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

Episode Date: August 20, 2020

Robert is joined again by Garrison Davis to continue to discuss Alexander Lukashenko. 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 in 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. I fucking hate headphones still. This is Robert Evans, the behind the bastards. And we just spent another like 45 minutes having to figure out how to reconnect the earbuds we're using for this very frustrating. But you know what also is frustrating? It's frustrating to live under a dictatorship also.

And in a way, isn't Bluetooth a kind of authoritarianism? I don't know. We're going to do part two of our episode. I think it is. And who is your guest? Oh shit, Jesus. I'm just so frustrated by the headphone issues that I forgot to introduce the person who fixed the headphone issues. Yeah, the youth. Local youth, Garrison Davis. Yeah, that's my new Twitter handle. No, it's not.

At Hungrybo Thai from Twitter, tear gas proof Garrison. Garrison, what was wrong with the headphones other than the headphones are terrible? Yeah, that would be good until I'm no longer. I have no idea what's wrong with that. I don't know. That could be your TikTok handle. Leave me fixed it somehow. It could be your youth. That could be your TikTok handle for however many more days Trump allows. Yeah, TikTok. Contact me to be a...

Yeah, yeah, okay. All right, we're moving on right now. Right now. Right now. God damn it. Okay, so we talked about in the last episode how Lukashenko's most well-named, no nickname was Batka, which kind of means daddy, which is a little weird. Daddy? Is it daddy or is it daddy? Is it daddy? I just think...

Daddy. Okay. That was a joke for the ladies. Yeah, no, not that kind of dad. Maybe that kind of daddy. His opponents, though, have another nickname for him that basically translates to farm Hitler. That sounds more fun. Yeah, yeah, which is a fun nickname. And speaking of Hitler, like any self-respecting autocrat, Lukashenko has a history of saying really weird things about Hitler.

That are, yeah, kind of baffling. Good. On one occasion, the Belarusian dictator told an interviewer, quote, Hitler created a powerful Germany owing to the strong presidential power. After all, the German order has been developing for centuries. Under Hitler, this process reached its highest point. This is how we understand the presidential republic and the role of the president in it. Yeah, that's not problematic.

When I become president of every country, I will make sure to model my presidency after Hitler. I prefer to be a strong president, like Hitler, a guy with whom I have less disagreements than you might expect. Exactly. Obviously, these remarks caused a bit of a stir as it ought to when your head of state compares himself favorably to Hitler. Lukashenko found it necessary to justify himself by semi-backpedaling and telling people that he thought Hitler was, quote, a real fascist, a real idiot in power who destroyed a lot of people. But, and this is where he goes wrong. Whenever you have that sentence and then add a but, you know you're doing a good job.

Just end it with, destroy a lot of people. Yeah, end it there. Don't add the but. But he continues, but managed to unite the nation by means of tough policy at that stage. The result was obvious. Therefore, there is no need to reproach me that we wish to have the serious tough power in Belarus. That's great. The result was obvious.

I don't know if we saw the same obvious thing in the results there, Alexander, but yes. Lukashenko has one other weird Hitler statement that he's repeated a number of times, which is the line, not everything Hitler did was bad. Which again, you shouldn't need to point out. No, you don't need to say that. Yeah, like it's one of those things. Yes, we could split hairs and discuss the extent to which the Nazi party deserves credit for the Autobahn or whatever. Well, here we go.

But it really isn't important. Here we go. Honestly, Hitler did do one good thing. Yeah, he took Hitler out of the game. That's killing Hitler. That was the only thing he did that other governments had proved unable to do so far. Gotta give him credit. Gotta give him credit for that.

Anyway, Lukashenko, weird Hitler opinions. So yeah, Lukashenko repeatedly admits to having authoritarian tendencies, but he also, again, gets really pissed when people call him a dictator. In 2012, Germany's foreign minister, Guido Westerveld, used the term dictator to describe Lukashenko's regime. And I should note here that Guido is homosexual. And the fact that I'm noting that he's homosexual is not a good sign for what's about to come next. Because as soon as Guido called Lukashenko a dictator, Lukashenko responded, better to be a dictator than gay. Which is like a ninth grade level.

Like a ninth grade in 2004. That's a very 2004 school grade. No, but at least I'm not gay. Yeah, well, you're good. Yeah, it's literally the thing that we moved on from at like age 14 when I was a kid. Your generation's much better about that sort of thing. A little bit, yeah. So in another interview, Lukashenko made it clear that he's capable of some nuance when it comes to LGBT issues.

And I'm going to quote now from an interview he gave to the Independent. Lesbians are bad, but I do not... Again, not a great clause to start us out with. He has a lot of good sentences that add the word but. It seems to be a recurring theme. Lesbians are bad, but I do not condemn them. As with gays, this is not my understanding. I think it's absolutely unacceptable and negative.

Okay, that's good. So at least he makes a distinction. He's not fine with lesbians. Lesbians, they're not great. I'm not going to condemn them, but they're bad. I refuse to take a strong anti-lesbian stance. But you know who's really bad? Because I think they're hot.

Is those gays. Yeah, but the gays. They are real problems. I feel fine condemning those. Yeah, again, Lukashenko is like a lot of people you grew up with in your small Southern community. Lukashenko's cultural conservatism manifests itself in his attitudes towards the Russian Orthodox Church, summed up by the statement he made to a church patriarch quote. Thank God our church does not suffer from the infections that have crushed the Western church.

