Regime, Go to Orchard!

The many faces of the strike.

The apple issue will be resolved radically. No more hostile Polish ones. The country will be eating only domestic fruits. The problem will be solved easily. The only question is where to find free labour. Lukashenka has, however, already thought of everything: now schoolchildren will get in the harvest. And not voluntarily, but by order. Each school, he says, will have an orchard, and the children will gather the harvest. As always, he pulled out the figure of a hat: 15-20 hectares. However, it is not clear whether each educational unit, settlement or the whole school community will cultivate so many hectares.

The children should be grateful for his generosity. How else would they know that apples grow on trees, and are not born at the grocery store shelves already ripe? One can try biology classes but, as Lukashenka explained a couple of years ago, schoolchildren do not do well in biology. The curriculum, he said, was dumb. They spend half a year studying worms and looking for the answer to the question "what should a worm do to be a parasite?" So, lessons are out. Only forced labour remains. All the more, the children, according to the retired boss, do not know how to work and what the land is. Well, that's okay, now the state will teach them and make them do it.

Of course, I would like to say speak for yourself, citizen. If your children do not know what the land is and what it is like to work, it does not mean that all Belarusian children are like that. But we are not discussing the individual characteristics of Lukashenka's descendants. I mean something different. I mean, as always, he is lying.

I know several families with many children where schoolchildren were eager to earn extra money during the summer. It concerns agriculture, the land about which they know everything. They tried to enrol in a camp to get 250 roubles for a month of work. To help their parents and to save money for ice cream and cinema for themselves. However, they encountered a refusal. It turns out that the camps are available only for the BRYU members. To work on the land, one has to be ideologically correct. Potential dissenters do not receive shovels.

So, the schoolchildren want and are ready to earn money. But the possibility of earning is available only to their own. Others must work forcibly. There is no need to pay. The apples are picked, and the children learn to march in line and obey commands to be obedient. Lukashenka probably considers he has come up with such a clever trick. But it all happened before - the USSR, Central Asia. Children there were sent for two months in autumn to pick cotton instead of classes. The younger ones were taken to the fields and brought home at night (they also had a productivity rate). The older ones stayed for the night in the fields and could go home for a day to bathe once a month. And their parents watched the news every evening to ensure that the republic had fulfilled its cotton harvest plan. As long as the plan is not met, the children are not coming home.

Now, if Bendums and Twistums of the state, as usual, stretch out in a front and start working, the same thing will happen. The output norm is for every school. After-school or in lieu of school trips - there is a small choice in rotten apples. Teachers' reports on the harvest. Parents' quarrels with homeroom teachers because one student is going to miss a training session because of the state stupidity, another one is going to miss academic competitions, the third one is going to miss a tutor. A mutual hatred of teachers and parents and general hatred of the regime. And then overreporting, sabotage, and, finally, the strike followed.

Once, in the eighties, a group of art students from Minsk was sent to do potato picking. The guys were creative about the strike. Every morning they went out to the potato field, carefully buried the potatoes deep down and collected stones. They put the stones in sacks, threw them into a truck, and the collective farm got a good harvest of stones in the evening. It was useless to argue with the students: as they worked for free, they could not lose their wages. They were sent back very quickly. The collective farm could manage it. I believe modern schoolchildren will come up with equally witty scenarios. The strike has many faces.

And Lukashenka, as always, has a poor imagination. A great manager would never have left the grown-ups idling at work while the children toil in the fields and orchards. An efficient manager would force adults and children to work for the benefit of the country for free. He would have assigned a plot of land to every settlement and district of a major city and imposed norms. For example, Novaya Borovaya works in a logging area, Lebyazhy digs a pit, Serebryanka drains a swamp. The main thing is to lock up Drozdy from the outside for them not to be in the way. After all, Drozdy has not learned to do anything: neither to manage, nor to educate, nor to use a pickaxe.

Iryna Khalip, especially for Charter97.org