Behind the Bastards - Part One: Alexander Lukashenko: The Dictator of Belarus

Episode Date: August 18, 2020

Robert is joined by Garrison Davis to discuss Alexander Lukashenko.FOOTNOTES: https://www.vox.com/2020/8/10/21357805/belarus-election-tikhanovskaya-lukashenko-protest-minsk   https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/28/europe/alexander-lukashenko-coronavirus-infection-intl/index.html  https://www.politico.eu/article/lukashenkos-brand-image-is-the-real-thing/  https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2014/07/10/homophobia-vote-rigging-and-posturing-20-years-of-lukashenko-a37216  https://www.dw.com/en/belarus-strongman-lukashenko-marks-25-years-in-power/a-49530563  https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/profiles/3080936/Alexander-Lukashenko-Dictator-with-a-difference.html https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/10.2979/jfolkrese.53.2.02  https://books.google.com/books?id=0Tn_CwAAQBAJ&pg=PA73&lpg=PA73&dq=alexander+lukashenko+biography&source=bl&ots=Rnv4tPj6K5&sig=ACfU3U17riZ_9mexSZAlqZJnX3sXUfc1GQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjrpc3RwJLrAhWYpZ4KHdAoBKAQ6AEwDXoECBgQAQ#v=onepage&q=alexander%20lukashenko%20biography&f=false  https://carnegie.ru/2018/04/12/house-that-lukashenko-built-foundation-evolution-and-future-of-belarusian-regime-pub-76059  https://www.obserwatorfinansowy.pl/in-english/macroeconomics/the-belarusian-economic-crisis-is-both-the-result-and-the-cause/  https://www.nytimes.com/1994/06/25/world/belarus-voters-back-populist-in-protest-at-the-quality-of-life.html  https://twitter.com/closeface12/status/1292839014056300544    Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. About a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I fucking hate Bluetooth and headphones.

This has been a terrible morning of figuring out basic technology things. And it's also three in the afternoon, which is nine in the morning for me. I'm Robert Evans. This is Behind the Bastards, the show where every week I write a very long essay about a different terrible person and then fail at the basics of setting up headphones. It's the worst. The reason we've been having such terrible technical difficulties is that today I actually have someone in the studio with me, which we haven't done since the plague. The studio. The person, the studio. Yeah, my desk that's in front of my bed in my room that is filled with ants and pieces of guns.

Why are there ants? Garrison, say hello to the people. Hello, hello, hello. Hi, this is Garrison. This is Garrison. Garrison, who are you? Hi. So some people may know me as at Hungry Botai on Twitter or Garrison Davis, tear gas proof.

I've been covering the protests in Portland and have been working alongside Robert Evans and some other fine, fine folks while getting shot at by federal agents for months now. Yep. We met in a cloud of tear gas and most of our relationship has occurred in that cloud of tear gas. And now we are becoming podcast buddies in addition to tear gas buddies, which is an exciting moment. And I could have just stayed home and recorded from there and not had to deal with this terrible Bluetooth headphone situation. Yeah, it's been awful. So the situation, we want to have Sophie on as we record, but a variety of things make that problematic, including the way that headphones work. Nobody sells headphones splitters anymore.

So we eventually had to go buy these things that you zoomers love, these little headphones, separate Bluetooth headphones. Don't blame me for that. Don't, don't wrote me into this. I am absolutely blaming you for the state of headphones back in my day, back in my day, Garrison. All we needed was an audio jack and then a little splitter and you get as many headphones as you want it on a laptop. Can we circle back? Can we circle back to the part where you say you wanted to have Sophie on? Excuse me.

Yeah. You were allowed to be here because I allow you to be here. Continue. Okay. So Garrison, you are one of the youth. Yes. That is the future. Yes.

I am the future. Yeah. You're famously 17 years old. Famously. What is a TikTok? I've never had it. It's a sound-o-clock mix. I feel like that's not what the president's banning.

And I feel like you're hiding your secret millennial zoomer, whatever. Yeah, I'm 17 for another month, but I've never had a TikTok. Okay. So maybe the other thing you can explain. What is an Ariana Grande? No. It's a coffee from Starbucks. God damn it, Robert.

You know how to pronounce her name. It's a coffee from Starbucks, right? Yeah, that sounds right. It's a flavor. Okay. Now that we've settled all these issues that the youth can teach us about the future. Sorry about climate change, by the way. That's going to be a real problem for you guys.

Thanks. I'll be dead of many cancers by then. Thanks for that. In a year and a half. We're talking today about Alexander Lukashenko. And maybe folks don't super know about this guy. But you've probably heard about some messed up stuff happening in Belarus. He's the dictator of Belarus.

So this is a very timely episode. And you know, Garrison, I was going to have you want to talk about Dr. Jordan B. Peterson, but considering the fact that Belarus is rising up against his dictator right now, and they're all getting horribly tear gassed and shot with rubber bullets. And we've been horribly tear gassed and shot with rubber bullets. I thought this would be a fun subject that also is timely. Yeah, there's a little bit of relatability there. What do you know about Belarus?

Little to nothing, except they are now experiencing a lot of tear gas and getting shot at by their police. That is probably true for basically everybody. I'll be honest. I knew that there was a dictator in Belarus, and that he was famously called Europe's last dictator by a bunch of American politicians. But that was about 90% of my knowledge of Belarus. Other than that, I think they have arguments with Ukraine over who does the best strange pig-based dishes, which I can't comment on.

But there's some good ass pig-based dishes. Salo, man, fucking amazing. But they both have salo, so I don't know. You ever had salo, Sophie? Mm-mm. It's like guacamole made out of pigs. Oh, no. It's kind of rules.

I'll take your. I'll trust you. You're not going to get along in Eastern Europe. I'll trust you on that one, buddy. Okay. So we're going to talk Lukashenko today. So yeah, once upon a time, and by which I mean like three years ago, he was repeatedly called Europe's last dictator by a bunch of American politicians.

And now there's a whole bunch of other dictators in Europe again. So that's not really accurate. That's not true anymore. At discounting Russia, if we call them like, because there's always that debate over like how European Russia is, like we've still got Hungary and Serbia. Hungary, yeah. We have a fair amount of dictators here now.

There's a lot more dictators in Europe. So he's not a specialist he used to be, but it is special because Lukashenko has been in power for like 26 years. So like throughout the whole kind of golden age, or if you want to call it that, like the kind of height of the European Union's influence, the height of NATO's power. He was like an old Soviet style autocrat hanging out in the middle of Europe. It's a pretty weird story.

And he's not, this is going to be, I think, useful because this is in the news right now. He plays it pretty close to the chest. So we just don't know as much about the guy personally as we do about some other figures. But I think it's still a useful story to get out to people in the moment here. So Lukashenko survived the collapse of the USSR and basically spent the whole period of capitalist democracy's victory lap ruling over a nation of 9.5 million people. He survived economic downturns, the birth of the internet,

conflicts between his nation's neighbors, and a bunch of really awkward hangout sessions with Stephen Seagal. Today, though, he's obviously in trouble. And for the first time in 30 years, yeah, this is the, we talked about this on the Seagal episode. This is the guy who like gave Stephen Seagal a giant carrot. But he's just out there, Stephen Seagal. Just bastarding it up.