He's referring to the Catholic church there. We have heard it all. Pedophilia, gayness, environmentalism. What the hell is going on? The trifecta of what pedophilia, gayness and environmentalism. The three evils of society. Yeah, we are getting sick here too. So I think that the Orthodox church and state are not working well enough here.

We cannot afford to lose a whole generation of people. Yeah, we can't afford to lose that to environmentalism. No, environmentalism and its cousin, gayness. It could have really just ruined the youth with those. Yeah, in 2014 after Russia's annexation of Crimea, Lukashenko offered to share control over a united Russia slash Belarus with Vladimir Putin, telling an interviewer on Ukrainian TV, I told Putin that after the Crimea annexation,

people might no longer call me Europe's last dictator. Oh no. Yeah, I don't know. It's interesting because he also held a peace summit in Minsk that helped bring him closer to NATO over the whole issue. He kept doing that whole weird jumping into both sides with both feet sort of thing. Good. Yeah.

I don't pretend to have any particularly deep site into Lukashenko's mind and like who he is as a person because he kind of plays a lot of his shit pretty close to the vest. But studying him, you do really get the opinion that he thinks it's important to be seen as legitimately popular. In 2006, after a blatantly false election, gave him 86% of the vote in the international community, you know, decried the fact that he was falsifying the elections. He actually admitted to falsifying the results of the election, but kind of lied about the direction in which he faked things,

saying, quote, yes, we falsified the results. I've already told this to Westerners. In fact, 93.5% of ballots were for President Lukashenko. People say this is not a European result, so he changed it to 86%. This truly happened. So his argument is like, people are accusing me of lying and falsifying an election. The way to respond to this is to say, yes, I lied and falsified an election, but just to make myself seem less popular.

Yep. That's good. I don't think that has the impact that he thinks it has. No, it's not a good way to build up trust. No. Outside of the official propaganda, a series of local rumors have propped up around Lukashenko. The most common one is that he's mentally ill,

suffering from a variant of antisocial personality disorder called mosaic psychopathy. His opponents will generally declare that Stalin, Hitler, and Mao were all diagnosed with the same disorder. And this is like, it's a meme in Belarusian sort of opposition groups, but I don't think it's true at all. For one thing, I don't think he's been diagnosed with anything. I know Hitler, Stalin, and Mao weren't diagnosed with anything. And Hitler, Stalin, and Mao and Lukashenko are all broadly different kinds of shitty.

Yeah, they all definitely, they're not all the same type of dictator. No, no, they're not. Very different. And in fact, if you're picking Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, you're picking three guys who are actually the most different three dictators, like Stalin and Saddam, same kind of guy. But Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, all pretty different dudes in terms of the way they utilized power and the way that they came into power, weird that he picks those. I guess it's just like they're the big dictators.

The three big death counts. You could add Mussolini there, I guess, but I guess Mussolini is a little bit similar to Hitler. Mussolini is pretty similar to Lukashenko comparatively. I'd say he's closer to Mussolini than he is to Hitler, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I don't know, whatever. Alexander Lukashenko does have a wife, but she very conspicuously doesn't carry out the job of First Lady. Belarus has no equivalent to Asma Assad or Melania Trump.

This is also in line with traditions for Eastern European despots. Stalin was conspicuously single for most of his time and power. There are rumors that Lukashenko's wife lives in a monastery or a mental institution. And likewise, there are rumors about his children. We're not really sure how many he has. People are pretty confident that about three of his sons, Nikolai, Dmitri and Victor, and it's kind of worth noting that while these guys are sometimes portrayed as particularly his youngest son, Nikolai, like we talked about this on the Children of Bastards episode.

He's the kid who got given a golden handgun. Yeah, yeah. Putin gave him a gigantic golden handgun that he carries everywhere. So there's all these very funny pictures of him like leading the president of Venezuela. With a giant golden handgun. A massive bulging gun in his little kid's suit. Good for him. It's very funny.

Good for him. It's exactly what you'd do if you were 11 years old. That's what I would do. And got to and like, yeah, you can carry a gun everywhere you want, buddy. And it's a giant gold one. Of course you would. Yeah. But so there's this kind of idea that because of the shit that Nikolai pulls,

and because of like the reputation he has that he's being groomed as the, like following in his dad's footsteps. And this is actually pretty heavily debated by people who know anything about the country. There's a lot of argument as to whether or not Lukashenko's children are kind of expecting to follow in his footsteps. For his part, the president himself has repeatedly publicly stated that his children don't want to go into politics and that he doesn't consider them heirs. And yeah, nobody really knows how true this is, but a lot of repeatable academics do think that he's kind of being broadly sincere there.

And yeah, it's, it's hard to say kind of what he wanted for the future prior to this last election. In the late aughts, there were persistent rumors that he felt trapped as dictator of Belarus and kind of was looking for a way out but couldn't find it. And I'm going to quote now from an article in Deutsche Well to kind of elaborate on that. Lukashenko's biggest challenge, meanwhile, still lies ahead, his exit from the political stage. He recently announced that the 2020 presidential elections will be held as planned and he's expecting to run again. In his biography on Lukashenko, Valerie Karbalovich described the leader as a hostage trapped in a political system of his own making. Lukashenko, he writes, has no choice but to try to remain in power indefinitely. With no viable successor in sight, Karbalovich says Lukashenko's electoral defeat would lead to radical regime change.

