Part One: Alexander Lukashenko: The Dictator of Belarus

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
M fucking hey, Bluetooth and headphones. This has been a
terrible morning of figuring out technology things. And it's also
three in the afternoon, which is nine in the morning
for me. I'm Robert Evans. This is Behind the Bastards,
the show where every week I write a very long

(00:22):
essay about a different terrible person and then fail at
the basics of setting up headphones. Um, it's it's it's
the worst. The reason we've been having such terrible technical
difficulties is that today I actually have someone in the
studio with me, which we haven't done since the plague.

(00:42):
But the person the studio, Yeah, my desk that's in
front of my bed in my room that is filled
with ants and pieces of guns. Um, why are there
a Garrison? Say hello to the people? Hello? Hello, Hello, Hi,
this is this is Garrison. This is Garrison Garrison. Who
are you tell the people who you are? High? So
some people may know me as at Hungry bow Tie
on Twitter or Garrison Davis tear gas proof. Um. I've

(01:07):
been covering the protests in Portland and have been working
alongside Robert Evans and some other fine fine folks while
getting shot at by federal agents for months now. Yep.
We we met in a cloud of tear gas, and
most of our relationship has occurred in that cloud of
tear gas. Uh. And now we are becoming podcast buddies

(01:28):
in addition to tear gas buddies, which is which is
an exciting moment. And I could have just stayed home
and recorded from there and not had to deal with
this terrible bluetooth headphone situation. It's been awful. So the situation.
We want to have Sophie on as we record, but
a variety of things make that problematic, including the way
that headphones work. Nobody sells headphones splitters anymore, so we

(01:49):
eventually had to go by these things that you zoomers love,
these these little headphones don't separate, separate Bluetooth. Don't blame
me for don't don't rope me into that. I am
absolutely blaming you for the state of headphones back in
my day. Back in my day, Garrison, all we needed
was an audio jack and then a little splitter and
you get as many headphones as you wanted on a laptop.

(02:09):
Can we circle back to the part where you say
you wanted to have Sophie on. Excuse me? Yeah, you
are allowed to be here because I allow you to
be here. Continue. Okay, So Garrison, you are you are
one of the youth. Yes, that is the future. Yes
I am I am the future. Yeah, you're you're famously
seventeen years old. What is a TikTok? I've never had

(02:35):
it is? It's a sound of clock mix. I feel
like that's not what the president's banning. And I feel
like you're hiding your secret, your secret millennial zoomer whatever.
I'm seventeen for another month, but I've never had a TikTok. Okay,
So maybe the other thing you can explain? What is
what is an ariana grande? No, goddamn Robert, you know

(02:56):
how to pronounce her name. It's a coffee from Starbucks, right, Yeah,
that sounds right, favor. Now that we've settled all these
issues that the youth can teachious about the future. Um,
sorry about climate change, by the way, that's going to
be a real problem for you guys. Um, I'll be
dead of many cancers by then. Thanks for that. In
a year and a half, Um, we're talking today about
Alexander Luca Shanko. Uh. And maybe folks don't super know

(03:21):
about this guy, but you've probably heard about some messed
up stuff happening in Belarus. Um, he's the dictator of Belarus.
So this is a very timely episode. Um. And you know, Garrison,
I was gonna have you want to talk about Dr
Jordan B. Peterson. But considering the fact that Belarus is
rising up against his dictator right now and they're all

(03:41):
getting horribly tear gassed and shot with rubber bullets, and
We've been horribly tear gassed and shot with rubber bullets,
I thought this would be a fun a fun subject
that also is timely. Yeah, there's a little bit of
relatability there. What do you know about Belarus, Little to
nothing except they are now experiencing a lot of tear
gas and getting shot at by their police. So that
is probably true for basically everybody. I mean, I'll be honest, like,

(04:04):
I knew that there was a dictator in Belarus and
that he was famously called Europe's last dictator by a
bunch of like American politicians. Um, but that's that was.
That was about of my knowledge of Belarus. Other than that,
I think they have arguments with Ukraine over who does
the best strange pig based dishes, um, which I can't

(04:27):
comment on, but there's some good ass pig based dishes.
Salo man, fucking amazing. But they both have salo, So
I don't know you ever had salo, Sophie. Mm hmm.
It's like guacamole made out of pigs. It kind of rules. Yeah,
you're not gonna get along in Eastern Europe. I'll trust
you on that one, buddy. Okay, So we're gonna talk

(04:51):
Lukashenko today. Um So, yeah, once upon a time, and
by which I mean like three years ago, he was
repeatedly called Europe's last dictator by a bunch of American politicians.
And now there's a whole bunch of other dictators in
Europe again, so that's not really Yeah, you've got like
a discounting Russia if we call them like, because there's