Yeah, he sure is. Just occasionally kidnapping women and locking them in a, I don't want to finish that thought. You just don't? Yeah, so, no, we shouldn't. So there's a lot of eyes on Belarus right now. We should probably start by covering some basic facts because most people don't know anything about Belarus.

Belarus is located in Eastern Europe. It's about as far east as you can go without hitting Russia. It's immediate western neighbor is Poland, and its neighbors to the north are Latvia and Lithuania. You could call it Ukrainian Canada, although nobody does. No one does that. No one has ever done that. Including this Canadian.

Yeah, and yeah, there's not really any comparisons to make between Ukraine and Belarus in that regard. Unless like, is Canada a dictatorship, Garrison? Not really. Okay, okay. It tries not to be. Yeah, Garrison's Canadian, so. I mean, our current prime minister did not get the majority

of the votes in our last election because we have a weird system that is different than the electoral college, but has some similarities. It's weird and not great, but yeah, anyway. It's cute how both of our countries make the same horrible decisions, but just a little bit, a little bit different shine on them. Yeah.

Yeah, that's nice. That's what friends do. So, yeah, if you know a little bit of history and geography, you can tell that Belarus has had a rough time of it historically. Being right between Poland and Russia. Doesn't seem great. Not great. There's a lot of problems with both those countries.

Yeah, not the best spot to have. Like not maybe not as bad a starting place as Germany, which is a pretty rough location to have a country as you might gather, but like they're kind of in the middle of a lot of shit historically. In the middle of a lot of genocide. Yeah, a ton of genocide. Because next to Ukraine, Russia, and Poland,

there's a lot of genocide in the adjacent area. Yeah, Belarusian history has a couple of different points where we say, and then a shockingly high percentage of the nation's entire population was killed in the space of a year. So yeah, Belarus, bad place to start as a country. If you're playing like civilization or whatever, and this is where you land, you're going to have a rough,

you're going to have a rough game of it. Belarusian identity is generally traced back to kind of starting to form in the 10th century and the establishment of the Principality of Polotsk. The first Belarusians entered history largely for their ability to maintain and profit off of a trade route that connected the Vikings to the Greeks, which is part of why it's such a rough place to be,

is it's like kind of right in the middle of a bunch of roads. Like if you want to get anywhere in Europe from Asia, you're going to wind up rolling through Belarus probably. And that is a recipe for getting the shit kicked out of you a bunch. They had a lot of ups and downs to the medieval period and spent a lot of time fighting with the Mongols, which are not a group of people you really want to fight. But eventually they won by the 1300s.

What is today Belarus had become a central part of the grand duchy of Lithuania. So Lithuanians and Belarusians were the same people for a while. At least that's what the historians I've read tend to say. I'm sure there's historians who will say that that's horribly inaccurate, but that seems to be broadly the consensus. And that at around like the 1400s,

Belarus and Lithuanian identity started to split. And by the 1600s, that whole chunk of Europe was more or less a free-for-all of constant warfare between different kingdoms. Between conflicts with Moscow, Poland, Sweden, and the Ottoman Empire, the population of modern-day Belarus was reduced by half over the course of a few decades in the 1600s.

Oh boy. It's the first time a gigantic percentage of the population dies horribly. In the 1600s. Yeah, 1600s. Wow. Half of Belarus' theologists get murdered. So that's good.

In the early 1800s, Belarus was absorbed by the Russian Empire and became its northwestern region. So it's like the Pacific Northwest for Russia. There's so many relatable elements here. Yeah, that's why in addition to Ukraine's Canada, Belarus' other nickname that nobody calls it is Russian Oregon. That's good because I'm both Canadian and an Oregonian.

Yeah, it's perfect. So this is really, I feel a deep kinship. We should be able to identify with these people. So being in the northwest of Russia was a bad place to be for basically all of the 20th century. Yeah. And the horrific wars of that era, World War I and World War II,

reduced the population of Belarus again by more than a third. By the end of— Yeah, like they just keep huge numbers of them, keep getting—any time like you're able to say like— And then this whole region was depopulated by this massive fraction. It's not a great history. So yeah, they've had a rough time of it. By the end of World War II,

Belarus had spent half a century being either torn apart by mechanized warfare or recovering from being torn apart by mechanized warfare. So the region settled into its new life after World War II, as one of the less memorable chunks of the Soviet Union. And for a while, things were like relatively okay, comparatively, compared to everyone dying, right? Sure. Once you've hit a low that bad,

anything besides that is comparatively good. Yeah. And they did, you know, they suffered— there was quite a bit of state repression in Belarus, which we'll talk about some of the effects from a little bit later. And everywhere in the USSR had its different experiences, both good and bad. It was a big, complicated thing that happened.

You can make a case that Belarus was one of the parts of the Soviet Union that was kind of broadly happiest with the whole arrangement. I did come across interviews with a number of Belarusian anarchists who talked about severe repression of their cultural identity under the Soviet Union in favor of Russian identity. This is something that happened all over the USSR, and it seems like it was a problem in Belarus too. But it is true that in 1991,

when the various Soviets of the Union had a referendum on whether or not to keep being the Soviet Union, Belarus was one of the few places where most people wanted to keep going. 83% of Belarus voted to continue being a part of the Soviet Union in 1991. Seems like people were broadly on board with what was going down. But that doesn't tell the whole story. Those numbers do get cited a lot as evidence that people were very happy with the system, but things aren't quite that simple.

Faith in the Soviet government had begun to collapse in Belarus starting in 1986 with the Chernobyl disaster and its subsequent cover-up. People don't like nuclear power plants exploding and then being covered up in thousands of people being poisoned. Not a fan of giant explosions then getting killed. Yeah, it's not anyone's best day ever. Speaking of incompetence causing giant explosions, also a timely reference.

Oh, I thought you were going to do an ad pivot there. Yeah, we were like, Gerson, where did you learn that? You know it will not explode in an entire city. Yeah, this podcast is supported by the concept of nuclear power plants being improperly maintained. It was a real big ad get for us. Raytheon sponsors blowing up this entire city. Yeah, I mean...

Robert, stop influencing him. Stop it, Robert, stop it. If it's not okay to influence a young man to appreciate Raytheon's fine product line, then I don't know what is. As we grow up in a complicated, conflicted world, we all need the security that comes from a Raytheon-based MX-9 knife missile. It makes me feel safe and secure in my home. Look, Sophie, a 17-year-old isn't allowed to own a firearm,

but there's no law that says he can't own a drone-fired knife missile. Not in this country. Not in this country. That's why it's a good country. That's how you defend your home, is with a knife missile. I thought it was with a machete. I have those too. Yeah, so people got angry in Belarus over Chernobyl,

and that was 1986. And in 1988, that anger was compounded when an archaeologist named Zionon Pazniak discovered a series of mass graves that dated back to Stalin's terror. These graves were located at a place called Kurapati, outside of the Belarusian capital of Minsk, and they held more than a quarter of a million corpses. There we go.