So that's interesting. That tracks. Yeah, I wonder, I always wonder how much to believe it when people talk about like these guys wanting a way out or being trapped because it does happen like Saddam, before the invasion was like wind all the time about how he didn't want to be dictator anymore. And you do have to think that like, for the guys who kind of are less ideological about it and just wanted power, there's a certain point at which you're old and you're rich and maybe you just like to enjoy being old and rich and not have to constantly worry about being overthrown by angry activists. I don't know. I mean, there's also like, he has a credible, there's another person that can run the country, which is his opponent in the election.

So if he wants to step down, he can. He doesn't need to be dictator forever. But here's the problem. Once you've been the dictator and you've had a bunch of people disappeared and executed for exercising their political rights, and you've stolen huge amounts of money from the country, then if you leave power, you're in a little bit of a pickle. Yeah, that's the thing, right? Yeah, that's the cage of your own making. Yeah, that's the cage.

The cage of your own making is made with the bones of your enemies because at a certain point you've killed too many people to retire peacefully. Because we don't just have an island where dictators can go. Well, we do, and it's Jamaica, but I don't think he likes the heat. So yeah, he's in a complicated situation. And as with any controversial political leader, there's numerous rumors about how Lukashenko fucks both his detractors and supporters. Close your ears at this point, Garrison. You're too pure. I'm covering my ears.

There we go. We know that the teens don't ever hear about dictators doing, I don't know, I don't know. I lost track of the joke here. Yeah, so both of his detractors and supporters feel it necessary to tell stories about Lukashenko's supernatural sexual and erotic, sexual prowess and his titanic erotic appetite. So like both people who like him and hate him need you to know how fuck hungry he is, which is kind of a weird, I don't know. I guess that's just Belarus. Yeah, one tabloid newspaper clearly pushing a government line of propaganda, described in alleged adulterous relationship by the president, and wrote that Lukashenko is the only candidate who is potent. Like he was basically like, look, he fucks around on his wife because he's the only person in Belarusian politics who can get it, which is an interesting line to take.

Um, yeah, in 2013 Lukashenko was asked by a Spoboda journalist how long he felt his political career would last. This was a polite way of asking, do you plan to be dictator for life? Lukashenko responded, if people will elect me, then you will have Lukashenko for as many terms as you elect him, if of course health will allow him. He then added, if you have any doubts about my health, let's take skates and skis and tomorrow we will try. Let's run 10 kilometers. If you come first, then tomorrow you will be president. Yay, I love, I love dictatorship of the marathon. That's my favorite political system.

It would be cool if I could just challenge the president to a fucking 10K and then get to be president. This is what I hope the final, I would, I would so beat the president at a 10K. The thing is now is because the election here is such a big mess, we could just have Joe Biden challenge Trump to a push-up contest and then the winner just be president. I mean, has he kind of always? He already, he already talked about that, but now that could just be the way we win the presidency. I don't have confidence in either of them, push-ups. And see what happens. No, I don't think either of them could, I don't know if I think either of them could do one good push-up, I'm gonna be honest.

I don't think so either. They're so, they're so trash, they're so old and trash, but Kamala, Kamala could do more push-ups than Pence, I'm fairly sure. Yeah, probably. But no, but they can't be on the stage together. Oh, right, right, right. It's against his religion to sweat near a woman he's not married to. So I don't think he's going to agree to that in the first place. So yeah, that's a weird one.

Now, I think the best Lukashenko propaganda I've come across is again from that Belarus country study guide that was produced with help from the Belarusian government. And I wanted to read a few fun, fun Lukashenko facts that they put out in their like broken Belarusian to English translated text, because it's fun. Lukashenko has always willingly indulged in sport. The head of the state is sure that enormous psychological strain he undergoes every day and nervous stress can only be removed by activity going in for sport. That's great. Yeah. Although every minute of president's time schedule is entered in the records, he tries to find time amidst the state affairs to come up to a bookshelf, to come up to a bookshelf. Reading books for him is a most pleasant occupation.

He obtains satisfaction whenever he gets acquainted with technological novelties with latest achievements of the scientific mind. He seems like a real eccentric fellow. You obtained satisfaction from a technological novelty earlier today and then it broke immediately. And then it broke immediately. Never buy headphones. Yeah. I love the way they describe when he needs a relaxation, he comes up to a bookshelf. That's what I do.

When I need to feel relaxed, I go up to my bookshelf and just stare at it for hours. Reading books for him is a most pleasant occupation. So over the last 20 some years, Lukashenko's political agenda has evolved from a vague platform of anti-corruption to more or less supporting return to the old Soviet economic system with minor market elements. The private sector has been kept pretty consistently at 20 to 30% of the GDP and Belarus' industry has kept chugging along due in large part to Russian support. Not only did Russia sell cheap oil to Belarus, but they bought the Soviet style products still made in its factories. So like all of the Kirkland brand products in Russia are all from Belarus. So like you can get like a stove that's made somewhere else in the world or if you want a cheap stove that just works, you get the Belarusian person. You get the Belarus brand.

Yeah. And yeah, they were like, and that that's part of what has kept their economy chugging along. Sure. So yeah, Lukashenko pretty much based his entire political capital on stability. But most of that stability has been an illusion. For example, for most of his time in power, Belarus shot to provide workers with an average monthly wage of around 500 US dollars. Unfortunately, the state was rarely able to afford more than about half of this. So they came to rely on regular loans from Russia, particularly in years like 2011 when Belarusian inflation topped 109%.

