‘No One Listened To Crazy Old Man’

Lukashenka disgraced himself three times on September 1.

The “open lesson” with the participation of Lukashenka was held with three “unforeseen situations”, writes Belsat journalist Aliaksandr Papko:

“There were only three unforeseen situations. 16-year-old cadet Zakhar Auchynnikau answered Lukashenka in the Belarusian language, which the authorities do not like. He honestly expressed his attitude to the Stalinist repressions. Dzianis Znak, a first-year student at the Faculty of Biology of the Belarusian State University, dared to say that after 2020, the majority of Belarusians do not trust the state media. Finally, at the close of the meeting, a student showed a notebook with the inscription “Save us” into the lens.

However, it is difficult to call this ritual of the government a successful event. The open lesson did not last 45 minutes, but almost 4 hours. “No one listened to the old man, the children yelled, as always, shouting over the teacher, and discussed their summer holidays,” subscribers of Belarusian Telegram channels describe the situation on the other side of the screen. In some schools, teachers let the children go after an hour or two. The ruler has long turned into an “old man”, torn off from his own society. His reminiscences of the times when there were district committees and regional committees of the party, his advice on the cultivation of “grain” is no longer close or comprehensible to the majority.

In 1994, Lukashenka was 39 years old. People of his generation and older, who grew up in the zenith of the USSR, made up two-thirds of the adult population. Now they are only a quarter. Two-thirds of the adult population then were either rural or first-generation city dwellers. Now the proportion of the urban population is approaching 80 percent. The life experience of the former collective farm chairman is alien to them.