(05:12):
always that debate over like how European Russia is, like
we've still got hungry. Yeah, Yeah, there's a lot more
dictators in Europe. So he's not he's not as special
as he used to be, but it is special because
uh Lukashenko has been in powerful like twenty six years,
so like throughout the whole kind of Golden Age, or
if you want to call it that, if the like

(05:34):
the kind of height of the European Unions influenced the
height of NATO's power. Um, he was like an old
Soviet style autocrat hanging out in the in the middle
of Europe. Um. It's it's a pretty weird story and
he's not This is going to be I think useful
because this is in the news right now. He's plays
it pretty close to the chest, So we just don't

(05:54):
know as much about the guy personally as we do
about some other figures. But I think it's still a
useful story to get out to people in the moment here. So,
Lukashenko survived the collapse of the USSR and basically spent
the whole period of capitalist democracy's victory lap ruling over
a nation of nine and point five million people. He
survived economic downturns, the birth of the Internet, conflicts between

(06:16):
his nation's neighbors, and a bunch of really awkward to
hang out sessions with Steven Seagal. Today though he's obviously
in trouble and for the first time in thirty years, Yeah,
he's this is that. We talked about this on the
Segal episode. This is the guy who like gave states
Abolo Giant Carrott. He's just out there, Steven Seagal. Yeah, sure,
is just occasionally kidnapping women and locking them in a

(06:40):
I don't want to finish that thought. Um. Yeah, so no,
we shouldn't. So there's a lot of eyes on Belarus
right now. UM, we should probably start by covering some
basic facts. Because most people don't know anything about Belarus. Um.
Belarus is located in eastern Europe. It's about as far
east as you can go without hitting Russia. It's immediate
western neighbor is Poland and its habors to the north,

(07:01):
or Latvia and Lithuania. You could call it Ukrainian Canada,
although nobody does. No one does that, including this Canadian.
Yeah and yeah, there's not really any comparisons to make
between Ukraine and Belarus, and in that regard, um, unless
like is Canada dictatorship. Garrison not really Okay, okay, it
tries not to be. Yeah, Garrison's Canadian. So I mean

(07:24):
our current prime minister did not get the majority of
the votes in our last election. Um, because we have
a weird system that is different than the electoral college. Um.
But has some similarities. It's weird and not great. But yeah, anyway,
it's cute how both of our countries make the same
horrible decisions. Um but but just a little bit, a

(07:46):
little bit a little different shine on them. Yeah. Yeah,
that's nice. That's what friends do. So um yeah, if
you know a little bit of history and geography, you
can tell that Belarus has had a rough time of
it historically. Being right between Poland and Russia doesn't seem great.
Not not great, but there's a lot of problems with
not the best spot to have, like not maybe not

(08:08):
as bad as starting place as Germany, which is a
pretty rough location to have a country. Um, as you
might gather, but like they're they're they're kind of in
the middle of a lot of ship historically, in the
middle of a lot of genocide. Yeah, in the mid
of genocide because connect to Ukraine, Russia and Poland, there's
a lot of genocide in the adjacent area. Yeah, Belarusian

(08:29):
history has a couple of different points where we say
and then a shockingly high percentage of the nation's entire
population was killed in the space of a year. Uh So, Yeah,
Belarus bad place to start as a country. If you're
if you're playing like civilization or whatever, and this is
where you land, you're gonna have a rough You're gonna
have a rough game of it. Um. Belarusian identity is
generally traced back to kind of starting to form in

(08:51):
the tenth century in the establishment of the Principality of Polotsk.
The first Belarusians entered history largely for their ability to
maintain and profit off of a trade route connected the
Vikings to the Greeks, Which is part of why it's
such a rough place to be is it's like kind
of right in the middle of a bunch of roads.
Like if you want to get anywhere in Europe from Asia,
you're gonna wind up rolling through Belarus probably um. And

(09:13):
that you know, is a recipe for getting the ship
kicked out of you a bunch uh. They had a
lot of ups and downs the medieval period and spent
a lot of time fighting with the Mongols um, which
are not a group of people you really want to
fight um, But eventually they won. By the thirteen hundreds,
what is today Belarus had become a central part of
the Grand Duchy of Lithuania UM, so Lithuanians and Belarusians
were the same people for a while. Um. At least

(09:37):
that's what the historians I've read tend to say. I'm
sure there's historians who will say that that's horribly inaccurate,
but that seems to be broadly the consensus um and
that at around like the fourteen hundreds, UM, Belarus and
Lithuanian identity started to split, and by the sixteen hundreds
that whole chunk of Europe was more or less a