People are not at their, while most Belarusians vote to stay in the Soviet Union, there's a lot of disillusionment. Those ones were not able to vote. Yeah, those guys couldn't vote. Yeah. And it does broadly make people less trusting of the government when they find a quarter of a million dead people buried outside of their hometown. Yeah, I would have some questions.

We would, yeah, it's not great. That's not the thing you want to hear about. Like, yeah. So the fact that an archaeologist working for the state was allowed to reveal that a quarter of a million people had been murdered and buried outside of Minsk is evidence that in 1988 there was a lot less repression in the USSR than there had been previously. Isn't that a good thing?

That is nice. Yeah, yeah. I love it when the state doesn't kill someone for saying there's a whole bunch of dead bodies. Yeah, obviously this was very troubling to people. And so there were a lot of calls for reform and accountability. Activists within Belarus created the Belarusian popular front in October of 1988 after mass protests that ended in fights with state security forces. And all of this brings us back around to Alexander Lukashenko,

who by that point was running a series of collective farms. He was a pig farmer, basically. Loves him some collective farms. And was apparently pretty good at running collective farms. And we should probably hop back in time again at this point. Alexander Grigoryevich Lukashenko was born on August 30th, 1954. And this much a lot of people agree on. Pretty much everything else about his background is up for grabs, though.

Many sources will say that he was born in the rural village of Kopis of the Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic. But Lukashenko himself has given multiple different answers when asked where he was born. He's claimed he was born in a godforsaken half-Belarusian half-Russian village and also that he was born in the city of Orsha. The reason for this discrepancy is simple. Lukashenko was more or less a nobody for most of his life. He was derided as just like a pig farmer by his rivals when he came to power.

And there were very few public details about his early life. And that's kind of the way that Lukashenko wanted it. As he began taking over, he knew that his biography was more of a tool for taking and holding power than it was an actual work of historical importance. And as such, most of what you'll read about Lukashenko tells us less about the man himself than it does about the culture of leadership and propaganda in the USSR, which I find kind of cool. So wherever you find like a community, a subculture, a cult, a nation, an ideology that's based around like charismatic individual people,

you will find specific traditions about writing biographies for those figures. And this is true everywhere. It's not just like a communist thing. It's not just a dictatorship thing. It's true of market capitalism. If you go grab a biography of Elon Musk and a biography of Steve Jobs and a biography of Bill Gates and maybe run through a couple of those fawning profile pieces in like the New Yorker of people like Elizabeth Holmes or Travis Kalanick of Uber or the WeWork guy like before all of their grips became crashing to the ground. Yeah, if you read a bunch of that stuff in a row, you'll notice a bunch of patterns.

Yeah, all of these biographies. They feel like kind of all just the same book. They are more or less. Yeah, and there's the thing like you have to in those books, you have to have like a period where they're working out of a garage or something like that. There's a structure that when we learn about the people, we like consuming a certain narrative. Exactly. Exactly. And they constructed, you know, Google was in this garage when it actually wasn't.

You know, it's the same thing, yeah. Yeah, it's the same thing if you find the books that presidential candidates. Sure. Like every presidential candidate has to publish a stupid fucking book right before they start their campaign. It's required now. Yes. And they're all the same book basically. Because that's just what we expect.

And if you grew up under evangelical Christianity, like you grew up. Like me. Yeah. You know, all of like the whenever you have like a charismatic preacher who comes to like deliver their, you know, like they all have the same story. It's the same grift over and over. Yeah, exactly. It's just a thing that people need in their stories of charismatic leaders.

And it's the same in propagandistic biographies of Eastern block leaders. So one thing that is emphasized in all of the stories about Lukashenko is that he was his dad was absent and he was raised by his single mother. Yeah. Of course. As was Joseph Stalin. As was everybody. Yeah. Everybody.

As was Sopar Maratniyazov of Turkmenistan. Nikolai Chichescu knew his dad, but his dad was an abusive prick and Nikolai was always a mama's boy. So like shittier absent father is a Soviet leadership trope. Yeah, it's like it's a trope that they keep they keep using whether it's true or not. Right. It's still something that they will they will still reinforce that narrative. Yeah, they reinforce that narrative and it's seen as being like important to getting people to to like feel the way about the leader that they kind of expected. Like Disney.

Some of it's just. Yeah, it's like Disney. You got to kill the parents. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You got to kill the parents in order to have a good dictator. So if you want to make a dictator.

Nope. I don't know. Where are you going? Anyway. Continue. I don't know. Sophie. I don't know.

It's it's I'm just angry about the headphones. You know what I'm not angry about Sophie? You know what I'm not angry about? Please be an ad for headphones. Find products and services that support this podcast. None of which are headphones. I hope there's some wireless headphones. I hope I hope Raycon gets in here real quick.

If Raycon starts trying to advertise on our podcast, they're going to have to deal with our other sponsor Raytheon. I'll tell you who I think is going to win in a fight between some people who make headphones and our good friends with the knife missiles. All right. It's the knife missiles. All right. Products. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what?

They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse were like a lot of goods. He's a shark.

And on the good and bad ass way, some nasty sharks. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday.

I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match. And when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space.

And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back!

Oh, that was horrible. I accidentally made a minor adjustment to these goddamn newfangled Bluetooth earbuds. He ruined everything. And turned off the whole situation. It was horrible. We spent hours getting this set up, and he destroyed it in a few seconds. I feel comfortable saying that Soviet Union works about as well as these horrible Bluetooth headphones in 1991. Meaning these headphones are responsible for multiple genocides.

Well, not in 1991. Okay, fair. Just like, well, I mean, you could argue, it's a series of war crimes in Afghanistan. Anyway, whatever. Let's continue. Okay, so, yeah, we're talking about Soviet leader tropes and Lukashenko, so obviously, all of his biographies will point out that his dad was gone. They all will say very different things about why his dad was gone. Which is, I think, kind of interesting.

It's like the Joker. Yeah, I think so. Are they like cool stories? Like, is it like... Yeah, kind of. One of his stories is that his dad died during World War II, which is like Turkmenbashi, the dictator of Turkmenistan, had the same story. His dad died in World War II. The problem with this is that Lukashenko was born in 1954. Ah, I love how that works out.

The timing doesn't quite work. Yeah, you know. It's like on all those true crime shows, and then we found the murder, and then they're like, I was in jail at the time of that death. That's what it feels like. Yeah, it's like that. And it may seem kind of baffling that a guy who's already in power would choose such like an obvious lie, but Lukashenko started making this claim during a different period for his regime between 2006 and 2008, when a bunch of opposition groups rose up and protests against one of his many sham elections.