Oh, good. Yeah, that's not good amounts of inflation. But Russia said no sometimes, which is again part of why like Lukashenko started making more overtures for the EU. And he's also gotten loans from the IMF and the European Union, which means he's kind of in debt to everybody a little bit, which is, I don't know. An interesting situation to be in. Now, in general, Putin and Lukashenko have had kind of a more of a tumultuous relationship than most media tends to present. Belarus and Russia are on paper part of that economic union that was always meant to progress to being a political one. And at first folks assumed that Lukashenko was a puppet of Putin's kind of inevitably bringing his country into this like union of Russia and Belarus.

But over the years, Lukashenko's like repeatedly pulled back like right at the moment where they might take a step forward towards that. And again, it's kind of like he's been a little bit of a cock tease with Belarus like, oh, yeah, we're totally going to like, we're going to get hitched. Don't worry. Don't worry. I just got to go see. I got to go see my like Bay over the IMF. We're just going to like hang out for a night. Like, but it doesn't mean anything. It's not a big deal.

Yeah. So last Christmas, Lukashenko presented Putin with a gift that some people see as a fuck you to Russia over the fact that they started like demanding repayment of things and kind of anyway. The gift was three sacks of potatoes and a bunch of like rendered for pork fat, which is a weird thing to like bring to your buddy's house as a Christmas gift. Yeah, Putin seems to broadly be kind of have been relatively pissed in recent years, particularly in the last year, and has responded by jacking up oil prices against towards Belarus and fucking with the state of their exports to Russia, which has kind of helped to crater the Belarusian economy. So all of this has meant that for the last few years, Belarus has been anything but stable. Lukashenko has continued to talk a good game about socialism, but he's reverted to the same sort of austerity measures that we see in Western countries. He's raised the age for drawing out your pension basically like raise the retirement age. He started permitting moderate unemployment.

It used to be like impossible basically to be unemployed in Belarus or Belarus. Yeah, he's allowed unemployment as a result of the fact that there just was not enough money to force it. And that's brought, you know, political turmoil because people are seeing themselves losing access to some of these like state institutions that had at least been like kind of a sav on the fact that they didn't have much freedom. Since 2008 Lukashenko solution to this has been to periodically loosen up the rules and allow his political opponents to organize and advocate for whatever it is they happen to want is like a safety valve, you know, things are getting worse and worse. So I might as well like give them an opportunity to get a little bit of resistance. Yeah, and you also get to figure out who's the best at organizing resistance and throw them in dark cells. And he kind of developed, he had a history of being relatively smart about approaching some of these protest movements. So for example, when mine workers went on strike over a delay in wage payments and demanded to be allowed to join a new non state owned union,

Lukashenko made sure that they got their money and they got a 50% raise. But then as soon as that was done, he fired all of the leaders who'd organized the strike and he also fired all of the heads of the new union likewise. Yeah, but you know what is really healthy Sophie. I do Robert, I think I do. Yeah, the products and services that support this podcast. Extremely healthy, you know. Yeah, very healthy, never fired the heads of a mining strike. Well, well, yeah, probably no comment.

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 Aaronson 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 and on the gun badass way and 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! So, yeah, Lukashenko. So he kind of developed over time a pretty canny way of responding to dissent. Every now and then he would loosen the rules for political activism to sort of let people gather in the streets more. But he never actually changed the laws so that at any point in time he could just like have his police start enforcing the laws again. And that gave him an opportunity to like kind of trap people and fuck with them, but also do the safety valve sort of thing when he needed to. I'm going to quote now from a write-up in the Carnegie Moscow Center about the way in which the regime dealt with dissent.

Quote, the regime has several tools to minimize the likelihood of mass protests that might escalate to the point of threatening its survival. First, a significant proportion of Belarusians are excluded from politics as a consequence of the state sector's economic dominance. The country has a widely used system whereby employers are not obliged to extend labor contracts when they run out, usually after one year. So the authorities have a powerful lever for influencing the majority of the working population. Similarly, students risk being expelled from institutions of higher education, the majority of which are state run if they express political dissatisfaction. So, yeah, it's a pretty sweet situation when you own the state and the state is everything and you can just shut down people's lives. Yeah, maybe one body shouldn't control all those things, I don't know. Now, protests are allowed in Belarus, but they have to receive state approval first.

Ah, yes. My favorite type of protest is state-approved protests. Yeah, is when they tell you where you can be, which they always want to do. Like, the police and the authorities always want to be able to tell people where you can protest. Yeah, that's something we're seeing in Portland a lot, is they'll just close off areas of downtown. They're like, nope, can't protest here anymore. Yeah, it's a thing you have to be really on guard for, because, you know, it's exactly the kind of thing you do if you want to be able to run an authoritarian state and stop people from resisting it. From 2015 to 2017, Belarus's rules about when people could protest and where were briefly loosened. Basically, people just got fined for partaking in unapproved protests rather than arrested. And this state of affairs lasted for a little less than two years until Lukashenko instituted a new law that taxed the unemployed, just the unemployed, who he called social parasites.