(09:58):
free for all of constant warfare between different kingdoms, between
conflicts with Moscow, Poland, Sweden, and the Ottoman Empire. The
population of modern day Belarus was reduced by half over
the course of a few decades in the sixteen hundreds. Yeah,
so that's the first time a gigantic percentage of the
of the population dies hard. Yeah, sixteen hundreds, half of

(10:19):
belarusk uh theologists get murdered. Um, so that's good. In
the early eighteen hundreds, Belarus was absorbed by the Russian
Empire and became its northwestern region. So it's like the
Pacific Northwest for Russia. There's so many relatable elements here. Yeah,
that's why, in addition to Ukraine's Canada. Belarus's other nickname
that nobody calls it is Russian Oregon. That's good because

(10:40):
I'm both Canadian and an Orgonian. Yeah, this is really
we should be able to identify with these people. So
being in the northwest of Russia was a bad place
to be for basically all of the twentieth century. Um,
and the horrific wars of that era, World War One
and World War Two reduced the population of Belarus again
by more than the third by the end of Yeah,

(11:02):
like they just they just keep huge numbers of them,
keep getting any time, like you're able to say, like,
and then this whole region was depopulated by this massive fraction.
It's not a great history. Um So, yeah, they've had
a rough time of it. By the end of World
War two, Belarus, it's been half a century being either
torn apart by mechanized warfare or recovering from being torn
apart by mechanized warfare. So the region settled into its

(11:24):
new life after World War Two. Is one of the
less memorable chunks of the Soviet Union. And for a
while things were like relatively okay comparatively compared to everyone dying. Sure,
I mean once you've hit a low that bad. Anything
besides that is comparatively good. Yeah, and they did, you know,
they suffered. There was quite a bit of state repression
in Belarus, which we'll talk about some of the effects

(11:47):
from a little bit later. Um. And everywhere in the
USSR had its different experiences, both good and bad. It
was a big, complicated thing that happened. Um. You can
make a case that Belarus was one of the parts
of the Soviet Union that was kind of broadly happiest
with the whole arrangement. I did come across interviews with
a number of Belarusian anarchists who talked about severe repression

(12:09):
of their cultural identity and the civic union in favor
of Russian identity. Um. This is something that happened all
over the USSR, and it seems like it was a
problem in Belarus. Two. Um, But it is true that
in nineteen ninety one, when the various Soviets of the
Union had a referendum on whether or not to keep
being the Soviet Union, Belarus was one of the few
places where most people wanted to keep going. Of Belarus

(12:30):
voted to continue being a part of the Soviet Union.
It seems like people were like broadly like on board
with what was with what was going down, but that
doesn't tell the whole story. Those numbers do get cited
a lot as evidence that people were very happy with
the system, but things aren't quite that simple. Faith in
the Soviet government had begun to collapse in Belarus starting
in nineteen eighties six with a chair Noble disaster and

(12:52):
its subsequent cover up doesn't make people don't like nuclear
power plants exploding and then being covered up, and sens
of people being poisoned, not not a fan of giant
explosions then getting yeah, yeah, yeah it's not it's not
anyone's best day ever, and making of incompetence causing giant
explosions also a timely, timely reference. So I thought you

(13:13):
were going to do an ad pivot there. Yeah, this
podcast is supported by the concept of nuclear power plants
being improperly maintained. It was a real big ad gate
for US Raytheon sponsors blowing up this entire city. Yeah,

(13:35):
I mean they don't stop it, stop it if it's
if it's not okay to influence a young man to
appreciate Raytheon's fine product line, then I don't know what is.
As we grow up in a complicated, conflicted world, we
all need the security that comes from a raytheon based

(13:58):
knife missile. It makes makes me feel safe and secure
in my look. Sophie, seventeen year old isn't allowed to
own a firearm, but there's no law that says he
can't own a drone fired knife missile. Not in this country.
Not in this country, good country. That's how you defend
your home is with a knife missile. I thought it
was with a mae. I have those two. Um. Yeah,
So people got angry in Belarus over chair noble. Uh.

(14:20):
And that was six And in ninety eight that anger
was compounded when an archaeologist named Zionon Pasniak discovered a
series of mass graves that dated back to Stalin's terror.
These graves were located at a place called Karapati outside
of the Belarusian capital of Minsk, and they held more
than a quarter of a million corpses. Okay, here we go, people,

(14:42):
people are not at their While most Belarusians vote to
stay in the Soviet Union, there's a lot of those
were not able to vote. Those those guys couldn't vote. Yeah,
and it does broadly make people less trusting of the
government when they find a quarter of a million dead
people buried outside of their hometown own. I wouldn't, I
would be I would have some questions, I would we would.

