Society and Civil Activism in Belarus

20. Oktober 2008 _ Nastia Matusevich
The existence of civil society in post-Soviet Belarus remains in question. The authoritarian regime creates the specific conditions for its existence, namely, the impossibility of civil activity by means of a large number of restrictive measures undertaken by the authorities. The handful of existing civil organizations are ineffective due to the biased public attitude towards them, and, generally, due to the pronounced unwillingness of citizens to participate.

This unwillingness may be explained by reference to some features of national mentality and to misfortunes of the historical past, which are exacerbated by the present state propaganda and ideology. Here, I shall elaborate on several factors and describe those tendencies of society that influenced and continue to influence and shape the present state of civil society in Belarus.

The results of independent surveys conducted in Belarus by the Independent Institute of Social, Economic and Political Studies (IISEPS)(1) are illustrative of some aspects of Belarusian society. First of all, most people do not have a clear idea of what is going on in the country on a larger scale; for example, they do not understand the general state of politics or economics. To a question about state of market reforms in the country, only 15 percent of respondents gave the correct answer, i.e. that these reforms never actually started. Only 27 percent of respondents said they had an idea of the aims of the present government and where it was leading the country, whereas 67 percent said they only had a vague idea or none at all. The most important problems that worry respondents concern their living standards, workplaces, health care and prices, while democracy and national independence are much less attractive to them. The paradox lies in the fact that all of these issues are currently in poor condition(an outdated and malfunctioning health care system, high levels of inflation and price increases, low salaries, unemployment), but people fail to see the real causes. Simultaneously, people strongly trust the government and especially the president. 53 percent of respondents believe that the country is still going in the right direction (while in reality Belarus is one step away from economic crisis), the same number trusts the president of Belarus (31 percent do not), and 42 percent would vote for him (compared to only 6 percent for the opposition candidate).

The most striking finding is that people would not even protest if they learnt that the authorities were doing something wrong. To the question “What would you do if you knew that the election results were rigged?”, 50 percent of respondents answered “I would not do anything”, 26 percent would tell their friends, 10 percent would support “defeated” candidates in going to court, and only 7 percent would go out on the street to protest. Similarly, 76 percent would not take part in an action against the deteriorating economic conditions (only 15 percent would), which is greatly proved by recent events in Belarus. When in December 2007, the government abolished many social benefits for the young and the elderly (school-age children, for example, now pay full price for public transport), nobody protested. Unfortunately, this is but one of numerous examples.

In other words, the majority of Belarusians do not want to participate in changing the situation in the country, they do not protest on a civil level, and do not protect their rights out of fear, ignorance or strong disbelief in the possibility of change. According to the World Values Survey(2), the level of membership in non-governmental organizations in Belarus is very low (only 2.4 percent of respondents belong to education, arts, music or cultural activities organizations, 0.6 percent to political parties, 0.5 percent to human rights organizations, 0.9 percent to ecological organizations, 0.5 percent to professional organizations, etc.), while the level of active participation is much lower still. Which factors can help to explain this?

First of all, there is the famous concept of Belarusians being very tolerant people. Numerous Belarusian historians state that due to specific historical and geographical conditions, Belarus always found itself at the crossroads of wars, which it did not initiate, but which still took place on its territory. At the same time, different peoples, ethnicities and religions coexisted in Belarus in a very peaceful manner – in the history of the country, there are no known conflicts on the basis of religion or ethnicity. This fact may account for the contemporary Belarusian tendency to favour non-violent ways of conflict resolution and to show tolerance in different spheres of life. However, in my view, recently the notion of tolerance (with the help of state propaganda) has merged strongly with the idea of political and civil passivity and alienation. Simultaneously, Belarusians are becoming less and less tolerant towards inner and outer “enemies” of independent Belarus (the opposition is the “inner enemy number one”, and the U.S. is the “outer enemy number one”) and believe in myths disseminated by the state media about spies and conspiracy networks. Thus, “tolerance” has become a big myth itself, especially when considering the present state policies towards promoting the Orthodox Church and restricting the activity of other religious communities.

A second influential factor refers to the creation of the Belarusian nation. Weak civil activism among Belarusians is related to their weak national identity. The country lacks a well defined national idea, which results in the failure to unite citizens under common ideas and goals. Such a national idea was repeatedly suppressed in the Belarusian lands in the course of history. First, by the Poles during the Polonization of the Belarusian lands in the late 16th and 17th centuries, then by the Russians during the more intense Russification campaign in the 19th century, and finally by the Bolsheviks during the repressive Sovietization of the 20th century. For instance, in the late 1930s, the Stalinist purges exterminated almost the entire intellectual and cultural elite of the Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic (BSSR). But the most devastating blow was delivered by World War II and the years that followed. The War almost completely destroyed the country: its entire territory was a battlefield, and about one third of the population died. This "massive scale of human and material destruction fundamentally contributed to the progress of Sovietization." The ‘palimpsest of historical experience’ was extirpated in its near entirety in the postwar BSSR, and the social engineering of a Russian-speaking homo sovieticus met with greater success in Belarus than in any other Soviet republic.”(3)

After the war, massive investments in the country helped its economy to develop quickly and to create a technically advanced society with a weak national identity. That is why when the country entered the perestroika period, it had the best economic indicators in the Soviet Union and the population did not really want anything to change. As a consequence, the population was not united under nationalistic ideas, as these were rather alien to them. Instead, they chose Alexander Lukashenko, a strong populist president who promised to fight corruption. The heroes of the Great Patriotic War artificially substituted for the national heroes and a national history. Hence, today it is often ironically said that Belarus’s history begins in the year 1941.