When protests against this got serious, he cracked down again and stopped letting people go out of the streets without getting arrested. Yeah, so that's interesting. Lukashenko has shown sort of a habit of giving in, giving concessions to protesters in certain situations in which he felt like it was kind of necessary. So in 2011, drivers who got angry at a rise in gas prices blocked Minsk's central thoroughfare, claiming that their vehicles had broken down. A bunch of them were detained and fined, but on the same day, the president lowered the fuel price. Now, the fuel price crept up again very quickly thereafter, back to the levels that had been before the protests. And he basically just used that as an opportunity to stop the protests temporarily, throw all of the people who organized them in prison, and then gradually raise the fuel tax back up to the level it had been before. Yeah, very sneaky. Very sneaky. Kind of the smart dictator way to do things.

It is. If you want to be a dictator, it's a smart way to handle the protests. Yeah, it's risky to confront protesters in the street and beat the shit out of them, because that can lead to huge mobs of protesters. That can radicalize people, then more people will be on the street. Whereas you give them what they want, you throw their leaders in prison, and then you fuck them over again and see if they're going to be bold enough to come back out. Smart guy. Likewise, President Lukashenko is deeply cautious about promoting charismatic or ambitious men to promote positions in government. And the only thing more dangerous than being a protester in Belarus is being a politician who works with the president and stands out in some way. I'm going to quote again from that Carnegie Russia piece, quote, those who occupy senior posts know this and try not to stand out, give too many interviews or develop public profiles. Lukashenko's aim is to ensure that neither elites nor ordinary citizens get the impression that someone has a stable hold on the number two position in the power vertical.

There is no clear error or favorite in the eyes of the elite, and one should not be allowed to appear. Moreover, to prevent officials from thinking that they are becoming untouchable and to keep them in line, Lukashenko regularly initiates criminal cases, usually in charges of corruption against some of them. The rare cases 10 to 15 years ago, in which high-profile officials went over to the opposition, ended with various criminal charges being brought against them to make sure others got the message. In this system, betraying the president's trust is the greatest sin. It seems this country's stability has been sorely based off of this guy trying to keep the country as boring as possible. Yeah, you really get that impression from it, and that's kind of why Belarus had a hard time. Belarusians who were trying to actually fight against state repression have consistently had a hard time getting anyone to give a fuck. Right now, because of the violence in the streets, has been the first time anyone's really cared about Belarus on an international level in quite a while.

Because people are terrible. And Lukashenko was good at being... Like, he was smarter than an Assad, where it's like, oh, you don't want to torture tens of thousands of people to death. You just torture the right few dozen people and kill a handful of those people, and everybody else gets the message. And you let them do their little marching and stuff unless they go too far, and then you just, you know... There has to be enough resistance allowed that people feel like they have a little bit of control so that they don't fully rise up. Exactly, yeah, and he kind of... It's a balancing act, and he seemed to be pretty good at it for almost 30 years.

One of the things that kind of disrupted his ability to effectively hide from that, or to... One of the things that seems to have disrupted his ability to successfully balance is the coronavirus. So Lukashenko made an interesting call when the virus hit, which is that he just refused to acknowledge that it was dangerous. Oh, we've never seen this before. We haven't, like, he makes the president look responsible in his... Oh, that's good. Yeah, it's not good. He told his people that the virus was a mass psychosis, and that if they got sick, they should all go to the sauna and get drunk to poison the virus.

Yeah, let's all go to the sauna in a moist room where all the air is going around. Yeah, that's a great plan. And let's drink lots of straight vodka to lower our immune systems. You get a poison of virus. Oh, God. Yeah, in late May, he insisted he'd been right not to lock down, stating, You see that in the affluent West, unemployment is out of control. People are banging on pots. People want to eat.

Thank God we avoided this. We didn't shut down. You want to guess what happened next? I'm guessing thousands and thousands of people have died. Oh, we don't know how many people have died, because it's Belarus. But the president absolutely got coronavirus. You can see a pattern states, Russia, Brazil, all authoritarian kind of leadership styles are so incompetent at handling an actual crisis of this scale. And he absolutely refused to make any changes to his life. They continued to hold all of his public appearances, government meetings continued without masks.

He continued to play hockey and go to hockey games. Oh, that's good. In late March, he was interviewed in full hockey gear, saying, It's better to die standing than live on your knees. Oh, boy. And yeah, then he caught the coronavirus. He says he was asymptomatic, but he does not describe being asymptomatic. And he told an interviewer, I apologize for my voice lately. I have to talk a lot.

But the most surprising thing is that today you're seeing a person who managed to power through the coronavirus standing on his feet. Good for him. Doctors made this conclusion yesterday. It was asymptomatic. Like I said, 97% of our people go through this illness without symptoms. And thank God I've managed to get into this group of asymptomatic people, which is not true. At all. There's no, he cited, he cited no actual statistics from his health ministry or whatever to make this claim.

But also he was clearly apologizing for the fact that his throat sounded shitty. I wonder why. Because he'd gotten sick. Very funny. Not funny because an unknown number of Belarusians died from the virus. Again, we have no actual data on how many of them got sick. But we do know that Belarusians were so desperate at the complete lack of support provided by their government that they started taking to go fund me in massive numbers. One campaign purchased more than $130,000 worth of respirators for doctors and nurses, which are going for like $16 a piece on the streets.

