40 THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER13, 2021
she might be shot, but the car kept mov-
ing, and she crossed into Lithuania.
The next morning, two videos of
Tsikhanouskaya surfaced online. She
looked exhausted, sad, broken. In the
first, made while she was being detained
in Belarus, she told the protesters to go
home, that the protests were over. In the
second, recorded after she had fled the
country, Tsikhanouskaya was free, but
her message was even more final. She
told the people of Belarus that she had
been defeated. “I thought that this cam-
paign had really steeled me and given
me so much strength that I could cope
with anything,” she said, fighting back
tears. “But I guess I am still the same
weak woman that I always was.” Mo-
ments later, the video went dark.
W
hen I visited Minsk, this past
July, I expected to find a grim
post-Soviet state, with concrete high-
rises and downtrodden workers plod-
ding the streets. I was half right. Much
of the city center was hemmed in by
brutalist buildings and Soviet monu-
ments; the Avenue of the Conquerors
was shadowed by the Stela, a fifteen-
story obelisk with a knifelike point. In
other neighborhoods, though, wide
boulevards and outdoor cafés made
Minsk feel as cosmopolitan as Berlin.
I spotted only a few remnants of the
protests: a white-and-red flag unfurled
from a second-story window and
quickly pulled back in; a procession of
women dressed in white, who walked
silently and soon disappeared.
The iconography of the current re-
gime is far more present. One morning,
as I rode in a taxi past a convoy of mil-
itary vehicles, my driver laughed and
pointed. “Lukashenka,” he said. “Boom-
boom-boom-boom.” Lukashenka is
sixty-seven, a bombastic figure with a
huge square head, a closely trimmed
mustache, and a thick neck that bulges
against his dress shirts. “He has a kind
of negative charisma,” Pavel Latushka,a former culture minister who fled Be-
larus last year after denouncing the re-
pression, told me. “From the moment
you meet him, he is dominating you.”
At cabinet sessions, his ministers are
often afraid to meet his gaze. Once, La-
tushka told me, the President paused a
discussion of government business to
warn him, “If you ever betray me, I will
strangle you with my own hands.”
Lukashenka has often met challenges
with threats. After he claimed victory
over Tsikhanouskaya, Western nations
imposed sweeping sanctions on his re-
gime. In response, Lukashenka oversaw
a bizarre scheme to destabilize neigh-
boring states, in which tens of thou-
sands of people from Iraq, Afghanistan,
and elsewhere were invited to use Be-
larus as a springboard for migrating
west. As refugees clustered in desolate
camps on the borders of Poland and
Lithuania, much of Europe was em-
broiled in the crisis. By the time it was
resolved, this fall, the election that set
it off was largely forgotten in the West.
Within his own country, Lukashenka
has imposed a kind of harsh paternal-
ism. “He considers himself to be the
protector of Belarus—from the West,
from Russia, from extremists within,”
a person who has known him for many
years told me. “He thinks that every-
one else is an infant, a child, against his
greatness.” Lukashenka, this person went
on, has maintained order, mostly through
the force of his will and the prodding
of his security forces: “The streets are
clean, people go to work. Belarus is still
a Soviet state, and Lukashenka is a So-
viet personality.” The country’s fear-
some secret police force is still known
as the K.G.B.
Lukashenka, the only child of an
abandoned mother, grew up in the vil-
lage of Kopys, in what was then the
Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic.
He began his career as a minor Soviet
functionary, working as a border guard,
an ideological lecturer, and the head of
a state-owned pig farm. When the So-
viet Union collapsed, in 1991, Russia
became independent, and the Belaru-
sian Republic, shorn of its anchor, fol-
lowed. Lukashenka was thirty-seven.
Belarus had gained independence be-
fore, in the turbulent period near the end
of the First World War, but it didn’t last
long enough for a sense of national iden-“Have you tried re-starting your computer?”