I mean, us in America have no experience with the leader in office making obvious lies about his family history. We don't know anything about that. Yes, this only happens in post-Soviet Union satellites. Not in this country. Yeah, so he started lying about his dad dying in World War II a decade before he would be born. During like this period of time when his legitimacy as president was being challenged and thousands of protesters were out in the streets fighting with cops. And I'm going to quote now from an article in the Journal of Folklore Research that's kind of about the different ways Lukashenko has presented himself. And it's going to sort of try to explain why maybe he made this kind of baffling call.

Lukashenko sought to gain support through different means, including an established genre from the Soviet period of Belarus, fake lore epics about Soviet heroes. They were often made up by professional folk singers guided by professional folklorists to glorify Soviet ideologies and particular protagonists, Lenin, Stalin, workers of the Soviet Union, et cetera, who embodied them. These new epics, called Noveni, combined the structures and motifs of traditional epics and were purposefully recorded and published. So, like, basically, it was this kind of thing that everyone probably more or less knew where he was lying about his background, but he was lying about his background in order to make a specific kind of propaganda art that everybody, like, knew what to expect from. So, like, everyone kind of knew that he was lying, but also the people who liked him didn't care. Yeah, it was just part of the thing. It was just part of the thing.

This is just what, like, leaders do in this part of the world, as they talk about how their dads died fighting the Nazis, even if their dad didn't. So, yeah. When you were born, like, ten years after? Might not have been old enough to make a baby in 1945, yeah. So, yeah, that's very funny. I find all of this interesting, anyway. So, the write-up in the Journal of Folklore Research that I found compares Lukashenko's shifting birth date and birth place to the book 1984, like, the reality is actually meaningless to even him.

What matters is, like, that the state can get people to believe it, or at least act as if they believe it, which is cool. Yeah, that's always neat. I'm going to quote again from that article. Which is something we'll talk about a little bit later, the idea that a bunch of people have kind of made up their own opponents of Lukashenko, get to also make up their own backgrounds for the guy, because everyone knows that everything you say about him is just sort of a lie or propaganda. It's just like a choose your own backstory book. Yeah, for the president. If you want this backstory, turn to page XXX.

If you want this backstory, turn to page XXY. It's cool. So, the alternative backstories for Lukashenko that his opponents come up with are often based on, like, racism, which is unfortunate. Yeah, many in the Belarusian opposition are convinced that Lukashenko's father was a German soldier, which is the non-racist option, where they're like, he's so shitty, his dad must have been a Nazi. Others contend that his father was secretly a Jewish man, which is not a rumor I like as much. And he's also regularly accused of hiding his Roma ancestry, although they are not polite enough to use the correct name and go with calling him Gypsy. That's like a common slur against Lukashenko.

Interesting. Yeah. So, I did want to get a clear idea of what the modern state propaganda about Lukashenko's background sounded like. I wanted to know, like, what is the actual government right about this guy? And I found a book called, with a very fun title, Belarus Country Study Guide that certainly seems to be government propaganda. It's published by a US-based publishing house, but the inside jacket notes that the information inside was provided by the Belarusian government. Good. And yeah, you can kind of tell by reading it that it was just published by the addictatorships.

Addictatorship. Yeah, propaganda arm and not edited at all. The government propaganda version of his life, or at least this one that I found, because again, they throw out a bunch of different versions, just states that he, quote, grew up and reared without a father. Not perfect grammar in this translation here. This put a considerable amount of responsibility for his family's care on his shoulders, quote, this is why it is logical that as early as in childhood, such qualities as perseverance, respect to work, sensibility to truth, and verity as the main basis of the human soul were being revealed. He was interestingly taking part in the social life of the collectives in which he studied or worked. The whole thing kind of reads like that. Okay.

Yeah. It's mostly incomprehensible. But it does have, I don't know, a couple of attempts at facts in there and notes that he served in the Soviet army from 1975 to 1982. It notes that he became an officer in the Communist Party and eventually found himself managing collective farms. It notes that he rose in prominence. Well, he did like a DIY bio for himself? No, it's like, yeah, kind of like... Like a Celeste oversaw it.

Yeah, I think that there's like, at different points in his rule, he's kind of let the people putting out state propaganda know that he wants them to write different biographies for him to emphasize different things. So it's like when you have a friend who acts different around different friend groups? Yeah, but instead of that, it's like a friend who acts different around different crowds of angry Belarusians in order to, I don't know, keep everybody happy. Yeah, in order to maintain power in a Eastern European state. It's a very strange quality. Yeah, it is. It is. And Lukashenko is interesting just because we actually know so little about the guy as a person, which is different.

Like, I much prefer it when we have a really detailed backstory about one of these individuals, but we just kind of have really the history of the different lies that his regime has told about him. So yeah, that's unfortunate. So he rose in prominence within the Communist Party throughout the late 1980s and he developed a reputation as a firebrand, like he was an anti-corruption crusader within the Soviet Union for a period of time. And he received repeated reprimands from the party because he could not keep silent. Yeah, and thankfully for him, you know, by the time he was getting in trouble for talking out against basically trying to drain the swamp within the USSR, things had opened up culturally there enough that he didn't get disappeared or in trouble for it. And in fact, he was elected to the Belarusian parliament in 1990 as a people's deputy on a platform of fighting corruption. Andenko straddled an interesting line of criticizing the Soviet government that had managed things for decades while also opposing any breakup of the USSR. He was the only deputy of the Belarusian parliament to vote against the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union, which is something he brags about today because like a lot of folks in that part of the world miss the Soviet Union.

Yeah, some of the older folks are probably nostalgic for it. Yeah, and he can be like, I was the one guy who knew that it was a bad idea. Yeah, it is a cool flex. Yeah. But at the same time, like he actually got to power by repeatedly criticizing the Soviet Union and pointing out how like fucked up and corrupt the government was. So he's a fakey. He's a fakey. He's playing both sides. He's playing both sides. He's doing what you got to do as a politician. It's like how you got a... He's a two-faced bitch.

Yeah, he's pulling a Joe Biden. Yeah. Yeah. Or Biden's pulling a Lukashenko. So as the USSR fell apart, Western interests rushed in to help their former enemy transition to the world of democracy. And in practice, this meant something for most like Soviet satellite states, something called shock therapy, which was this kind of like theory among capitalists that like as these nations sort of opened up, the best thing to do was immediately privatize every single thing in the country. And that that would work, that like shocking people into full on capitalism would be a good idea for reasons that were unclear and probably based around the fact that it was extremely profitable for capitalists. Yeah.