Okay. Because like there just weren't masks available. So people people have been crowdfunding basic medical supplies for their doctors in Belarus, a supposedly socialist state, because the government just refused to admit that the coronavirus was a thing. And it is weird that like you've got Belarus, the closest thing we have to the USSR left on the planet except I don't know maybe Cuba or something. And you've got the United States, which is, you know, this bastion of capitalism. And they both kind of wound up in the same position where civilians were crowdfunding. Using crowdfunding. To help out doctors.

This is a sign of a perfect working system when you have people having to use a crowdfunding site for their medical care. This is a sign that everything is fine. Nothing is wrong. Yeah, it's great. And for his part, Lukashenko, yeah, refused to cancel. Anyway, over the years, Lukashenko clearly grew comfortable with the idea that his words could manipulate and dictate reality. You know, he could change his own birth date, like the nature of his dad or whatever, like at a whim for whatever was politically convenient. And again, kind of like we saw with Trump, he ran into the coronavirus, which is this thing that like, you can't manipulate.

You can't fake your way. You can't lie to it. No. Yeah. And it will get you sick if you don't take certain precautions. But, you know, he let it spread like wildfire through Belarus, and that sucked. And it happened to be also that this year was a presidential election. And so the kind of campaigning season started just as the coronavirus was really biting and the economy was hitting a nosedive.

And there was no way for him to hide the rot, right? You can't, as the president claim, I kept everything stable while people are sick and out of work. Yeah, it's hard to just propaganda this one away. Exactly. There's a certain point at which the lying does not work. A government poll taken in April of 2020 found that only a third of Belarus trusted the president. Opposition candidate, and this is, again, a poll his own government released. That's always my favorite type of poll. Yeah, not great results.

Opposition candidates began to come out of the woodwork to oppose his rule. There were three of them initially. One of them was a guy named Sergei Tchenovsky, who's a famous YouTuber who grew to local fame by putting out videos highlighting corruption and incompetence within the government. And then there were two other like opposition politicians who were kind of prominently running against the president, and they all get arrested almost immediately. And then, which is like normal, right? Yeah, that's what's happening. But then something weird happens. The wives of all three of these opposition politicians get together and decide to run one single campaign together.

So they merge their support in campaign and they throw all of their support behind the wife of the YouTube star who got arrested, a woman named Svetlana. And they start running a really credible campaign. In a matter of days, they collect 100,000 signatures necessary to register as a campaign with regime controlled election authorities. And the regime lets them. And you get the feeling it's because they thought that the campaign was doomed. It's just so silly. Yeah, they thought there's no chance. Yeah, Lukashenko would kind of like crudely say something along the line, like mockingly say, oh, I don't think we're ready for a female president here in Belarus.

But she kept getting more popular and more popular and more popular. And something really neat happened where, as this is all going on, starting with like, you know, the coronavirus pandemic, people in Belarus started getting onto apps like Telegram and increasing numbers, hundreds of thousands of them who hadn't been before to organize these like drives and donations and providing like to organize the providing basic medical supplies to medical professionals. And they were on all these platforms when the campaigning started up. So they began like there was this one app created that allowed them to like track votes and like track what people were voting for us that they could have like an accurate updated by the minute count of how people were really voting to compare to the government tallies on the election. And so, and also like you have all these people who are able to get like organize voter drives and stuff like that to actually like run a really competent campaign that very quickly overwhelmed the president's like all of the state repressive measures he'd spent decades building up. And it kind of works. I'm going to quote next here from a write up in Vox quote, experts told me Lukashenko usually allows some opposition candidates to run against him doing so lets the regime keep the appearance of a fair election, and also allows those with grievances to address them once in a while,

hoping complaints die down soon after the vote. That seems to have happened in this case, but the president also didn't seem too threatened by Tikhanovskaya's candidacy. One reason was that Tikhanovskaya had no political experience at all. In fact, she'd never spoken at a political rally before. The other was that Lukashenko holds sexist outdated views of women. Society is not mature enough to vote for a woman, he said in July, adding that the weight of the presidency would leader to collapse the poor thing. But Tikhanovskaya didn't collapse under pressure. Instead, she united the opposition and brought hundreds of thousands of people into the streets and support. So yeah, they put together this campaign, like the sign for this campaign was like a heart and a fist in a fist fumping position and a V for victory. And yeah, it all works. So you're saying a grassroots movement led by a woman is a vibe?

Led by three women. Yeah, it's definitely a vibe. And because protesters have this, they have this like vote tracking system that they've all set up together independently. They're able to like keep track of how the votes are actually going when the government lies about it, which is what happens, you know, there's an election. The early polls, which seem to be pretty like the credible polls suggest that about 80% of people voted for Svetlana. The government claims that 80% of people voted for Lukashenko, which again has happened every election. But this time when he claimed that he'd won by an overwhelming margin, everyone knew it was a lie because they were all online talking to each other. So like, and you'll hear this in interviews, people being like, well, I just assumed he must have a bunch of supporters elsewhere.

And like, so that's why he kept winning. But now people were online with hundreds of thousands of their citizens and everyone was saying like, no, none of us voted for Lukashenko. We're all in communication. We know who we voted for. This guy wasn't it. Yeah, we're all talking. And so so that's what takes all these people out into the streets. And we're going to talk a little more about what happened next. But first, you know, what's better than going to the streets, but buying the products and services participating in the rat wheel of capitalism, which provides us with satisfactory answers to all of our needs that are so much better than getting out in the streets and breaking windows, all of that bad stuff you don't need with products and services. God, I hope with the dick pills ad.

