14 TheEconomistAugust 29th 2020
1T
o russia’s west, Belarus, previously a
model of authoritarian stability, is in
tumult. On August 9th its people refused to
accept the official assertion that they had,
once again, chosen to elect Alexander Lu-
kashenko, the country’s dictator. In Rus-
sia’s far east demonstrators have been on
the streets since July, when the governor of
the Khabarovsk region, who had been
elected without the Kremlin’s blessing,
was arrested on Moscow’s orders and
charged with murders committed in the
early 2000s.
Those protests were a harbinger of hope
for Alexei Navalny, a charismatic Russian
opposition leader. He was looking forward
to issuing a palpable rebuke to the Russian
regime at this September’s regional elec-
tions; the far-eastern unrest showed the
strategy was working. But Mr Navalny now
lies in a coma in a Berlin hospital, having
apparently been poisoned in Russia by per-
sons unknown on August 20th.
Together, these three developments
make the prospects for Russia’s president,Vladimir Putin, more precarious than at
any time since he came to power.
The unspecified neurotoxin which his
doctors blame for Mr Navalny’s condition
seems to have been administered while he
was returning to Moscow after a trip to Si-
beria. Whoever carried out the attack, the
subsequent attempts by the Kremlin to
stop Mr Navalny’s transfer to a hospital in
Germany, its refusal to investigate the at-
tack and its efforts to muddy the waters
strongly suggest complicity if not outright
responsibility.
For years Mr Putin has used the power of
the state to harass Mr Navalny, pursuing
him through the courts, imprisoning him
for short spells, excluding him from bal-
lots—but never silencing him definitively.
Holding back in this way, it was thought,
demonstrated the president’s confidence
in his invincibility. At the same time it held
out the faint possibility that Mr Navalny
might one day lead a real uprising—a pos-
sibility which helped ensure the support of
the elites with whom Mr Putin lives in co-dependency. For Mr Navalny to be removed
from the scene, as has now happened,
would show either that the president no
longer controlled his own partisans or that
he felt real fear.
What there is to be afraid of can be seen
over the western border. Despite—indeed
to some extent because of—reprisals
which have included beating and torture,
apparently leaving at least five people
dead, the people of Belarus are protesting
in ever greater numbers, feeling their mo-
ment has come. Their revolt matters to Mr
Putin not because he is particularly depen-
dent on Mr Lukashenko, nor because the
two countries have, since 1996, been joined
in a two-country common market known
as the “Union State”. It matters because
Belarus has served as a template for many
of the tactics Mr Putin has used to achieve
and maintain his power, and Mr Lukash-
enko has now lost any semblance of legiti-
macy. Though Mr Putin has never been dic-
tatorial in quite the same way, he may only
be a few steps behind him.
Those involved join the dots quite ex-
plicitly. On August 15th Mr Lukashenko,
trying to drum up support, said on televi-
sion “It is not a threat to just Belarus any-
more. Defending Belarus today is no less
than defending our entire space, the Union
State, and an example to others.” The others
who needed that example set, it went with-
out saying, were those in Russia sympa-
thetic to Mr Navalny. Or, as Leonid Volkov,The people lose patience
MINSK
The uprising in Belarus and the poisoning of Alexei Navalny reveal Vladimir
Putin’s vulnerabilityBriefing Belarus and Russia