(15:03):
Yeah that it's not great. Um, when you that's not
the thing you want to hear about, Like, yeah, So
the fact that an archaeologist working for the state was
allowed to reveal that a quarter of a million people
had been murdered and buried outside of Minsk is evidence
that in nineteen eighty eight there was a lot less
repression in the USSR than there is. Yeah. Yeah, I

(15:24):
love it when the state doesn't kill someone for saying
there's a whole bunch of dead bodies. Yeah. Obviously this
was very troubling to people, and so there were a
lot of calls to reform and accountability. Activists within Belarus
created the Belarusian Popular Front in October of nineteen eight
after mass protests that ended in fights with state security forces.
And all of this brings us back around to Alexander Lukashenko,

(15:45):
who by that point was running a series of collective farms.
He was a pig farmer. Basically, um loves loves him
some collective farms, um, and was apparently pretty good at
running collective farms, and we should probably hop back in
time again at this point. UM. Alexandr Grigoryevitch Lukashenko was
born in August thirtieth, nineteen fifty four, and this much

(16:06):
a lot of people agree on. Uh. Pretty much everything
else about his background is up for grabs, though many
sources will say that he was born in the rural
verage village of Copius in the Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic,
but Lukashenko himself has given multiple different answers when asked
where he was born. He's claimed he was born in
a god forsaken half Belarusian half Russian village and also

(16:27):
that he was born in the city of Orsha. Uh.
The reason for this discrepancy is simple. Lukashenko was more
or less than nobody for most of his life. He
was derided as just like a pig farmer by his
rivals when he came to power, and there were very
few public details about his early life. And that's kind
of the way that Lukashenko wanted it. As he began
taking over, he knew that his biography was more of
a tool for taking and holding power than it was

(16:48):
an actual work of historical importance, and as such, most
of it shall read about Lukashenko tells us less about
the man himself than it does about the culture of
leadership and propaganda in the U. S s R, which
I find kind of cool. Um. So, wherever you find
like a community, a subculture, occult, a nation, um, an
ideology that's based around like charismatic individual people, you will

(17:10):
find specific traditions about writing biographies for those figures. And
this is true everywhere. Um. It's not just like a
communist thing. It's not just a dictatorship thing. It's true
of market capitalism. If you go grab a biography of
Elon Musk and a biography of Steve Jobs, and a
biography of Bill Gates, and you know, maybe run through
a couple of those fawning profile pieces in like The
New Yorker of people like Elizabeth Holmes or Travis Kallinik

(17:30):
of Uber or the Wee Work guy, like before all
of their grips became crashing to the grad. Yeah, if
you read a bunch of that stuff in a row,
you'll notice a bunch of patterns. All of these biography
they feel like kind of all just the same book.
They are more or less. Yeah, And there's the thing,
like you have to in those books, you have to
have like, um, a period where they're working out of
a garage. There's a structure, there's there's a structure that

(17:51):
we like when we learn without the people, we like
consuming a certain arenime exactly. And they constructed you know,
Google was in this garage when it actually wasn't. You know.
It's the same thing. Yeah, it's the same thing. If
you if you find the books that presidential candidates all,
like every presidential candidate has to publish a stupid fucking
book right before they start their campaign. It's required now. Um.
And they're all the same book basically, uh, because that's

(18:13):
just what we expect. Um. And if you grew up
under evangelical Christianity, like you grew up like me, Yeah, um,
you know what all of like the whenever you have
like a charismatic preacher who comes to like deliver their
you know, like they all have the same have the
same story. It's the same grift over and over yet yeah, exactly.
It's it's just a thing that people need in their
stories of charismatic leaders and it's the same uh in

(18:36):
propagandistic biographies of Eastern Bloc leaders. Um So, one thing
that is emphasized in all of the stories about Lukashenko
is that he was his dad was absent, and he
was raised by his single mother. Uh as was Joseph
Stalin everybody, as with Saparmaranti is off of Turkmenistan. Nikolai
Cichesko knew his dad, but his dad was an abusive prick,

(18:56):
and Nikolai was always a mama's boy. So like shittier
absent father is a Soviet leadership trope. It's it's it's yeah,
it's like it's a trope that they keep that they
keep using. Whether it's true or not right, it's it's
still something that they will. They will still reinforce that narrative. Yeah,
they reinforce that narrative, and it's seen as being like
important to getting people to um to like feel the
way about the leader that they kind of expected. It's yeah,

(19:21):
it's like Disney, you got to kill the parents. Yeah, yeah,
you gotta kill the parents in order to have a
good dictator. So if you want to make a dictator, Nope,
I don't know where are you going? Anyway, continue, I
don't I don't know, Sophie, I don't know. It's it's
I'm just angry about the headphones. But you know what,
I'm not angry about, Sophie. You know what I'm not

(19:43):
angry about find products and services that support this podcast.
None of what's your headphones. I hope there's some wireless
head I hope. I hope Recon gets in here real quick.
If Recon starts trying to advertise on our podcast, they're
going to have to deal with our other sponsor, Raytheon.
And I tell I'll tell you who I think is
gonna win in a fight between some people who make
headphones and are are good friends with the Knife Missiles.