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 goods.

He's a shark. And on the good and bad ass way. And 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 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 offending 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! Okay, so, yeah, it was a really interesting situation. So, basically, Svetlana and these other women, like the wives of these candidates, run this incredible grassroots campaign that by all accounts outside of the Belarusian regime fucking wins. And there's, you'll hear so like tankies, people who listen a lot are a group of people I don't like much.

And they're basically this group of leftists who finds a reason to defend every dictator and a reason to criticize every movement against a dictator who isn't in line with the United States. Because if you're not a fan of the US, then it doesn't matter how bad a dictator you are. Anyway, I don't like tankies. One of the things that they will attack, one of the things that they will attack Svetlana's campaign from is that one of the proxies that she picked for her campaign, like a local activist who was sort of campaigning for her, praised Adolf Hitler in speeches, which is a bad thing to do. But also Lukashenko definitely never repeatedly. It's not like he didn't praise Hitler. It's like, if you are going to say like, I agree with you, it's a problem that this person's vetting was so bad that they picked like an election proxy who had support like who says nice things about Hitler.

But the president repeatedly says nice things about Hitler. So that may not make the point you want it to make in this case. Which is like, yeah, it's bad that that happened. But also, come on, like the guy that they're running against has repeatedly talked about how good many of the things Hitler did is. Maybe this is a sign that nobody who runs for president makes great choices. We're saying it's like, it's like, it's like, tell them people they should vote for Trump instead of Biden because Biden's creepy around women. It's like, yes, but also Trump. Yeah, like that's not that's not a good argument to vote for Trump.

They're both creepy around women. Yeah. And I don't want to like criticize that line here because I honestly you get the feeling like she just like she never wanted to be in politics. She she probably just didn't really think much about vetting people and nobody can be that good in Belarus at running a political campaign like they much experience. It's been illegal. So I'm going to give her a pass on the fact that one of the people she hired wound up having said some dumb things in the past. Yeah, doesn't seem cancelable to me. Yeah, and she had it was one of those things.

So she would she would say things sometimes in speeches that were like kind of brought like like broadly, let's say gender traditional. So she would repeatedly make the claim that like I would rather be preparing cutlets for my children than running for president. But like I just have to do it, which you can feel about the way you want. It's also what's a politician. It plays well. Yeah, like it's a very pretty patriarchal society and that'll get people who might not otherwise vote for a woman on board. Exactly. No, it's a protest vote.

Yeah, exactly. She also said some stuff that I think is pretty cool. I don't need power, but my husband is behind bars. I'm tired of putting up with it. I'm tired of being silent. I'm tired of being afraid. And obviously one of the things that's really tragic about this in the immediate wake of the election, you know, all these protests start up. Things become like very violent very quickly with state security forces cracking down and she has to go into hiding.

She sends her children out of the country first, in which she's actually in the same boat with Lukashenko because there's it's heavily suspected, although not 100% proven like the presidential aircraft. Belarus's Air Force One flew to Turkey as soon as things started getting bad and it's believed that Lukashenko's family was on board. Okay. Yeah. Do we know? Do we know where he is right now? I think he's still in the country. He's supposed to be giving an address pretty soon.

Okay. Probably will have by the time this episode drops and there's a bunch of different anyway. Svetlana comes on, like, basically goes to ground for a while and seems like she gets caught because the next time we see her, protests are going on and she makes a video from the office of a government minister where she's like everyone should accept the election results and go home and not fight the police. And she looks like fucked up and traumatized. It's like, it's, it's, yeah, yeah, we know what's going on here. And she's fled the country since so she is out and safe and hiding for the sake of her family's safety. And things in Belarus are very bad right now. 7000 people have been arrested.

Now most of those people are a sizable chunk of those people have been released at this point. Again, we are not talking yet at least about a regime that is like the Syrian regime where they're going to immediately kill thousands of people. They have killed at least two people, probably significantly more, and they're torturing people, lots of them. There was the audio that came out a few days ago. We're going to include a clip from that in a second, but it's, it's audio of protesters from outside of one of Belarus's not so secret prisons, just like people, you can hear people being tortured and we'll play that now. So yeah, that's horrifying. Not great. Not great, but it hasn't stopped people from coming out.

And in the last, as I, as I deliver this, things will be in a different state by the time you hear this, the most recent change has been that the government is allowing mass demonstrations again, and like soldiers are hugging protesters. And it seems like things got bad enough that he decided, oh God, if I keep repressing people, shooting people in the streets, that will inevitably lead to a revolution. And I don't know that I'll win. Because this morning I saw footage of like police cars joining in on the protest or whatever. Yeah. And it's, it's hard to say at this stage, because there have been one of the things that was happening is there were viral videos of members of like even Russia or even Belarusian special forces throwing away or burning their uniforms to be like, we're not going to hurt our people. And maybe that was enough of a problem that he realized he had to change his response. I can't tell if the, because there have been cases in history where like police and military forces joined with protesters, and then the government got overthrown. Yes.

