Political Scientist: The System Was Jolted Pretty Badly

Practically no mechanisms capable of meaningful action are left.

The Olympic scandal with Tsimanouskaya, who was pulled out of the competitions and then forcibly deported to Belarus, graphically showed a phenomenon which I can observe on a much more local level, says Piotr Kuzniatsou, political analyst and creator of the Hard-Hitting website in his Telegram.

Since all this mayhem with the liquidation of our Institution began, all these five tax audits at once (this is just a couple of months after the end of the previous two), we have to communicate a lot and not always easy with numerous representatives of various government agencies.

Almost the same picture everywhere - a complete lack of understanding of what is happening, how to behave, what to do and what will happen next. Everyone is concerned about the same thing: we must do this, because we have been told so, but how and why we must do it - the devil only knows, it's not clear, why we need it at all and how things are going to work further, if we have already got to this point. For the reason that the institution is liquidated without any clear grounds, purely by order: the City Executive Committee ordered to destroy, and in the tax office they ask: Can you show us your letter, which we have received, no one showed us anything or explained?

That's the way it goes here, but at the Olympics, at the global level, with a scandal and noise to the whole world, the functionaries first show wild unprofessionalism, having messed up with doping samples and tests, then - no less wild incompetence, trying to replace athletes with non-core ones, and then they start near-kidnapping of an Olympic athlete right from the Olympics. The chain of events and actions is simply bewildering: is such a way of thinking and acting even possible at this level?

All these situations clearly show one thing: the strongest imbalance of all mechanisms and chains, inconsistency and even a certain chaos. In a broad sense, it is a story saying that the system in Belarus as such does not exist anymore. What they call "the state" does not work today either as a state or even as their system. There are no working algorithms, no coordinated and well-organized automatic and consistent work of the separate parts of the big whole, the officials have no understanding or anything else of what and how to do in their sphere under the existing conditions. There is only one thing - decisions and orders, which must be urgently implemented without looking at anything.

This is not a system. This is a huge number of mindless executives, managed in manual mode. This configuration is the least resistant to any stress, because in case of any really strong impulse, this whole crowd of executors will simply not know and understand what to do and how to do it. Manual control in such situations either does not work in principle, or works within very narrow limits.

Now in this context I often remember the year 2011. It looked like everything was fine, and then, seemingly all of a sudden, within a week money disappeared from banks, several parallel exchange rates appeared, shadow online exchanges, panic, queues, food in Homel completely disappeared for a while (it was just that crowds of Russians arrived at once, they could exchange their rubles at the real rate in contrast to the official one, and buy up everything they needed for a penny, because the government had prohibited to raise prices). There was a complete feeling of collapse.

Then the protests began and, let's just say, the established system was jolted pretty badly. It was obviously a crisis and a crisis for everyone.

The similarity of the situation is that, given the state of the economy and its prospects, this may easily happen again at any time.

And the dissimilarity of the situation is that in 2011, firstly, the majority of people were actually loyal to the authorities, albeit purely by inertia. And secondly: In 2011 these authorities had a working system, where everyone had a rough idea of what and how things could be, and what must be done.

Today the general feeling is that if something like that happens, they simply will not be able to cope. First of all, it is precisely because there are practically no mechanisms capable of meaningful action left.