The present regime finds it easy and fruitful to implement similar policies today. Just to mention a couple of examples: incidentally, in the official version, you get the impression that Belarusian history actually starts in the year 1941 as the authorities greatly promote the heroism of Belarusians during World War II and neglect many other aspects of national history; moreover, popular mass culture (in majority Russian) is present everywhere in the state media and in state-sponsored events, while alternative, independent and high culture (to a large extent national Belarusian) is greatly restricted in its activity. The educational system is also outdated and ineffective due to a number of inconsistent reforms during the last 10 years, heavy restrictions on international intellectual exchange and methodological innovations. The state monopoly of the media creates an informational vacuum in the country because only about 3 percent of Belarus’s slightly less than 10 million inhabitants regularly travel to Western countries, around 14 percent travel to neighboring countries of the former USSR, and only 6 percent obtain information from independent media. Isolationism in terms of access to information and cooperation with abroad (be it for tourism, educational programs or business cooperation) is aggravated by the isolationism of people within the country. It is a common occurrence that villagers who live in poor conditions naively believe television announcements stating that the situation is much better everywhere else in the country. Accordingly, they are much more likely to vote for the incumbent president than their wealthier compatriots.

Belarus’s civil sector, unfortunately, hasn’t managed to develop enough to resist this politics of isolationism. NGOs went through several stages of development since the beginning of the 1990s: from the dynamic development in the first half of the 1990s and a flourishing and politicization between 1996 and 1998, to various efforts of the authorities to weaken the NGO community, beginning in 1999 and developing into a full-out war of the government against NGOs in 2003-2005. In the wake of this large-scale campaign to close down most NGOs (through numerous re-registrations, limitations of foreign assistance, restrictions on fundraising within the country, restrictions on receiving technical assistance from international organizations, and criminalization of membership in unregistered NGOs)(4), the civic sector went largely underground and today represents a weak network of organizations and initiatives.

Therefore, today’s statistics demonstrate that contemporary Belarusians care much more about their living standards than about their rights, national identity and democracy. However, the situation has changed compared to the Soviet times: the present regime is not able to skillfully run the country’s economy and as a result of its failures the living standards are deteriorating. In 1994, Belarusians lived statistically better than citizens in all other countries of the former Soviet Union. However, during the next 9 years the rate of economic growth in Belarus declined, exceeding only such countries as Moldova, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, while the other countries, whose citizens had about the same or an even lower standard of living in 1994 - Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Russia, Romania, Bulgaria, and Poland among others - already significantly outpaced Belarus by 2003(5). It is hopefully just a matter of time until the crisis will make people look differently at the situation in the country.

Other important factors are changing as well. Belarus cannot stay isolated from contemporary global processes, both in terms of economics, technological development, social mobility, the sphere of information and culture. These global trends supply the country with objective information and democratic influence. And most importantly, the generation which was influenced by the cultural, intellectual and national development of the first half of the 1990s, differs significantly from the homo sovieticus of yore. This generation searches for its national identity and may well form the potential future (intellectual) elite of the country. Already today, they account for the majority of protests against the regime. All these factors should and ought to give rise to increased civil activism – the only question remaining is when this will happen. So far, the answer is: not yet. As the recent elections to the House of Representatives in September have clearly demonstrated, the regime still neglects democratic principles and people still fail to protest.

Footnotes:

(1) All the information about IISEPS’s surveys, results and publications can be found on their website http://www.iiseps.org/. In this essay I refer to their last survey conducted in September, 2008

(2) Data taken from their website http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/. In the essay I use the survey conducted in Belarus in 2000 (lack of subsequent data).

(3) Mihalisko Kathleen J. (1997). Belarus: Retreat to authoritarianism. In Karen Dawisha and Bruce Parrott (eds.), Democratic changes and authoritarian reactions in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and Moldova. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

(4) Cavusau Jury. (2007). Belarus’ Civic Sector. In Pejda Marta (ed.), Belarusian society ‘2007: Hopes, illusions, perspectives. Warsaw-Minsk: East European Democratic Centre.

(5) Wojtowicz Aleksandr. (2006). Dzisiejsza Bialorus: Aspekt polityczny I ekonomiczny. Spojrzenie w przyszlosc [Belarus today: Political and economic perspective. Look into the future]. From Iwanow Mikolaj (ed.), Bialorus: Trudna droga do demokracji [Belarus: A difficult road to democracy]. Wroclaw: Kolegium Europy Wschodniej.