Right. I don't know if that's the case. We don't know if it's actually genuine or if it's kind of been being controlled by him to make himself look good. Yeah. And there's also rumors that basically what's going to happen is Lukashenko is going to be backed by Russia and allowed to stay in power for another year and then resign and that like that's what they're going to try to do. So like he can save some space, but like they want to put their man, but also it's like, it's not clear that that would work because basically a significant number of the country at this point is actually more pro Europe than pro Russia. It's in some polls that have happened have had it been close to 5050. It's usually about 50% pro Russia 35 to 40% pro EU. Who knows where things are at this moment. But it is a situation that's like kind of the thing that he's been trying to avoid since 2014, which is Belarus winding up kind of like Ukraine, where you have the country split along pro European or pro Russian lines. And then Russia comes in and takes a chunk of the country and there's a big ugly civil war. Like a lot of really horrible things could happen here.

And some of them being that like Belarus could get, you know, sort of absorbed more by kind of the technocratic West and wind up being picked over by capitalists. Yeah, I mean, there's no Albania did. There's no easy great solution here. Yeah. Besides like just getting the elected leader actually elected like the person who we probably think won the election. Yeah, yeah, which is which is a start. And it is one of those things where you can kind of look through what's likely to happen next and be like, oh, well, it doesn't seem like there's a lot of potential for things to end well for Belarus. And I do like you can make a strong logical arguments there, right, that like, you know, NATO is going to like, like the IMF or whoever like, like what all these different sort of Western powers that have been kind of have been slavering at the chance to get their to get their teeth around Belarus will do that and it'll make life worse for people,

not impossible. Although at this point, considering how bad things have gotten hard to see how that would be worse than where things are. There's also the argument like Russia will take over and like it'll become more authoritarian and things will get worse for people and like none of the options before them are good. And I don't like getting trapped into that kind of thinking because it leads you to like, it leads you to not be excited about what what is a core good thing here, which is that a shitload of people who never thought who never who have not had political agency in their lives are now like drop kicking riot cops in the street and trying to change their circumstances. And that's a good thing. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, yeah, it's these people get however have for the first time in a while or having a sense of like agency in their life. Yeah. And I I don't want to like, I don't think it should be a foregone conclusion that they will get fucked over like one way or the other by, you know, Russian imperialism or or sort of like the kind of the same like the fucking shock doctrine capitalism. I don't think either of those has to be inevitable. Like it's an unwritten year. Things could be different.

Like, yeah, who knows. Anyway, there's enough things going on in the world that there's not a foregone conclusion yet. Yeah, so that's what I've got for this episode so far. And I hope that if you're in Belarus and somehow listening to this because they shut down the internet to a pretty heavy extent. People have found ways around it, thankfully. One of the cool stories is that like there's this app that was developed to allow people in China to access the internet. Yeah, that people started downloading in Belarus before the internet got or before like all the app stores got blocked. So people have been passing it around and flash drives. Oh, that's so cool. Thousands of people so that they could get it on their phones.

This this cyberpunk. Yeah, it's very cool. That's that's actual cyberpunk. That is awesome. And it's neat. There's been some really cool stories coming out like a bunch of British soccer hooligans flew over to Belarus to like fight the cops on the hat. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's fucking it fucking rules. Yeah, like anti racist skinhead type. Yeah, the UK, which I think fucking rocks. And I was reading a really interesting crime think published in an article an interview with a number of different Belarusian anarchists. And yeah, people were asked like what their it was really interesting for a number of reasons. One of them was that like one of the guys they interviewed estimated like there's maybe a hundred of us in the country, like anarchists who were actually organized in an organized anarchists. And but they're also like the people who have the most time and experience thinking about how to fight the state. Yeah, they've they spend their free time thinking about. Yeah. So they've been the backbone and help trying to like train up all of these other these Belarusians who kind of like never would have considered themselves political activists before, which is an interesting story. I'd love to to learn more about to be honest.

And yeah, another one of the people they interviewed, like was asked like what can we do to help and he was like, well, there's some donations that people can want. But like really, if you could, if it's at all possible for you to travel to Belarus and help us fistfight the cops, we could really use that help right now. Of course, it's difficult with the plague. Very difficult. Not a great time. I would love to be there doing something, but not easy to get to at the moment, especially for Americans who are no longer welcome anywhere in the world. Yeah. Belarus where we are paying attention and hope that y'all figure out how to make things better in your lives and that everyone who says that this is inherently doomed winds up being wrong. Yep. Very hopeful and optimistic ending. Very. I love optimism. You know what else I love, Garrison? No, what else do you love? Plugging.

You love you love plugables. I love plugables. Sometimes we've tried to plug in headphones all day for hours. Well, actually, because they were not plug-in headphones, it was a nightmare that stole like an hour from our day. We'd better if we had a splitter, then we could plug in two headphones. Exactly. Exactly. People would just... Sometimes progress isn't necessary. What was wrong with the audio jack? Why did people need something new? It worked fine. It worked fine.

Why plugables are good. Speaking of plug-ables, my plug-able is at Hungrybo Town Twitter for protest reporting and other kind of political fun stuff. Yeah, that's what I'm doing right now. That's my main thing currently. And mine is at IWriteOK where you can occasionally see me live streaming Garrison and myself and a number of our other close friends getting repeatedly tear-gassed in the streets of Portland, Oregon. As has become tradition in the streets of Portland, Oregon on days that end in Y. Oh, it's a good time, Sophie. Great. Great stuff. Our city has ruined for a long time. Yeah, on an unrelated note, my lungs hurt every day.

I wonder why. Oh, okay. Well, that's the episode. Products and services, everybody. Just remember, no matter how dark things get, we always have products and services. 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 in 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.