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CHAPTER 9 “Labels” of the Belarusian Regime Attempts at categorizing the developments in post-communist Belarus are made continually.As a result there have appeared a number of labeling categories by means of which their authors try to find adequate criteria for the assessment of the political situation in Belarus. Elena Korosteleva writes that the Belarusian system with its de facto individual presidential rule and the circumstances where all the official political institutions in society are directly or indirectly dependent on the president can be characterized as “superpresidentialism.”1 S. Shushkevich diagnoses the Belarusian regime as neocommunist.2 According to Shushkevich, renunciation of private property , emphasis on social equality, denial of personal freedom, militant atheism , and repudiation of Western values are the basic principles of the Belarusian regime’s ideology that relate it to communism. They are still preserved in “Belarusian minds,” because they had not been opportunely unmasked following the break-up of the USSR. “In comparison with the classical totalitarian states, the totalitarianism in Belarus is rather restricted ,”3 as “the Belarusian authoritarian regime tolerates elements of civil society,”4 albeit with limitations that significantly diminish their efficacy. Eke and Kuzio define the Belarusian regime as “sultanism.” It is characterized by utmost patrimonialism, lack of a borderline between the private and the personal spheres, insufficiency of articulated ideology, authoritarianism without outside rules, disapproval of political pluralism, and a violent overthrow of the regime as the only way to end it.5 The sultanism phenomenon , according to these authors, has a pronounced oriental accent. However, the Belarusian regime, as compared to similar regimes in the for1 Stephen White and Elena Korosteleva, “Lukashenko and the Postcommunist Presidency,” in Postcommunist Belarus, ed. S. White, E. Korosteleva, and J. Löwenhardt (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005), 64. 2 Stanislav Shushkevich, Neokommunism v Belarusi (Smolensk: Skif, 2002). 3 Shushkevich, Neokommunism v Belarusi, 113. 4 Shushkevich, Neokommunism v Belarusi, 132. 5 Steven Eke and Taras Kuzio, “Sultanism in Eastern Europe: The Socio-Political Roots of Authoritarian Populism in Belarus,” Europe-Asia Studies 52 no. 3 (2000): 536. mer Central Asian republics, is obviously more liberal and presupposes definite liberties (for instance, the right to leave the country for a Belarusian is not restricted by the state). As to the idea of a violent overthrow, Ioffe was right to note that it is highly unlikely “that Lukashenka may end his tenure as a president only if violently overthrown. In the absence of any indications that the 2001 presidential election was falsified to the point of changing the winner, any assumption is simply too far-fetched.”6 The same can be said about the 2006 presidential election. According to the results of opinion polls carried out by the IISEPS, during the 2006 presidential elections 63 percent of the voters voted for the current president (83 percent according to the data of the Central Election Committee). That is, the actual popularity of the Belarusian leader does not permit us to speak of him maintaining his authority by means of overt violence. Some researchers conceptualize Lukashenka’s political regime by the play of words his own name—“lukashenkism.”7 The typical features of lukashenkism are “an authoritarian style of leadership, with a growing reliance on the police and special forces, censorship and tight control of the media;” “a discernible contempt and disregard for democratic institutions and procedures;” “an aversion to and avoidance of vital economic reform with an expressed preference for the state-led policies of the Soviet era;” “an active policy of reuniting Belarus with Russia.”8 Zviglyanich describes lukashenkism as “a symbiosis of communism, chauvinism and populism in the Latin American style.”9 He defines Lukashenka’s political paradigm as “a distinctive world of postcommunist autarchy and retrostrategy , where, though there is no official dominant communist ideology as there was in the Soviet Union, communist practices in politics, economics and management have nevertheless been preserved and modified in their entirety.”10 Contrary to Shushkevich, Zviglyanich does not see the communist ideology as inserted into the new political reality that is being built by Lukashenka and his supporters. One can speak of preserving not so much of ideology itself but of its practices, in particular the practice of rela6 Ioffe, “Understanding Belarus: Economy and Political Landscape,” 99. 7 Margery MacMahon, “Alexander Lukashenko, President, Republic of Belarus,” Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics 13, no. 4 (December 1997): 129–36. 8 MacMahon, “Alexander Lukashenko,” 129...

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