(20:04):
It's the Knife Missiles products. We're back. Oh that was horrible.
I accidentally made a minor adjustment to these goddamn newfangled
bluetooth earbuds off. The whole situation was horrible. We spend

(20:25):
hours getting this set up and destroyed it in a
few seconds. I feel comfortable saying that Soviet Union works
about as well as these horrible bluetooth headphones. In the headphones,
I responsible for multiple genocides, well not nine, Okay, okay, okay, fair, fair,
just like well, I mean you could argue series of

(20:47):
war crimes anyway whatever whatever, Um, okay. So yeah, we're
we're talking about like Soviet leader tropes and Lukashenko. So
obviously all of his biographies will point out that his
dad was gone. They all will a very different things
about why his dad was gone, um, which is I

(21:07):
think kind of interesting, Like it's like the Joker. Yeah,
I think so are they like stories like well, like
is it like like yeah, kind of One of his
stories is that his dad died during World War two, um,
which is like a Turkmen Boshi, the Dictaty of Turkmenistan,
had the same story his dad died in World War Two.
The problem with this is that Lukashenko was born in

(21:28):
nineteen fifty four. So I love how that works out. Yeah. Yeah,
Like you said, all these true crime shows when they're
like and then we we found the murder, and then
they're like, I was in jail at the time of

(21:48):
that death. That's what it feels like. Yeah. Yeah, it's
it's like that, um. And it may seem kind of
baffling that a guy who's already in power would choose
such like an obvious lie. But Lukashenko's started making this
claim during a different period for his regime, between two
thousand six and two thous eight, when a bunch of
opposition groups rose up in protests against one of his

(22:09):
many sham elections. Uh, he meaned, yeah, I mean, our
us in America have no experience with the leader in
office making obvious sides about his family history. We don't
know anything about this only happens in uh post uh
Soviet Union satellites, not in this country. Yeah. So, yeah,
it's so he started lying about his dad dying in

(22:31):
World War Two a decade before he would be born. Um,
during like this period of time when he's, you know,
his legitimacy as president was being challenged and thousands of
protesters were out in the streets fighting with cops. Uh.
And I'm going to quote now from an article in
the journal of Journal of Folklore Research that's kind of
about the different ways Lukashenko has presented himself. Um, and

(22:53):
it's going to sort of try to explain why maybe
he made this kind of baffling call quote. Lukashenko sought
to gain support through different means, including an established genre
from the Soviet period of Belarus fake lore epics about
Soviet heroes. They were often made up by professional folk
singers guided by professional folklorists to glorify Soviet ideologies and
particular protagonists Lenin Stalin, workers of the Soviet Union, etcetera,

(23:15):
who embodied them. These new epics, called novini, combined the
structures and motifs of traditional epics and were purposefully recorded
and published. So like, basically it was it was this
kind of thing that everyone probably more or less knew
where he was lying about his background, but he was
lying about his background in order to make a specific
kind of propaganda art that everybody like knew what to

(23:39):
expect from. So like everyone kind of knew that he
was lying, um, but also the people who liked him
didn't care. Just part of the thing, this is just
what like leaders do in this part of the world,
as they talk about how their dads died fighting the Nazis,
even if their dad didn't Yeah, when you were born,
might not have been old enough to make a baby

(24:01):
in nineteen yeah, um, so yeah, that's very funny. Um.
I find all of this interesting anyway. So the right
up in the Journal of Folklore Research that I found
compares Lukaschenko's Lukashenko Shifting birthdate and birthplace to the book
nineteen eighty four, where like the reality is actually meaningless
to even him. What matters is like that the state

(24:21):
can get people to believe it, or at least act
as if they believe it. Um, which is cool. Yeah,
that's always neat um. I'm gonna quote again from that article.
We might expect official narratives to strive for monologic uniformity,
but the results of my research demonstrate that official discourse
on Lukashenko's birth and life as a whole is an
incoherent mess of of official representation, altered narratives, literary productions,