Shock therapy was not a wild success. It caused widespread economic and social turmoil and is generally seen as having been a disaster in most places it was tried. Yeah, which is why you have all those old people who are kind of nostalgic because they got their lives kind of ruined in the mid 90s. Yeah, it was nice when like soulless business people didn't own our power plants. And they were instead like property that was held in common is kind of the way a lot of people feel. Now 1990 is the year Belarus held its referendum on membership in the Soviet Union, people overwhelmingly wanted to stay. But the Belarusian Popular Front had also grown into a significant political force at that point. These are the guys who were like nationalists, they want Belarus to be its own separate country. And they're also Democrats.

So like they want a democracy and they want Belarus to be an independent nation. Okay. And under their charismatic spokesman, a fellow named Pazniak, the BPF started at agitating for Belarusian national ambitions for the first time in a generation. And that year's elections to the Supreme Soviet, the BPF won 10% of the seats. And this probably would have satisfied most of the desire for change in Belarus at this point. But happenings elsewhere in the USSR forced people's hands in the direction of national sovereignty. In August of 1991, there was a coup attempt in Moscow. Yay!

But it led to... Yay! I mean, wait, are you pro-coup or anti-coup, Sophie? I was pro-coup. You're pro-coup. You're in favor of this coup in Moscow. I was like, yay, a coup! It's a strong stance in favor of Soviet hardliners by a hardcore communist.

I just got excited over the word coup. Yeah, I mean, I always support a coup. It's always an exciting word. Yeah. We recently went through a coup with a riot rib restaurant. Yeah, there's a rib restaurant in Portland that had an armed coup recently. I actually didn't enjoy that one. It was not fun.

It seemed like a big mess. Yeah, and much like the rib restaurant that briefly existed in downtown Portland, the Soviet Union did not survive its armed coup or this attempted an armed coup. So the coup failed and it led to declarations of independence by all of the Soviets that bordered Belarus, Estonia, Latvia, and Ukraine. By this point, the writing was on the wall. It's 1991 or 92. 1991, yeah.

Yeah, so it's kind of, most people in Belarus don't seem to really want the Soviet Union to go away, but also just because of how fucked up everything gets and how badly it's handled in Moscow, all of these other states in the Soviet Union start declaring their own independence and the writing's kind of on the wall. Yeah, it's going to come down, so yeah. We might as well get a head start on being Belarus. So Belarus declares its own independence on August 25, 1991. The sudden end of the Soviet Union meant opportunity for a lot of people.

Liberals, including members of the BPF, saw it as their chance to turn the country into a democracy along Western lines. There was a great deal of resistance to this, though, and for a while, the country's old style Soviet organization remained mostly unchanged. By 1994, conservatives had been pushed into creating a new position at the head of Belarusian political life, the presidency. So everybody expected that the prime minister, a guy named Kaibich, would slide seamlessly from one head of state position to another and that he would just kind of go from being

the prime minister to the president now that they had a president. But then from out of nowhere came Lukashenko. He ran a lightning campaign based around fighting corruption in the ossified old regime. And again, the guy's a pig farmer at this point, but he's a deputy and he kind of like proves himself to be a really successful rabble rouser. His campaign slogan was, I'm neither with the leftists nor the rightists, but with the people against those who rob and deceive them. He's an effective politician.

And he's doing a drain the swamp sort of thing. He does one of the things that he's kind of focused on that is probably a good idea in the long run is he doesn't want to privatize Belarus's like state assets. He wants to keep the economy pretty much the same way it was under the Soviet Union. And this is really the only Soviet satellite state in Europe where this happens in. So yeah, Lukashenko won a Democratic election with about 80% of the vote. And this is probably like a more accurate count. And this is an actual election?

And it's like it's not a fake election, like the one that just happened? No, it seems like if I haven't heard any real arguments that he that this was a fake election and he kind of came out of nowhere. He didn't have a lot of institutional support when he won the presidency. Yeah, and he's kind of a weird guy to have as your first president because for one thing, he didn't really think there should be presidents. He was not a fan of democracy. He supported immediate reunification with Russia.

So he wasn't really a big supporter of Belarus being an independent nation at the start. And yeah, mostly he mostly the reason that people voted for him was his anti-corruption stances, right? Like his other his other the other things that he like sort of focused on weren't as popular. I find it interesting just like reconciling that with what he is now. Yeah. And like it's yeah, that's odd. He changes a lot in terms of like the shit.

He keeps rewriting his stories, you know. Yeah, he gets to do that because he's the guy who controls the state security forces. But I'm just saying like it makes sense that he's so wishy washy flip floppy out of character. I think he just has like a really bad identity crisis. Maybe he just doesn't know who he is. Maybe he just like needs to like go to therapy and like find himself thoughts. No. Yeah, I think you should take some Molly and maybe like, you know, maybe he was told he

was born at a time and was following somebody else, following a different star sign when he should have been following another. We don't know. Oh, it's an astrology problem. Oh, good. That's what you're saying. I'm just saying that it must be. Yeah, maybe he's dating the wrong people because he doesn't know what his birthday is.

What he could do is he could he could sign up for better help. Yeah, you're right. Better help online counseling. Thank you. That's something that he could do. Yes. You're hired. Stop yourself from becoming the dictator of Belarus.

The only option is better help online counseling. 100% of people who don't use online counseling become the dictator of eastern block nations. It's guaranteed to prevent you from becoming a dictator too. Exactly. It's the only promise they make it better help is that you will not become Alexander Lukashenko if you use better help. I mean, it is actually time for an ad break though, Robert. I know.

That's why I did that. I know what I'm doing. We might as well roll into ads. Hopefully. I'm telling you. Garrison is hired. Thank you. Products.

Yep. You beat me to. I did it. Bitch. My job now. All right. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations.

And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced cigar smoking man who drives a silver hearse.

And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. On the good and bad ass way. Nasty sharks. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman.

Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC.

What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost.

This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. When you realize that you've mentored somebody who's younger than you and knows how to do more things and is slowly taking over your role and he's sitting right next to you and you don't know what to do.

I know, it's terrible, because he hasn't ruined his brain with drugs yet. It's very funny. He hasn't ruined his brain with a series of horrible decisions. And he has fluffier hair than you. I know. It's just so funny. I know. He's gonna coo me out of my show.

I know. I'm telling you. I'm watching it happen. That's why I'm talking about machetes. God damn it. This is just knives at my back everywhere I try. And we slowly realize that your cat likes him more than you. It's just happening.

I'm gonna have to hire riot police to protect my podcast, and then I'll become what I've always hated. From a teenager. So, which is what the riot police are doing right now. Yes. That's what they're doing. So, you can just use the same guys. Don't worry.

Anderson and I will always choose you. We will always choose you. Sorry, Garrison. I'm skeptical of that. Sure. Always. We'll see. Always and forever.

Loyalty. Back to actual dictators. Back to Lukashenko. So, he gets elected, this guy who doesn't really want to be president and who wants to basically go back to being the Soviet Union and who is the only thing that he's really popular for wanting is fighting against corruption. This is the guy who becomes the president of Belarus, and his presidency is kind of conflicted from the beginning.

