48 THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER13, 2021
oligarchs have expressed interest in buy-
ing. According to a former senior mem-
ber of the Lukashenka regime, a joint
team of Russian and Belarusian offi-
cials has begun meeting regularly to
make important decisions on the coun-
try’s security.
Western officials told me that a for-
mal merger of the two countries was un-
likely, if only because such a move could
ignite a popular rebellion. “He’s made
himself much more vulnerable to pres-
sure from Russia,” a second Western
diplomat in Minsk told me. By crush-
ing dissent, Lukashenka seemed to be
mimicking his Russian benefactor, and
thus obviating the need for Russian
intervention.
Latushka told me that Putin had
tacitly approved the scheme to funnel
migrants to Poland, Lithuania, and Lat-
via. (A Kremlin spokesperson denied
this, saying, “President Putin and Rus-
sia have nothing to do with the migrant
crisis.”) In late spring, the first of thou-
sands of Iraqis began arriving in Minsk,
lured by a promise that they would be
allowed to migrate to Europe. During
my visit, I found myself waiting out a
downpour under an awning with a mid-
dle-aged man dressed in a cheap suit.
He told me that he was from Iraq. When
I asked how he’d come to be in Belarus,
he grew flustered—“I have to go”—and
hurried off into the rain.
European officials told me that the
Iraqis were driven in government buses
to the Lithuanian and Polish borders,
where they were ushered across. By late
summer, hundreds of migrants a day
were crossing the frontiers. “Lukashenka
has weaponized migration,” Gabrielius
Landsbergis, the Lithuanian foreign
minister, told me. The migrants were
obliged to pay local officials as much as
five thousand dollars apiece to reach
the border, so it seemed likely that peo-
ple inside the regime were profiting.
On Lukashenka’s watch, some six thou-
sand migrants crossed into neighbor-
ing countries.
Tsikhanouskaya, following the de-
velopments from outside Belarus, ar-
gued that the scheme was merely a
symptom of Lukashenka’s ruthlessness.
“Supposing this abuse of migrants is
somehow stopped, do you really be-
lieve the regime’s threats beyond its
borders will end there?” she asked the
European Parliament. “Do not let the
regime manipulate migrant smuggling
in order to obscure the human-rights
catastrophe inside the country. Both
Belarusians and migrants are now hos-
tages of the regime.”
In November, under diplomatic pres-
sure, Lukashenka stopped openly en-
couraging migrants to come to Belarus,
and began sending some home. But
there were indications that he was
merely pausing his operation; thousands
of migrants remained in Belarus. “They
have dialled it down,” the second West-
ern diplomat told me. “But they could
dial it back up whenever it suits them
to do so.”T
his summer, Tsikhanouskaya came
to New York’s Battery Park and ad-
dressed several hundred Belarusian
Americans. The Statue of Liberty stood
in the background; a sea of red-and-
white 1918 f lags waved in the crowd.
“Over the past year, your actions have
directly shaped the events unfolding in
Belarus,” she said. “Your demonstrations,
your conversations with journalists and
politicians, your assistance through sol-
idarity funds—even from so far from
home, you are participating fully in the
life of our common motherland.”
Her words, though true enough,
could have been uttered by nearly any
exile leader in the past century. In the
history of political exile, leaders forced
to flee their countries have often been
able to expect two things: they will usu-
ally be safe, and they will nearly always
be irrelevant. After Poland was cap-
tured by Communists, the Polish gov-
ernment in exile met in London draw-
ing rooms for fifty years, but it took a
group of dockworkers in Gdansk to
spark a revolution. A handful of exiles
have returned to power, including Aya-
tollah Ruhollah Khomeini, in Iran; Ho
Chi Minh, in Vietnam; and Lenin, in
Russia. But few of them effected change
without the military at their backs, and
even fewer established democracies.
Tsikhanouskaya and her aides are
determined to avoid the fate of simi-
larly situated groups before her. “We are
not a government in exile,” she said. Her
organization occupies a single floor of
an office building in Vilnius, with about
thirty employees; exiled Belarusians from
Poland, Ukraine, and Lithuania meetwith her staff regularly. She said that
her team was trying to build a perma-
nent opposition inside Belarus. Her staff
is in regular contact with dozens of peo-
ple; if, as many expect, Lukashenka calls
a nationwide referendum to reaffirm his
rule, they are talking about organizing
a campaign of protest votes. Allies of
Tsikhanouskaya’s circulate dissident
literature, including the weekly Honest
Newspaper; at least a million copies have
been distributed in Belarus. I saw one
in the stairwell of the building where I
stayed in Minsk, stuck to the wall with
decals of the 1918 flag.
There are limits to what Tsikhanou-
skaya’s movement can accomplish from
afar. “If you want a beautiful picture—
of demonstrations, of protesters—we
can call people to the streets,” she said.
“But how many victims will it cost us?”
Yet, she added, even a regime as repres-
sive as Lukashenka’s had limited means
available to control a population that it
had already lost. “Lukashenka can’t keep
on arresting people anymore,” she said.
“Now, when he arrests one person, two
more step forward.”
The journalist Igor Ilyash, a veteran
of many police detentions, believes that
Lukashenka’s government has entered
a long period of instability. “It can keep
its power now only by violence,” he told
me. “History shows it’s almost impos-
sible to continue with force and vio-
lence for very long.”
At times, the regime’s efforts to as-
sert control seem merely to demonstrate
how little power it has. After the pro-
tests, the phrase “Long live Belarus” was
banned. But during my visit I heard
people call it out on the street, signal-
ling their allegiance. By contrast, in two
weeks in Belarus, I saw just one public
display of support for the regime: a
middle-aged man, wearing shorts and
dress shoes, evidently drunk, wandered
up to my café table in Minsk. “Long
live Lukashenka,” he said, and then
belched and wandered off.
The most important pillar of Lu-
kashenka’s government is the security
forces. At the height of the protests,
some officers quit in frustration; a few
threw their uniforms in the trash. But
there was little other visible evidence
of dissent. Aliaksandr Azarau, who until
two years ago was a senior official in
the Ministry of the Interior, told me