(24:43):
and quotations ascribed to the president. That the president's own
words are often contested provides a good example of how
fragile his biography is and how easily it can be
challenged by vernacular alternatives. Um, which is something we'll talk
about a little bit later. The idea that um, a
bunch of people have kind of made up their own
opponents of Lucas Shanko get to also make up their
own backgrounds for the guy, because everyone knows that everything

(25:04):
you say about him is just sort of a liarar propaganda,
like just like a choose your own backstory book. Yeah,
for the president if you want this backstory turned to
page x x X. Yeah, but this backstory turned to
page xx y. It's cool. So the alternative backstories for
Lukashenko that his um his opponents com up with are

(25:26):
often based on like racism, which is unfortunately yeah. Yeah.
Many in the Belarusian opposition are convinced that Lukashenko's father
was a German soldier, which is the non racist option
where they're like, he's so shitty, his dad must have
been a Nazi. Um. Others contend that his father was
secretly a Jewish Man, which is not a rumor I
like as much. Uh. And he's also regularly accused of

(25:48):
hiding his Roma ancestry um, although they are not polite
enough to use the correct name. Uh and and go
with calling him a gypsy. That's like a common slur
against Lukashenko. Interesting. Um. Yeah, So I did want to
get a clear idea of what the modern state propaganda
about Lukashenko's background sounded like. I wanted to know, like,
what is what is the actual government right about this guy?

(26:10):
And I found a book called with a very fun
title Belarus Country Study Guide. Uh. That certainly seems to
be government propaganda. It's published by a US based publishing house,
but the inside jacket notes that the information inside was
provided by the Belarusian government. Um. And yeah, you can
kind of tell by reading it that it was just

(26:31):
published by the dictatorship propaganda arm and and not edited
at all. The government propaganda version of his life, or
at least this one that I found, because again they
throw out a bunch of different versions, just states that
he quote grew up and reared without a father. Um.
Not not perfect grammar in this translation here they put

(26:51):
this put a considerable amount of responsibility for his family's
care on his shoulders. Quote. This is why it is
logical that as early as in childhood such qualities as perseverance,
back to work, sensibility to truth and verity as the
main basis of the human soul, were being revealed. He
was interestingly taking part in the social life of the
collectives in which he studied or worked. The whole thing
kind of reads like that, it's it's mostly incomprehensible, um,

(27:16):
but it does have I don't know, a couple of
of of attempts at facts in there. It notes that
he served and served in the Soviet Army from nineteen
seventy to nine two. Uh. It notes that he became
an officer in the Communist Party and eventually found himself
managing collective farms. Uh. Notes that he rose in prominent
did like a d I Y bio for himself. Um No,

(27:36):
it's like, uh yeah, kind of like at least oversaw it. Yeah.
I think that there's like at different points in his rule,
he's kind of let the people putting out state propaganda
know that he wants them to write different biographies for him,
to emphasize different things. So it's like when you have
a friend who acts different around different friend groups. Yeah,

(27:58):
but instead of that, it's like a friend who acts
different around different crowds of angry Belarusians in order to um,
I don't know, keep everybody happy or to maintain power
in a Yeah, in a very weird, it's cool, very
strange quality. Yeah, it is. It is, And and Lukashenko
is interesting just because like we actually know so little

(28:18):
about the guy as a person, um, which is different.
Like I much prefer it when we have a really
detailed back story about one of these individuals. But we
we just kind of have really the history of the
different lies that his regime has told about him. Um So, Yeah,
that's unfortunate. Um So. He rose in prominence within the
Communist Party throughout the late nineteen eighties, and he developed

(28:41):
a reputation as a firebrand, like he was an anti
corruption crusader within the Soviet Union for a period of time. Uh,
and he received repeated reprimands from the party because he
could not keep silent. Um. Yeah. And thankfully for him,
you know, by the time he was getting in trouble
for talking out against basically trying to drain in the
swamp within the USSR, things had opened up culturally there

(29:04):
enough that he didn't get disappeared or in trouble for it.
And in fact, he was elected to the Belarusian Parliament
in nineteen ninety as a People's Deputy on a platform
of fighting corruption. Lukashenko straddled an interesting line of criticizing
the Soviet government that had managed things for decades while
also opposing any breakup of the USSR. He was the
only deputy of the Belarusian Parliament to vote against the

(29:25):
nineteen dissolution of the Soviet Union, which is something he
brags about today because like a lot of folks in
that part of the world miss the Soviet Union. Some
older folks are pri nostalgic for him. Yeah, and he
can be like, I was the one guy who knew
that it was a bad idea. Yeah, it is a
cool flex Yeah. But at the same time, like he
actually got to power by repeatedly criticizing the Soviet Union

(29:46):
and pointing out how like fucked up and corrupt the
government was, which is interesting. He's a fake, he's playing
both sides. He's playing both sides. He's doing what you
gotta do as a politician. It's like, how you gotta Yeah,
he's pulling a job Biden, Yeah, yeah, or Biden's pulling up.

