundation grant of one hundred thousand dollars in 1994, had survived two years of bureaucratic obstruction with the stubborn vitality of something that knows it is needed, and had built the second-largest listening audience in Minsk — particularly popular among young people, who were at that moment being rounded up and sent to the countryside to pick potatoes, which was a separate policy.

The “technical reasons” were not specified and did not need to be. A fax is a fax. The station went dark. The young people continued, presumably, to pick potatoes, now in silence.

In September the parliament voted to schedule the referendum for November 24th in conjunction with parliamentary elections, and added three questions of their own to the ballot, including one supporting a proposed alternative constitution in which there was no president at all. The absence of a president, as a constitutional category, has a certain elegance — it is a solution with the directness of a folk tale. Cut off the head and the body will sort itself out. The president, predictably, did not appreciate the elegance.

Colonel Zamyatalin appeared on television to announce that parliament had committed a constitutional coup d’état. A loyalist member of the presidium declared that Lukashenka was now “free to act as he wishes.” This statement was offered as a kind of comfort to supporters but had, for those of us listening on the other side, the ring of something more like a threat — the announcement that a constraint had been removed, which is only reassuring if you trusted the constraint.

If Lukashenka held his referendum regardless, the sequence of events seemed fairly obvious: decree issued, parliament initiates impeachment, president dissolves parliament, and after that anything was possible, which is another way of saying nothing was guaranteed.

By the first week of October I had, in my dispatches, drafted three scenarios for the coming months. I do not reproduce them here to demonstrate prescience — I was wrong in the particulars, as one generally is — but because the act of writing them down was itself a kind of discipline, a way of imposing narrative order on what felt, from inside, like pure contingency.

In the best case: a falsified referendum passes, the parliament is disbanded, and Lukashenka’s regime receives a temporary respite until the next crisis, which I estimated would arrive within six months.

In the middle case: mass demonstrations, more than a hundred thousand people, clashes near the Palace of Sports, a human chain around the Supreme Soviet building, a referendum that fails, a military that refuses to crush the demonstrators, a president who flies out of Belarus toward an unknown destination.

In the worst case: the opposition dispersed, organizers arrested, deputies taken to unknown locations, a state of emergency, a referendum held under occupation, and then whatever came after, which depended on whether the opposition could regroup and on what Russia would decide to do, which was, as it always was, the real question.

We were trying, I wrote to my colleagues in New York, not to cry wolf. The desire to howl a little was, I confessed, irrepressible.

What actually happened was closer to the worst case than the middle case, as such things tend to be — the optimistic scenario requires many things to go right simultaneously, while the pessimistic scenario requires only a sustained application of will, which authoritarian governments are generally better positioned to supply.

Lukashenka held his referendum on November 24th. The results were falsified. A new constitution granting the president near-total power was adopted. The Supreme Soviet was replaced with a rubber-stamp National Assembly. The opposition was scattered. The independent media was extinguished, systematically, with the thoroughness of a man who understands that the light is the problem, not the specific lamps.[^3]

On a Friday evening in late March 1997, I returned to Minsk from a trip to Hungary and was arrested at the airport. I was held for more than twelve hours without access to anyone — made to sleep under guard, given nothing to eat. Officials from the United States Embassy were denied access until a few minutes before I was placed on a plane to Frankfurt.[^8][^9][^10]

A state television newscast that evening described how I had organized opposition rallies and shown footage from November as evidence. The footage showed me standing at a demonstration. I had been at the demonstration. The commentator presented my presence as the proof. I was also accused of having bought people, and a promise was made that a list of the purchased would shortly be released to the public. It was not released. Lists of the purchased, in my experience, are rarely released, because the accusation is not about the list. It is about the word bought, which sticks to the people it names and cannot be unstuck by the absence of a list.

President Lukashenka repeated the charges the following day. “We will not allow foreign citizens to finance the opposition or take part in disturbances,” he said, adding that he would not like the American government to regard my detention and deportation as “a deliberate act.”[^2][^11]

It was, of course, a deliberate act. Matthew Brzezinski, a journalist who visited the Foundation’s Minsk office during this period, captured something of the atmosphere in his book Casino Moscow. He described the Russian-language broadcasts of Radio Liberty — the only alternative to domestic state channels — experiencing frequent “technical difficulties,” and recorded the sardonic verdict making the rounds among the foreign community: “Welcome to Europe’s North Korea.” Byrne managed a weak smile.[^17] “It is no accident, diplomats say, that the first person expelled from Belarus was Peter G. Byrne, an American who directed the Belarus Soros Foundation, which finances about 80 percent of the country’s tiny independent sector,” Judith Miller reported in the New York Times that July.[^16] The choice of target was the message. It was also — as an anonymous source in the law-enforcement agencies told the Russian news agency Interfax — a warning shot, not against me personally but against the Foundation itself, which had by that point distributed thirteen million dollars in Belarus toward education, health, and environmental programs. Within weeks, the authorities levied a three-million-dollar fine for alleged currency violations and seized the Foundation’s bank account.[^4][^12][^13]

The Foundation continued working for several more months, with the equanimity of an organization that has decided that the work is the work regardless of the conditions, and then closed its Minsk office in September 1997. The State Department issued a statement calling the closure a very negative message about the intentions of the Belarusian government regarding democracy and human rights, which was accurate, and also somewhat beside the point, in the way that autopsies are accurate and beside the point. Belarus was the first country in the former Communist bloc to expel the Soros Foundation. George Soros said the campaign was an effort to destroy independent society.[^5][^14]

Radio 101.2 never came back on the air.

Belorusskaya Delovaya Gazeta was eventually shuttered.

Viktar Honchar — the deputy who had been shot at in June 1996, who had continued his work with the careful stubbornness of a man who has decided that stopping is not an option — disappeared in September 1999, along with former Interior Minister Yury Zakharenko, who had chaired the anti-dictatorship council. Their bodies have never been found.[^6][^15]

The zajchik, the little rabbit, survived in various forms for many years, continuing its primary adaptive strategy: running, not drawing attention, hoping for the best.

Alyaksandr Lukashenka is still president of Belarus.

—P.B.