Protesters Appointed Lukashenka Chief Jester

Revolution is a fun process.

In Belarus, mass protests against the official results of the presidential election and violence by law enforcement officials continue for the second month.

Russian political scientist and Carnegie Center expert Andrei Kolesnikov told Current Time about the development of protests in Belarus, why more and more people are mocking Lukashenka and why his future now is in between exile and The Hague.

- How do you evaluate what the protesters in Belarus have achieved and are succeeding in?

- They have managed to drive Lukashenka into a corner, despite the fact that the situation is really stalemate and Lukashenka is not giving up and is not going to leave, he has chosen this option, despite that it deprives him absolutely of the future, his future is somewhere between the closed state dacha on Rublevo-Uspenskoye highway near Moscow and The Hague. Nevertheless, this is his choice. His choice is to beat up, torture, punish, and retain his own power at any cost. It has nothing to do with the Belarusian people anymore, naturally.

This month has shown that Belarus has a civil society, that there are people in Belarus who are ready and able to lead this country, that Belarus has the highest political culture, of which nobody has suspected anything for all these long and long years. The country is ready for very serious changes, the country is ready to move from East to West for normal civilized life. The country is not ready to accept Putin, which maybe he has not yet understood, because he has also made his choice, which is quite obvious for him, and supports one day his opponent, and another day his colleague in dictatorial relations, Mr. Lukashenka.

In short, I would be extremely positive about the results and would not measure them by the fact that Lukashenka did not fall, that he did not give up his post. No, it will not go anywhere now, even if the protests are over for some climatic reasons. They will come back. That's it, now Belarus is a completely different country.

- But it is not even that Lukashenka has not yet resigned his post....

- You are absolutely right. This is a very important moment, precisely because the nomenklatura and law enforcement officers have remained with Lukashenka for now. But this is also a short-sighted step. It shows how disoriented they are, how much they do not understand where they are, in what world these very law enforcement officers, this very nomenklatura live.

In fact, I always cite the example of 1989 - Poland and Czechoslovakia, when that very nomenklatura, those very law enforcement officials were more far-sighted and kept their reputation, many of them even kept their positions for the future by negotiating with civil society, by sitting at a round table in Poland or Czechoslovakia, and very quickly reaching an agreement with the civil forum.

This understanding does not exist here; it suggests that the quality of elites, even in comparison with communist times, has fallen incredibly in authoritarian regimes like Russian and Belarusian ones.

- What else can we compare with the developments in Belarus? This is Armenia, Venezuela, what is it?

- I would not directly compare it with the revolutions of recent times. It doesn't look like a classical color revolution or a color revolution that has become classical. It looks like the velvet revolution of the late 80s. It is a unique situation at all. This is not Armenia, not Venezuela, not Maidan. There is no violence here. We see the most brutal violence, with crossing all the borders of legitimate, by the Lukashenka authorities.

That is why in this sense there is such a term "catching up revolution" - what did not happen in Belarus many years ago is happening now. The society has grown out of the national costume that Lukashenka dressed it in and has been admiring this imaginary society all the time. The society has grown up, it has become much smarter and more mature than the state. And we see it all in the streets. That's exactly why I'm saying that there will rather be a permanent revolution until it achieves success.

- Andrei, and based on some experience of historical, political science: what can become a turning point?

- It is very difficult to predict such things. Here, as it turns out, there are no laws - they cease to work. All political science, even with its mathematical apparatus, cannot predict anything. It cannot even predict the dictator's behavior. However, according to all political science canons, Lukashenka should have started negotiations. He does not agree to them, which indicates a high degree of his recklessness. Therefore, maybe it makes sense here to speak not about a trigger, although some unexpected events, of course, may lead to some kind of a landslide revolution or, I don't know, to a big blood, God forbid. We can rather talk about the sequence of this Belarusian uprising, which turns into a permanent process, even if, I repeat, at some point there will be fewer people in the street. And this process will gradually wear away the stone that has not moved.

- I read your column the other day, which started with the same words that political science is sometimes powerless and can't predict, but you wrote there what works about the Middle Ages and carnival culture can predict - this is a very interesting column, but very unobvious at first sight. Can you tell us more about the connection between that period and the current protests in Belarus, in your opinion?

- Any revolution is partly a merry process, because everything turns upside down. And this official seriousness, sacral power suddenly becomes ridiculous, caricature and funny. All this is described in the works of Mikhail Bakhtin, a classic of Russian philology and literary studies. In particular, his work about Francois Rabelais's life was devoted to the theory of carnival, when all the relationships, characteristic of stable states, possessing animal severity, all those relationships were destroyed during the carnival, when the power was laughed at, among other things.

If we look at the posters, costumes, and performances that accompany the Belarusian revolution, we will see absolutely unbridled joy and mockery of these masked people. By the way, the demasking is very important when masks are ripped off in order to turn this faceless mass into people with names, with names that are worthy of criminal prosecution, names that are worthy of being public and known to a large audience. These are people who break the law.

This carnival, despite that everything is very serious, everything is very cruel from the side of power - torture, beatings - the revolution is still fun. And anyway, the dictator turns out to be the king for laughing at. He is funny in himself, he looks like a jester, he looks like a character in an animated film - such a parody dictator from various Disney cartoons, I do not know, Pixar films. And here he gives some more reasons to be mocked. And they mock him more and more harshly, witty and uncompromisingly. It is no longer humor, it is already satire, and this satire knows what it wants. It wants absolute change, it wants this carnival to become something new, and the old, serious, condensed, monolithic has gone.

- Andrei, according to all television and journalistic laws, it would be a great note to finish the interview, but I can't help but ask you about Vladimir Putin, because initially the conversation should have started with him, because you are a Russian political scientist in the first place. Do you understand Russia's attitude? Has this attitude been formed?

- Yes, it has been formed. Russia does not have its own candidate for the post of the president of Belarus or the post of the vicar of Belarus. Russia has missed the moment. It does not know how to do it and never has - not Russia, but Putin's elite, I mean. It has missed the moment to talk to people from the circles alternative to Lukashenka. It's not even the opposition - it's people who simply think more rationally, a little more democratically than Lukashenka. None of this was done, even though Lukashenka is an enfant terrible for the Russian authorities, he is a terrible child with whom it is impossible to agree on anything, so Russia has been forced to take Lukashenka's side. All the more so because psychologically Putin, as a man who is also always ready to oppress any front in the most brutal way, he sympathizes him emotionally.

This side is busy, now all that remains is to follow the events and try to use Belarus economically bit by bit. Does it make any economic sense? It is not obvious. It may be an additional burden for Russia, but Putin's elites never think about it. Rational economic calculation is not typical for them. Accordingly, this problem will last a long time. This is the very support of the new Belarusian nation.

The Belarusian civil society will never accept Putin, will never accept his governor, and it will not be possible to deceive this smart society with high political culture. In other words, it is impossible to imagine some person who is supposedly independent and is not dependent on Moscow, just under no circumstances. In fact, the Kremlin is in an absolutely stalemate, associating itself in front of the eyes of the world with the cruelest senseless cartoon dictator, and this reflection falls on the Kremlin too, the Kremlin also becomes a caricature.

Putin's meeting with Lukashenka has become the subject of colossal mockery and, in general, some kind of plot for the Belarusian carnival. They are ridiculous. They are funny, outdated, they have to leave. This is what the civil society of Belarus understands, and possibly the Russian civil society, at least to a certain degree, despite its extreme inertia.