And I'm gonna quote now from a study on the country that was written by an academic named Helen Fedor, quote, Lukashenko's presidency was one of contradictions from the start. His cabinet was composed of young, talented newcomers, as well as veterans who had not fully supported the previous prime minister. As a reward to the parliament for confirming his appointees, Lukashenko supported the move to postpone the parliamentary elections until May 1995. Lukashenko's government was also plagued by corrupt members. Lukashenko fired the minister of defense, the armed forces chief of staff, the head

of the border guards, and the minister of forestry, following resignations among reformists in Lukashenko's cabinet, parliamentary deputy, Ciarhe Antonchik, sorry, Russians, read a report in parliament on December 20th, 1994 about corruption in the administration, and this is Lukashenko's administration. So he kind of like immediately puts new people in place and they're wind up being corrupted shit too. Although Lukashenko refused to accept the resignations that followed, the government attempted to censor the report, fueling the opposition's criticism of Lukashenko.

Lukashenko went to Russia in August 1994 and his first official visit abroad as head of the state. There he came to realize that Russia would not make any unusual efforts to accommodate Belarus, especially its economic needs. Nevertheless, Lukashenko kept trying. In February 1995, Belarus signed the Treaty on Friendship and Cooperation with Russia, making many concessions to Russia, such as allowing the stationing of Russian troops in Belarus in hopes that Russia would return the favor by charging Belarus lower prices

for fuels. However, because the treaty included no such provision, there was little hope of realizing this objective. So he's not great at this at first, and his main plan for being the president seems to be become a Russian satellite state, so they'll sell you cheap oil, which is, I don't know, not a great plan, but I've never been in charge of Belarus. What do you know? What do I know?

So right off the bat, Lukashenko had issues with parliament, mainly over the fact that he didn't think it should exist or be able to tell him what to do, which is a problem to have. He was convinced that as president, he had the right to dissolve parliament at any moment, although no one else was really sure that he had this right. He was just like, I'm pretty sure I can do this. And there were disagreements, including by the parliamentarians who did not think that he could do this.

So eventually, the parliament of Belarus starts carrying out a hunger strike against the president. And the protest ends when all of the striking deputies were evicted from the parliament house in the dead of night by police, who claimed that an alleged bomb had been hidden somewhere in the building. So they all get forced out of the parliament building, and they head over to the national TV and radio building to make a statement. And they find that those buildings have also been closed off by the police due to an alleged bomb threat.

A bomb threat again. You don't think there were real bombs in those places? Well, you know, this could have been something. So after all this, parliament gave in to Lukashenko on a number of his demands, because thanks to Belarus's complete lack of a free press, he'd made it impossible for them to publicize their strike. Well, there were the bombs. What else can you do?

Yeah, there were bombs, and now we don't have a parliament. It's no more. It's the problem. That keeps happening in Europe. It does. You know, you know, who else doesn't have a Senate right now? Us? Because they all decided not to work anymore until September?

Yeah. I wish that. Nope. I'm going to make that claim on it. Wrong. Wrong podcast. Don't need to have another conversation with the secret. Anyway, the parliament, I'm going to quote again from Helen Federer's write up, quote,

the parliamentary elections held in May of 1995 were less than successful or democratic. The restrictions placed on the mass media and on the candidates expenditures during the campaign led to a shortage of information about the candidates and almost no political debate before the elections. In several cases, no one candidate received the necessary majority of the votes in the May 14th elections, prompting another round on May 28th. The main problem in the second round was the lack of voter turnout. After the second round, parliament was in limbo because it had only 120 elected deputies,

still short of the 174 members necessary to seat a new legislature. After another round of elections was discussed, probably near the end of the year, but the government claimed to have no money to finance them. Basically, he forces the old parliament out, which forces a new set of elections, but he also makes it impossible for anyone to report on this and makes it impossible for any of the campaigns to be funded so that nobody can actually have an election or vote or know that they even need to vote. He just does away with a parliament that can do anything against him in this manner.

Seems like a real anti-corruption precedent. Yeah. Probably get rid of the corruption. I mean, I'm sure all of those guys were corrupted shit. Probably. Probably. But there's another time. The guard of one corruption substituted for another.

That's right. Thus solving the problem forever. So to make a not all that long story short, Lukashenko emerged from his fight with parliament as basically a dictator. So in the space of his first year or two in power, he kind of does away with any of the restrictions against him. Political analyst Valery Karbalovic, author of an opposition biography of Lukashenko, cites two factors as explanations for why Belarus went straight to a strong man dictator

after the fall of the USSR. And just kind of, you know, they had a democracy for like a minute there and they just kind of gave it up as soon as the first guy came along who was like, but what if we said fuck that? And her explanation is, quote, Lukashenko was hungry for power and rejected having his powers curtailed and Belarusian society yearned for a sense of Soviet stability. So in 1996, Lukashenko decided to change the constitution on his own and allow himself to fire parliament whenever he wanted, which really made the situation a lot easier for

him. He got rid of all the deputies who'd provided even mild resistance to his whims and he replaced them with a parade of yes men. Since then, he has not dealt with any serious challenges to his rule from within the political establishment. In 1997, Lukashenko established the Union State of Belarus and Russia with Boris Yeltsin. This was never a real organization, but it's like, it's like a fake EU for Russia and Belarus that they tried to get a couple of other countries on board with.

There was an idea that like they might, Russia might cede its sovereignty to this so that Putin could be president past his third term, but then they just wound up doing that anyway. But yeah, it's just like this kind of fake political organization that existed to kind of tie Belarus to Russia. And the fact that it existed gave them sort of like political cover for some of the things that like Russia wanted to do. And in exchange for agreeing to this, Lukashenko got the ability to achieve what would go on to be the only real success of his reign, which was like slow, steady economic growth

and reliable payment of state wages. On paper, Belarus was a quasi Marxist state. About 80% of the economy is controlled by the state. Some people say 60. It's somewhere in that ballpark. Belarus remains the only former Soviet state where all farms are still collectivized. And while many former Soviet republics have gone on to have tumultuous economies that have outright collapsed like Albania and like Russia, Belarus has on the surface like kept

a relatively steady course. And this has basically all been due to Russian economic support. Belarus has survived by buying heavily subsidized Russian crude oil, refining it and then selling it to the rest of Europe at a profit. This is kind of like what funds everything in Belarus or what did fund everything in Belarus. And an economy based on cheap Russian gas allowed Lukashenko to mostly ignore Western complaints about the human rights abuses within his country. There were many of these.

He disappeared at least two of his cabinet colleagues after they got too popular and at least four of his political opponents like people running against him in elections have just sort of been, are no longer, their whereabouts are no longer known. Now Lukashenko has felt the need over the last 26 years of his rule to provide the occasional illusion of democracy and choice to people. Opposition parties are generally allowed, but then they tend to be either heavily compromised by the get go or they're very quickly banned and their leaders are arrested. And in fact, it does kind of seem like the only reason there are opposition parties in

Belarus is so that he can arrest the leaders of those parties after the elections and throw them in dark holes, which is, you know, one way to do it. During the 2006 elections, Lukashenko warned that any Belarusians who attended protests opposing his reign would have their necks run as one might a duck. Ah, good. Yeah. Great. Yeah, that's nice.

