That was the fate a senior Belarusian official in Tokyo saw in store for sprinter Krystsyna Tsimanouskaya last weekend, after she publicly criticised coaches in the national Olympic squad. It looks as though she’s actually broken free, but for millions of her compatriots – functionaries keeping Alexander Lukashenko in office, as well as people who long to see him leave – the hazards are more perilous than ever.
News out of Belarus has hardly been slow of late, but it feels as though the drama is accelerating. I’ve just written an LRB post (https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2021/august/into-the-devil-s-vortex) about the Tsimanouskaya drama – which coincided with the mysterious death by hanging of a 26-year-old opposition activist in Kyiv – and that’s made me reflect on the fear and malevolence that’s now hanging over Lukashenko’s determination to retain power. A couple of years ago, knowing little about Belarus except that I fancied a holiday there, I saw him as a benign figure by neo-Soviet standards: almost avuncular, as dictators go. No longer. His regime isn’t just victimising people who make their opposition public; it poses a challenge to everyone’s integrity and self-respect. To survive, it insists on positively indulgence, no matter how unreasonable Lukashenko’s demands. And that’s not going to end well. As I’ve said before about the pseudo-president’s ‘reasons’ for grounding a Ryanair jet, threats of external aggression he invokes are delusional – but within Belarus, there’s a bomb on board.
In reverse order, my earlier pieces are here:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2021/june/border-crossingssp
https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2021/may/what-was-lukashenko-thinking
sadakat kadri 