(30:07):
So as the USSR fell apart, Western interests rushed in
to help their former enemy transition to the world of democracy,
and in practice this meant something for most like Soviet
satellite states, something called shock therapy um, which was this
kind of like theory among capitalists that like, as these
nations sort of opened up, the best thing to do
was immediately privatized every single thing in the country, um,

(30:29):
and that that would work. That like shocking people into
full on capitalism um would be a good idea for
reasons that were unclear and probably based around the fact
that it was extremely profitable for capitalists. UM. Shock therapy
was not a wild success. It caused widespread economic and
social turmoil uh and is generally seen as having been

(30:49):
a disaster in most places it was tried, which is
why you have all those old people who are kind
of nostalgic because they got their lives kind of ruined
in the mid nineties. Yeah, it was nice when like
soulless business people didn't own our power plants. Uh, and
they were instead like property that was held in common.
Is kind of the way a lot of people feel. Uh. Now.

(31:10):
Nineteen ninety is the year Belarus held its referendum on
membership in the Soviet Union. People overwhelmingly wanted to stay,
but the Belarusian Popular Front had also grown into a
significant pop political force at that point. These are the
guys who were like nationalists they want Belarus to be
its own separate country. Um. And they're also democrats, so
like they want a democracy and they want Belarus to

(31:30):
be an independent nation. Um. And under their charismatic spokesman
a fellow named Pasniak. The BPF started at agitating for
Belarusian national ambitions for the first time in a generation,
and that year's elections to the Supreme Soviet the BPF
one of the seats, and this probably would have satisfied
most of the desire for change in Belarus at this point,
but happenings elsewhere in the USS are forced people's hands

(31:52):
in the direction of national sovereignty. In August of nineteen one,
there was a coup attempt in Moscow. It didn't work,
but it led to Yeah, I mean, wait, are you
pro coup or anti cusa? I was pro coup, you're
pro coup, You're you're you're in favor of this coup
in Moscow. It's a strong stance in favor of Soviet

(32:14):
hardliners by hardcore communist Sofia excited over the word coup. Yeah,
I mean, I always support a coup. It's always an
exciting word. We we we recently went through a coup
with a riot rib restaurant. That there's a rib restaurant
in Portland that had an armed coup. Reason. I actually
didn't enjoy that one. It was not fun. It was

(32:34):
seemed like a big, massive, yeah, and much like the
rib restaurant that briefly existed in downtown Portland. The Soviet
Union did not survive it's armed coup, or this attempted
an armed coup um so it The coup failed, and
it led to declarations of independence by all of the
Soviets that bordered Belarus, Estonia, Latvia, and Ukraine. By this point,

(32:55):
the writing was on the wallah, so every it's kind
of most people in Belarus don't seem to really want
the Soviet Union to go away, but also just because
of how fucked up everything gets and how badly it's
handled in Moscow, all of these other states in the
Soviet Unions start declaring their own independence, and the writings

(33:17):
kind of on the walls. Yeah, it's like it's it's
it's gonna come down, so we might as well like
get ahead start on being Belarus. So Belarus declares its
own independence on August twenty five, nineteen one. Um. The
sudden end of the Soviet Union ment opportunity for a
lot of people. Liberals, including members of the BPF, saw
it as their chance to turn the country into a
democracy along Western lines. There was a great deal of

(33:39):
resistance to this, though, and for a while the country's
old style Soviet organization remained mostly unchanged. By Nur, conservatives
have been pushed into creating a new position at the
head of Belarusian political life, the presidency. So everybody expected
that the Prime Minister, a guy named Ki, would slide
seamlessly from one head of state position to another, and

(34:00):
that he would just kind of go from being the
prime minister to the president now that they had a president.
But then from out of nowhere came Lukashenko. He ran
a lightning campaign based around fighting corruption in the ossified
old regime. And again, the guy's a pig farmer at
this point. Um, but he's a deputy and he kind
of like um, proves himself to be a really successful
rabble rouser. His campaign slogan was, I'm neither with the

(34:22):
leftists nor the rightists, but with the people against those
who rob and deceive them. He's he's just like a PA.
He's an effective politician. He's a very effect and he's
he's doing a drain the swamp sort of thing. Um
he does one of the things that he's he's kind
of focused on that that is probably a good idea
in the long run is he he doesn't want to
privatize Belarus's UM like state assets. Um. He wants to

(34:46):
keep the economy pretty much the same way it was
under the Soviet Union. And this is really the only um,
the only Soviet satellite state in Europe where this happens
in UM. So, Yeah, Lukashenko want a democratic elect with
about eight percent of the vote. And this is probably
like an actual election, and it's like it's not a
fake election like the one that just happened. No, it

(35:08):
seems like if I haven't heard any real arguments that
he that this was a fake election, and he kind
of came out of nowhere. He didn't have a lot
of institutional support when he won the presidency. Um. Yeah,
and he's he's kind of a weird guy to have
as your first president because for one thing, he didn't
really think there should be presidents. Um. He was not
a fan of democracy. Uh. He supported immediate reunification with Russia.