And despite this, he consistently denies being a dictator, stating at one point that my position in the state will never allow me to become a dictator, but an authoritarian ruling style is characteristic of me. So like, that's his argument. He's an authoritarian and that's like his style. No, no, no, no, you don't understand. I'm not a dictator. I'm an authoritarian.

Yeah. Very, very different. Very different. It's like, um, it's like claiming you're a civil libertarian as opposed to, uh, I don't know, a Nazi. Yeah. Um, yeah. So Belarus's international political alignment has remained broadly Russia focused for most

of Lukashenko's reign. He made a point, particularly early on, of thumbing his nose at Western powers. In 1998, he bought a house in an upscale gated community in Minsk, which was shared by 25 ambassadors, including the British and American envoys, and it was like nicer than most housing developments in Belarus tended to be shot. I'm surprised. Yeah. Lukashenko decided he liked it and he wanted it all to be his, uh, including all of the

other people's houses who lived there. So the British and American envoys, uh, refused to leave. And so Lukashenko ordered water, electricity and gas cut off to their homes. When they still refused to leave, he changed the locks on the front gate so they could no longer get back inside. Um, and eventually he got his nice compound. There you go. That's how you do it.

That's how you do it. That's how I procured all of my housing. Yeah. Just change the locks. Yeah. Turn off all the water and gas and change the locks and people stop coming to the house. Exactly. And then it's yours.

That's a, that's a good way to deal with the fact that nobody in your generation can afford rent. Yay. So eventually the U.S. and England withdrew their ambassadors in protest. Uh, Lukashenko ignored this because he didn't give a fuck, uh, but his antipathy to the West has not been consistent in recent years, nor has his alignment in Russia. After the 2006 elections, the U.S. and the EU threw a bunch of sanctions out at Belarus because, you know, because there wasn't a real election.

Yeah. And he beat them up. Uh, and then Russia invaded Georgia and around the same time, um, like basically 2006, Lukashenko has some sham elections and he beats the shit out of people who protest and the EU and, uh, the U.S. put sanctions on him, but then Russia invades Georgia at around the same time. And he like is vaguely critical of Russia, um, and that makes the EU and the U.S. happy. That makes it much better. But it makes Russia angry.

So they double the price of the gas they're selling Belarus. Well, you can't, you can't win at all. No, no. And that's like, he's kind of just been dancing between NATO, uh, and Russia for most of the last 10 years in particular, which is, is like interesting. You'll see a lot of people will claim that like, like there's a lot of suspicion that, uh, you know, he was going to, when the protests started getting out of hand, he was going to call on Russia to defend his sovereignty.

Um, but Russia hasn't been super positive towards Lukashenko lately. Um, and the Belarusian government actually arrested like a bunch of, um, Russian mercenaries at the whole start of things. So it's like, it's a pretty complicated situation because like you also have people who will be like, Oh, this uprising in Belarus is just like orchestrated by NATO to try to remove another, you know, uh, a good old fashioned socialist leader from Europe. And it's like, well, actually there have been periods where like NATO was kind of okay with Lukashenko and it's, it's, it's much more complicated than all that.

Yeah. It doesn't seem super straightforward. No. Um, he's basically like, he's, he's kind of like, um, he's kind of a cocktail. Like that, that's Lukashenko within the context of European politics is like, he'll flirt with Russia a little bit and then he'll run over to the U S to make Russia jealous. And then like, that's just kind of how things can make a great soap opera. Yeah.

Yeah. Gone with the cheap Russian unfiltered gas. I don't know. Yeah. Um, so yeah, this dance has continued irregularly for the last like 15 years and you might look at Lukashenko's position in the new Cold War era as similar to positions taken by like a bunch of African and Middle Eastern nations during the old Cold War where they would kind of try to play both sides.

The Bush administration gave Lukashenko, uh, his last dictator in Europe, nickname in 2005. But after 2006, Western powers were a lot more careful about how they referred to him. Um, and Lukashenko threw them raw meat to releasing, uh, his nation's most prominent political prisoner, Alexander Kozulin, from prison after his 2006 conviction for hooliganism, for leading a demonstration that protested against a rigged poll. Hooliganism is how most Belarusian political, uh, opposition leaders wind up getting charged with. This is just like we have Felony Mischief.

Exactly. Felony Mischief. Don't call it that. God, like at least make it sound like a serious crime. Felony Mischief. Yeah. Hooliganism. As, uh, and again, he was still like the guy that he was.

So as he releases this prominent political prisoner to make the West happier, he also detained 20 independent journalists after a series of cartoons making fun of him showed up on the internet. Um, yeah. So I don't know. You know, he's, he's, he's continued to be the guy that he is now the clearest shortcut to guaranteeing a government response, uh, in terms of like being an activist, like, because it's always been kind of weird, like what the state would respond to as a rule, Belarus

would allow protests, um, but would always punish the people who organized them. Um, but he for years actually got a lot of political mileage out of attacking the United States and the UK for tear gas and crowds because we don't have to do that in Belarus because we just torture and murder the people who organized the protests. Uh, how, how, how things have changed. Yeah. And they also, he also tear gas. And he also tears us.

Yeah. Absolutely. Sure. Um, if there's no media, that doesn't have to get out. So yeah, uh, there were a number of other kind of weird rules, uh, that the media had to abide by in Belarus, uh, television stations in Belarus have been ordered on pain of arrest and presumably torture to never film him from behind. That's good.

Yeah. And it started because he went bald in the mid aughts, uh, and he didn't want his bald spot to be visible. Um, I don't, I think he's bald enough. Now he has a comb over. So I don't know that that rule is still in place because it's very obvious. Um, but yeah, he, he would imprison you for showing that he was bald for a while. Uh, and it's probably fair to say that like, if you're gonna, if you're gonna, if you're

gonna like rank dictatorships, um, Belarus is pretty low in terms of like, if you're gonna, if you're gonna make a list of like which dictatorships have been the worst to live under. Um, I guess it's one of the better ones, like the level of oppression. You wouldn't really compare it to like North Korea, um, so to speak, or to Syria, um, like in Syria, they have their secret prisons where they torture people and they killed tens of thousands of people in those prisons. And Belarus, they kill a handful and they, they do eventually let most people go.

Um, so, you know, not great, but I guess it could be, I don't know, I don't want to say that either about a horrible dictatorship. You know, it's just, it's just, that's where they, that's where they land on the worldwide things. Like you get information out of Belarus, people are able to report on things, but you also never know if reporting on something happening in Belarus is going to get you beaten and tortured by state authorities. But it might not.

