‘Democratic freedom does not fall into our laps’

What’s the secret behind the Belarusian summer of 2022 – why were the protests against the rigged elections able to evolve into such a mass movement at the time, unlike the ones before?

Here, various developments converged with chance events that culminated in 2020.

In 2020 itself, it was mainly the coronavirus pandemic. In Belarus, Lukashenka announced that no measures would be taken against the virus – and proceeded to mock people who fell ill. It was in that moment that the mask slipped and ‘Batka Lukashenka’, the people’s protector, revealed just how much he holds other people in contempt. And society reacted, because people had realised that their friends were ending up in hospital and people were dying – of pneumonia, according to official reports. They themselves set up initiatives, organised hygiene products, collected donations, put the authorities under pressure. This experience of self-organisation on the one hand, and dissatisfaction with the state, on the other – this was one of the impulses that brought them into the mass protests.

It was also nurtured in the run-up to the election. As in other presidential elections, the state took a hard line against the most successful potential candidates. By late May/early June 2020, all of the well-known opposition politicians, more or less, had already been arrested and were out of the picture. After these arrests, people came out into the streets, protested, formed human chains, gathered in front of the Central Election Commission. This all happened against the backdrop of 2017 onwards, when there was already quite a high level of discontent within society due to a lack of prospects for the future and corruption within the regime, which had frequently sparked protests not only in the capital but also out in the countryside. And it must be said that if it hadn’t been for these three women – Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, Maria Kalesnikava and Veronika Tsepkalo – who stepped in for their husbands who were in prison or abroad, these mass protests would never have happened. Quite simply, the regime underestimated them. They were the ones who inspired courage in this situation.

How was the Lukashenka regime able to retain its grip on power despite this discontent and despite the tremendous courage and solidarity within very large sections of the population?

The regime took action against the leaders of these mass protests fairly swiftly, with 7,000 people detained in the first week alone. These people were beaten and tortured in prison, there’s evidence of that, and this was intended to spread fear and alarm. But actually, it added even more fuel to the protests, because of this overwhelming violence on such a large scale, which many people had really never expected, and simply because so many people were caught up in it.

Tsikhanouskaya was forced out of the country fairly quickly and ended up in Lithuania. Kalesnikava was arrested in early September. The members of the Coordination Council, the body that meant to organise the power transition in dialogue with the regime, were arrested quite quickly or driven out of the country. At some point, the protest movement was more or less left to its own devices. Self-organisation played a major role, but of course, you need some kind of political leadership. And more importantly, there was no erosion of the regime. There were some people in the military, in the prosecution offices and among diplomats who were no longer loyal to the regime, but there were simply not enough of them to pose any kind of threat. The state-controlled economy is a major power factor in Belarusian politics. There were actually large-scale strikes and protests in some of the major enterprises, each involving hundreds of people, but it was not enough, given that some of the state-run enterprises employ thousands of staff. And here too, the regime adopted a hard-line approach: it arrested the leaders of the strikes fairly quickly and put pressure on the workers.

All these factors then converged so that from September onwards, the protests were unable to mobilise more people. By October, 1.5 million people had protested in the streets. That’s a very large figure in a country of 9.2 million, but it probably needed even bigger numbers, particularly from within the regime itself, to be able to pose any kind of threat.

A lot has happened since then. Since 2022, Belarus has been complicit in Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine. What was Russia’s role in 2020?

Lukashenka’s election campaign that year was actually very anti-Russian, one might say, and very focused on Belarusian independence. At the time, there were arrests of suspected Wagner paramilitaries in Minsk, there was quite a lot of unrest and Belarusian state television was broadcasting messages that were intended to discredit the Russian leadership and vice versa. This has happened every so often in the last 20 years; there have been bursts of mutual hostility even if the relationship was presented externally as a strong and unbreakable partnership. Then when the protests broke out, there was often targeted fake news, undoubtedly originating in Russia but also spread via Belarusian propaganda, claiming that the Russian National Guard was on its way to Minsk to help crush the protests. The aim was to incite fear. One effect of this was that the functionaries within the Lukashenka regime became ultra-cautious in deciding whether to join the protests or remain loyal. In light of this, it was probably obvious that the protests stood no chance of success because Putin wouldn’t allow it. So when Lukashenka met with Putin the first time and this multi-billion loan was promised, it became clear that everything that had previously been said against Russia and Putin and the Russian leadership was forgotten and the regime was seeking Putin’s backing to be able to launch a brutal crackdown on the protests.

