INTRODUCTION TO THE NEW EDITION

Condoleezza Rice called ‘the last remaining true dictatorship in the heart of Europe’ in 2005.1 The first edition of this book, subtitled The Last Dictatorship in Europe, came out in 2011. In the years following, Belarusian President Aliaksandr Lukashenka liked to play up the idea of being the ‘last dictator’; in a 2012 interview he proclaimed ‘I am the last and only dictator in Europe. Indeed there are none anywhere else in the world . . . You came here and looked at a living dictator. Where else would you see one? There is something in this. They say that even bad publicity is good publicity.’2 But after Russia’s aggression against Ukraine in 2014, Lukashenka slyly told Bloomberg in a 2015 interview that ‘There are dictators a bit worse than me, no? I’m the lesser evil already.’3 He meant Putin. Some also saw domestic reasons why the label was outdated after 2014. Belarus’s precarious position after the beginning of the war in Ukraine led to some tactical foreign policy diversification, and in turn to some minimal domestic liberalisation, to try and open doors in the West. And if Belarus got a little better, several European countries got a lot worse, some of them, such as Hungary, in the EU. Democratic deterioration elsewhere meant that Belarus was no longer the ‘last dictatorship in Europe’. In 2019 and the Economist Intelligence Unit rated Azerbaijan as more autocratic than Belarus; Freedom House had Russia and Belarus at roughly equal pegging, with Russia slightly less bad in the EIU’s reckoning.4 The Belarusian regime started to object to being called ‘the regime’. But the events of 2020 made the label accurate again. Lukashenka had rigged elections before – in 2001, 2006, 2010 and 2015. But the blatant fixing of the 2020 election blew up in his face. Hundreds of thousands of Belarusians x INTRODUCTION TO THE NEW EDITION xi took to the streets. Mass imprisonments, beatings and torture failed to disperse the protests, which carried on for months. The mirror-image of a dictatorship is a quiet and submissive population, so whether the protesters would ultimately prove successful in removing Lukashenka or not, their actions served to cast off at least one of Belarus’s labels. Others remain. In the Western imagination there are no proper countries between Poland and Russia. Often presented as the last neo-Soviet state, or seen as Russia-lite, or even as nation-lite, Belarus has been home to disappearing tricks. Its capital city, , was where President Kennedy’s assassin Lee Harvey Oswald stayed as a would-be Soviet ‘ordinary worker’ in 1960–2. Mythical ‘Minsk’ is where Phoebe’s boyfriend David the Scientist Guy disap- pears to in the US sitcom Friends, which is just a plot device to remove him from the face of the Earth. Marxists like to talk about ‘non-historical peoples’ (stateless ‘tattered remnants’ according to Engels), but every people has a history. The lands that are now Belarus, however, were part of other national ‘projects’ until the twen- tieth century. The people contributed to those projects and helped make them unique, but the term ‘Belarus’ referred to a specific region rather than a nation until late in the nineteenth century. The early proto-Belarusian tribes were originally part of a medieval state with the other eastern Slavs. They then helped form the much misunderstood ‘Commonwealth’: neither ‘Poland’ nor ‘Lithuania’, but a multinational agglomeration of all the lands and peoples (and potential peoples) that lay ‘in between’, before the Russian Empire won control of most of the region in the late eighteenth century. In the nineteenth century Belarusians still thought of themselves as members of the old Commonwealth, or as ‘west-Russians’ – loyal to the empire and to the Orthodox Church, despite most Belarusians having been Uniate Catholics only a generation before. A specific national movement appeared relatively late, after the Revolution in 1905, and was still weak in 1917. The unification of Belarusian lands first in the 1920s and then during the Second World War was a project of Soviet power. Belarus is not a nation without a history. The two main English-language accounts, Nicholas Vakar’s Belorussia: The Making of a Nation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1956) and Jan Zaprudnik’s Belarus: At a Crossroads in History (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1993), were written when Belarus was still part of, or just potentially emerging from, the . Both authors wanted to demonstrate that Belarus had a separate history and could one day be inde- pendent, strong and free. But Belarus’s history has basically been a series of false starts – though each different beginning has left important legacies. The first part of this book looks at all of these pre-histories, before the modern idea of xii INTRODUCTION TO THE NEW EDITION

Belarus began to crystallise around 1900. The second part looks at the rise and possible fall of Aliaksandr Lukashenka, who ironically first won a relatively free election in 1994, before ruling twenty-six years until 2020. Ironically, too, he moulded Belarus in his own image – but Belarus outgrew him. The revolution of 2020 marked another rebirth, and the emergence of a new civic nation. The final irony, however, was that in order to survive Lukashenka looked likely to go in the opposite direction, using Russian support to stay in power. The price could be very high: a hollowing-out of the state and its sovereignty. There are two new chapters and a conclusion for this paperback edition: Chapter 13 takes the story forward from 2010, Chapter 14 looks at the events of 2020, and a new Conclusion discusses whether Lukashenka could survive the protests. In order to emphasise what is distinct about Belarus’s history, I have chosen to use Belarusian names and spellings. So I have written ‘Lukashenka’ rather than ‘Lukashenko’; the former is the Belarusian spelling of his name, the latter is the Russian version. I have spelt the city Vitebsk, famous as the birthplace of the artist Marc Chagall, as ‘Vitsebsk’, and used words like ‘Litvin’ that are no doubt unfamiliar to most readers, but which are essential to understanding the story. Sometimes, however, choices have to be arbitrary. ‘’, for example, has many names, because it is at the centre of many national histories. I have chosen to call it ‘Vilna’ when it was a mainly Slavic city before it became the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius in 1940. It was only really ‘Wilno’, the Polish spelling, between the wars, and was never really ‘Vilnia’, which is the Belarusian spelling. I have chosen ‘Uladzimir’ rather than ‘Uladzimer’ in the main text, but the endnotes keep the original forms. Finally, I have chosen to transliterate the unique Belarusian letter ‘ў’ as ‘w’ rather than ‘u’, which is how it sounds and is hopefully clearer for the general reader. I would like to give warm thanks to all those who have helped in the prepa- ration of this book: to Andrei Dynko, Valer Bulhakaw, Mila Bertosh, Dzianis Meliantsow and Vitali Silitski in Belarus; to Father Nadson, who runs the Belarusian Library in ; to Natalia Leshchenko and Elena Korosteleva- Polglase in the UK; to Margarita Balmaceda, John-Paul Himka, Grigory Ioffe, David Marples, Barbara Skinner and Timothy Snyder in North America; to Alexandra Goujon and Anaïs Marin in France; to Rainer Lindner in Germany; to everyone at New , the Batory Foundation and OSW in Poland; to Miklós Haraszti in Hungary; to Yaroslav Hrytsak in Ukraine; and to all my colleagues at UCL and ECFR, especially Jana Kobzova, Ben Judah, Fredrik Wesslau, Joanna Hosa and Nicu Popescu. At Yale University Press, my thanks go to Heather McCallum, Robert Baldock, Tami Halliday and Joanna Godfrey. Miles Irving and Cath D’Alton at UCL made the maps. This book is dedicated to Vitali Silitski who passed away in June 2011, aged only 38.