It could not. I love the uncertainty of if I'm going to get abused by the state for doing journalism. That's what makes it a good place. It's my favorite part of journalism. Yeah. So, uh, yeah. And again, for most of this period, like Lukashenko, there, there would be kind of regular frustration with aspects of state repression, but most of the country was kind of on board with things

just because like things were pretty stable. There was like slow, steady economic growth, Belarus kept enough of the old Soviet era institutions around to ensure that social inequality remained very low. Belarus has one of like the lowest levels of social inequality of any place in the world. So you didn't see a lot of like regular people on the street. Nobody had, nobody was really rich. Like they wouldn't have known anybody who had like a lot, but also like you didn't know anybody who was dirt poor for most of the history of Lukashenko's reign.

Like people, people, there wasn't like, it wasn't like, um, you wouldn't see homeless people on the street or whatever, right? And so people were like, well, at least things are stable and we don't have to worry about like all of these cause like you look over at Albania and a bunch of other places that like experimented with capitalism suddenly in the nineties and they, they wound up like people lost everything and wound up on the street and like that didn't really happen in Belarus. Okay.

Um, so that made, that helped him like maintain popularity. And they were still kind of quasi-Marxists for a little bit. Yeah. Aspects of it. Like it's one of those things where people, actual Marxists and stuff will point out like a bunch of ways in which that actually is not the case. Oh really? Yeah.

People pointing out differences between Marxism really. Yeah. I'm shocked. But yeah. Broadly speaking, life in Belarus continued on from under, under Lukashenko pretty similarly to how it had been under the Soviet Union. And that is in, in, in the good ways and that like people continued to be able to benefit from sort of some of these state institutions that got taken away in other parts of Eastern

Europe and in the bad ways and that like there was still massive political repression and no real free, no real like freedom to, to, you know, pick your own political leaders or whatever. Uh, early on in his reign, Lukashenko earned the nickname Batka, which means father. And that's broadly how he's attempted to portray himself ever since as like the father of the Belarusian people. Um, and this kind of dick differs a lot from dictators like Gaddafi, Turkmenbashi or the Kims, because he never portrayed himself as a super human figure.

Um, like he, he preferred to kind of, uh, the image he seems to refer himself as like as a farmer. So there's a lot of propaganda about how Lukashenko, you know, as opposed to like the, the, the Wichita from like the Kims where it's like, Oh, they, they built a rocket ship, you know, or whatever they invented the game of golf with Lukashenko, the stories that they tell about him or like he went to a collective farm and saw that cows were being abused. And so he fired his minister of agriculture to like make sure that cows are taken care of now in Belarus.

He's like the father farmer. That's kind of, that's the image he tries to put out. Yeah. That's, that's sort of like, yeah, like, yeah, yeah. Farming dad is the, uh, is the way Lukashenko wants to be known. It's like worth, like when Steven Segal visited, like they went and hung out at a farm and Segal had to eat gigantic carrots that Lukashenko pulled out of the earth. Good, good, good.

That's a weird video. Very awkward. So yeah, uh, it's probably accurate to say that Lukashenko never really had a cult of personality, like most dictators we talk about. It's just not something he really went for. And I'm going to quote now from an article in Politico about this. It cites an expert on Belarus named Lashenko quote, on the face of it, that's a weakness, but Lashenko argues it differently.

Ideology, she writes, is one of the most successful undertakings by the Belarusian leader. In traditional Soviet ideology, though, it does not consist of truths, but attitudes, principally feelings of security and pride. Belarusians are constantly reminded by the state propaganda machine that the outside world is dangerous, whereas life in Belarus is inviably calm and well protected. Wages and social payments are on time. There is no terrorism, no political upheavals as in Ukraine or Georgia.

The constant struggle by authorities against external and internal enemies is not just successful, but grounds for pride. Belarus, or argues Lukashenko in 2003, has been endowed with the great mission of being the spiritual leader of Eastern European civilization. So that's interesting to me, because you've got this country where there's a strong history of half of the nation dying in horrible violence, and so a lot of Lukashenko's kind of argument for why he should stay in power has been like, nothing happens. We haven't had a massive genocide in our country.

And that means I'm a good leader. Years since we were all killed, 26 or whatever, which is, I guess, one thing. So yeah, again, no real cult of personality for Lukashenko, but he has had some songs written about him. And his favorite is a diddy called Master in the House, and it includes, I don't know how to sing this to a tune, but here's the English translation of kind of the most relevant chunk of the song. He is a hard nut to crack.

He wouldn't teach you anything wrong. He can call everybody to order. He is really cool. He can easily redress all grievances. He is reliable and calm. That is a good diddy. That's a good diddy. Yeah.

I love it when people can easily redress all grievances. But also you see that he's kind of a boring dictator in a lot of ways. It seems kind of the only way he's gotten some support is he's just kind of boring. Yeah. He's like what people like about him because things have been so tumultuous. That's what people liked about him, I think, like, you know, in some places you need to have like the dictator is, you know, holds up the sky and is the only thing keeping, you know, you know, the Western hordes back or he invented all these wonderful things.

In Belarus, it's like he's calm. He's reliable. He keeps everybody chill. Yeah. Yeah. And so the rest of the song goes on for a pretty considerable length of time. Anyway, it's, it's, he's a weird guy. He's kind of hard to get your hands around and I, he's definitely not the kind of colorful

figure that we tend to cover on Behind the Bastards. He is a terrible dictator who's suppressed a lot of people very violently. But he's also just like kind of a boring middle manager. He seems like a boring dictator. Yeah. He's, he's, he's a, he's kind of a boring dictator at the end. And yeah, I found a quote from him, another quote from him where he kind of talks about himself as an authoritarian from an August 2003 interview where he says, again, an authoritarian

style of rule is characteristic of me and I've always admitted it and then notes, you need to control the country and the main thing is not to ruin people's lives. Which is a really self aware thing for a dictator to say is like, as long as I don't fuck people up, I'll be, people will support me. They're going to keep letting me be a dictator as long as I don't do something massively terrible. So in part two, we're going to talk about the time Lukashenko did a bunch of massively terrible things that made people not want to support him as a dictator anymore. But first, this episode's over, Garrison, you want to tell people where they can find

you on the internet before we talk more about Belarus? Yeah. If you want to see me talk about protests and getting shot at by police and federal agents, you can go to my Twitter at Hungry Bowtie, Hungry as in the accessory, not the country. Yeah. That's where most of my stuff lives right now. Working on a few other things.

But yeah, mainly my Twitter right now. So follow Garrison's Twitter, tweet things at him, fill up my mentions with anything that's legal. Yeah. Yeah. That's legal. Yeah, follow me on Twitter and fill my mentions up with anything that's illegal. That's how it works.

Crimes to me, laws to Garrison. That's how the Twitter goes. Yeah. You're at the eye rights, all right. Yeah, that's the thing. So the podcast is over. You can find us on the website at BehindTheBastrokes.com. You can buy t-shirts.

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