By 2022, this crackdown was happening at tremendous speed at many parallel levels: harsher provisions under criminal law, criminalisation of people who read the independent media, stifling of the independent media, relentless harassment of civil society organisations and so on and so forth. One of the questions that I ask in the book is this: did Putin decide to use Belarusian territory to rally the troops, so to speak, for his full-scale invasion when he saw that there was scope for this after this crackdown on the protests, because the protests were no longer there, the opposition was no longer there, and the people were now in exile? It’s for the future to answer that question, but it undoubtedly aided his decision.

In these protests, how important was Belarusian identity – or, for that matter, the desire for more independence from Russia? Did that play a major role?

On the issue of independence from Russia, I would go as far as to say that actually, an attempt was made to keep it out of the frame. There was a genuine belief that this was an intra-Belarusian matter, namely the desire for political inclusion and national self-determination, and that this could be resolved in the country itself. This may have been naïve, but it was a genuine sentiment. And you didn’t see any anti-Russian slogans at the protests because, of course, people understood the threat from Russia. But nor did you see large numbers of EU flags, which had been on display during the protests in 2006 and 2010; instead, you saw the white-red-white flag. On the one hand, the history of the Belarusian freedom movement played a role, because the flag became a symbol of the protests. There were these long-standing efforts by the ‘rebirth movements’ from the early 20^th century onwards, when Belarus was attempting to form itself as a nation, and then again at the end of the 1980s at the time of perestroika. But this narrative of the Belarusian language and culture really only played a subliminal role in the protests, I would say. If we talk about identity and values, this was more about people wanting to decide their own fate at last, a demand for political inclusion, a hunger for the rule of law, for fair and democratic rules. National identity is a hotly contested concept in Belarus, after all, and it is claimed by the regime as well. As an identity-based national form, it didn’t really play much of a role.

In Germany, what can we learn from the Belarusians?

Not just from Belarus. We have underestimated the desire for independence, democracy and self-determination in these Central and Eastern European countries for far too long. In the 1990s, no one really took any notice or supported what Ukraine or Belarus wanted, including their efforts to demarcate themselves from Russia.

Right now, at a time when these freedom movements are coming under pressure not only from Putin but now also from Trump, there is one lesson that we can undoubtedly learn: freedom, democratic freedom, does not fall into our laps. You have to stand up for it every day, you have to fight for it and, in the worst case, you have to make sacrifices. It comes at a cost. It is painful. And that’s what we’re seeing with the Belarusians, and with the Ukrainians above all. So what we can learn from them is resilience and this strength that lies within these movements. With the Ukrainians, it’s obvious, but perhaps less so with the Belarusians. But even in exile, it’s astonishing. They have been forced out of the country and have to build new lives for themselves elsewhere, go through all the legalisation process, which involves bureaucratic challenges, find places for their children at school or nursery, find jobs, learn to cope in a new language, a new culture. Many of these people were imprisoned and tortured, and they are traumatised. And then to still find the energy to stay engaged, to stand up for Belarusian society and the democracy movement in exile – that takes almost superhuman strength. We can certainly learn a lot from that.

The interview was led by Stefanie Orphal, Head of Communications at ZOiS.

Ingo Petz is a journalist and Belarus editor at the online medium dekoder.

Petz, Ingo. Rasender Stillstand. Belarus – eine Revolution und die Folgen. edition.fotoTAPETA, 2025.