Lukashenka As Chernenko

The carriage races of our century.

Recently, watching Lukashenka and reading the mass slander of Belarusians in the media and social networks, I tried to understand what all this reminds me of. Some kind of fierce deja vu, so acute that it was accompanied by the smell of scarce pre-New Year oranges, for which the Soviet people stood in lines.

Well, of course, oranges. Lines before the New Year for scarce goods. And not only before the New Year. The struggle within work collectives for holiday food orders with green peas, a can of condensed milk and a blueish chicken. Yes, this is it: the late Soviet era and the same general secretaries.

Lukashenka has come a long way and showed us all the general secretaries of the period of collapse. Until 2020, he was very similar to Leonid Brezhnev of the seventies. The era of stagnation is not Stalinism, so people feel almost safe. Of course, there are a number of dissidents who are not satisfied with cheap vodka and sausage for 2.20 rubles — for some reason they need freedom of speech and assembly. They print leaflets and samizdat. They are actively imprisoned, colossal budget funds are spent on surveillance of them, entire departments are created in the KGB for their sake. But the rest — those who can do without freedom, who have adapted and find such a life acceptable — live quite comfortably. They don’t put people in jail for jokes anymore, so you can laugh in the kitchen in the evening, exchanging fresh jokes about Brezhnev, and even feel like evening Jacobins. During feasts, the main hero of the evening is the one who can do the funniest job of impersonating the decrepit General Secretary. And in general, everyone is happy — no one is starving, black maroons don't drive around at night, many people go to the Crimea or Dombay, you can play sea battle or solve crosswords at party meetings. The main thing is to raise your hand in time to hear “adopted unanimously” and go home.

Lukashenka's behavior after August 2020 and for several more years is pure Andropovism. When you don't understand what to do and where to rush, how to manage something that is falling apart before your eyes, you start doing idiotic things and organizing idiotic campaigns. Andropov ordered people to be caught in parks, cinemas and shops so that they would be afraid of the authorities.

Officially, this was called strengthening labor discipline. And if it turned out that a Soviet citizen detained by the police in a store or cinema hall should officially be at work, then the punitive mechanism was immediately put into action. The Soviet press, with all its fervor, exposed truants and published editorials with the slogans “Parasites are our enemies! Protect the bread of labor from them!” It was Andropov who began to build prison psychiatric hospitals (dissidents understood that this was personally for them) and introduced a curfew for children and teenagers. In short, a set of meaningless movements, new, equally meaningless, tasks for the security forces, screws tightened to a creak — just so that the people knew their place and understood that without the highest permission they could not even go to the movies.

And now, before the next self-election, Lukashenka is the spitting image of Konstantin Chernenko: “after a serious and prolonged illness, without regaining consciousness, he began his duties.” Complete disintegration, decomposition, decay of the entire system. A rapid movement towards the end of the Soviet Union. The people were already laughing out loud. Jokes multiplied like rabbits. Now the heroes of the parties were those who could imitate the main Soviet announcer Igor Kirillov and pathetically pronounce: “Comrades, you will laugh, but the Soviet people have suffered another heavy loss…” It was then that the expression “gun carriage races” appeared. Lukashenka has caricatured all the participants in these gun carriage races in recent years. And don't tell me that Mikhail Gorbachev, who began perestroika and reforms, appeared after Chernenko. If Ronald Reagan, or Margaret Thatcher, or Napoleon, or Winston Churchill, or Mickey Mouse had headed the USSR after those general secretaries, they still would not have been able to do anything with the dying, decaying, stinking system. It ended with the last gun carriage, and the only question was whether reforms, mass protests, or a nuclear explosion would bury it. The doom of the system is as inexorable as the change of seasons.

So, Konstantin Ustinovich 2.0, get to work on your duties without coming to your senses. We are really looking forward to it.

Iryna Khalip, exclusively for Charter97.org

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