(35:31):
So he wasn't really a big supporter of Belarus being
an interest nation at the start. UM. And yeah, mostly
he mostly the reason that people voted for him was
his anti corruption stances, right like his other his other
the the other things that he like sort of focused
on weren't as popular, UM find interesting, just like reconciling
that with what he is now. Yeah, and it's yeah,

(35:55):
that's odd. He changes a lot. He keeps writing his worries,
you know. Yeah, he gets to do that because he's
the guy who controls the state security forces. But I'm
just saying, like that it makes sense that he's so
wishy washy flip floppy out of character. I think he
just has like a really bad identity crisis. Maybe just

(36:15):
doesn't know who he is. Maybe he just needs to
like go to therapy and like find himself thoughts. No, yeah,
I think he should take some molly and maybe, like,
you know, maybe he was told he was born at
a time and was following somebody else following a different
star sign when he should have been following another. We
don't know. Oh, it's an astrology problem that you're saying.

(36:39):
I'm just saying that might might must be wrong people,
because he doesn't know what his birthday is. What he
could do is he could he could sign up for
better help. Yeah, you're a better help online. That's something
that he could do. If you want to stop becoming
the dictator of Belarus. The only op is better Help

(37:00):
online counseling. A hundred percent of people who don't use
online counseling become the dictator of Eastern Bloc nations. It's
guaranteed to prevent you from becoming a dictator to exactly,
it's the only promise they make it Better Help is
that you will not become Alexander Lukashenko if you use
better Help. I mean it is actually time for an
ad break though, Robert, I know that's why I did that. Well,

(37:21):
I know what I'm doing. You might as well roll
into ads hopefully. I'm telling you Garrison is higher products.
Ye beat me? Did it? Bit my job? Now? All right,
we're back reize. So you've meant towards somebody who's younger

(37:43):
than you and knows how to do more things, and
it's slowly taking over your role, and he's sitting right
next to you, and you don't know what to do.
You know, it's terrible because he hasn't ruined his brain
with drugs yet. It's very funny. He hasn't ruined his
brain with a series of horrible decisions and has and
he has flu fier hair, than you. It's just so fun.
I know he's gonna coop me out of my show.
I know. I'm telling you, I'm watching it. That's why

(38:06):
I'm talking from machetes. God damn it. This is just
knives at my bed and we and we slowly realize
that your cat likes him more than you. It's just happening.
I'm going to have to hire riot police to protect
my my podcast. And then I've always from a teenager. Yeah, well,
just which is what the riot police are doing right now,
That's what that's what they're doing. So you could just

(38:27):
use the same guys. And I always choose you. We
will always choose you. I'm skeptical always, We'll see always
and forever. Back to actual dictators. Back to Lukashenko. So
he gets elected, this guy who doesn't really want to

(38:48):
be president um and who wants to basically go back
to being the Soviet Union, and who is like the
only thing that he's really popular for wanting is fighting
against corruption like that. This is the guy who becomes
the president of Bellas and his presidency is kind of
conflicted from the beginning. And I'm gonna quote now from
a study on the country that was written by an
academic named Helen fedor uh Quote. Lukashenka's presidency was one

(39:11):
of contradictions from the start. His cabinet was composed of young,
talented newcomers as well as veterans who had not fully
supported the previous prime minister. As a reward to the
parliament for confirming his appointees, Lukashenko supported the move to
postpone the parliamentary elections until May. Lukashenko's government was also
plagued by corrupt members. Lukashenko fired the Minister of Defense,

(39:32):
the Armed Forces chief of Staff, the head of the
Border Guards, and the Minister of Forestry. Following resignations among
reformists in Lukashenko's cabinet, Parliamentary Deputy Deputy cr Hey Anton Chick, Sorry,
good Russians read a report in parliament on December about
coruption in the administration, and this is Lukashenko's administration, so
he kind of like immediately puts new people in place

(39:55):
and their wind up being corrupted ship too. Although Lukashenko
refused to accept the resignations that followed, the government attempted
to censure the report. Feeling the oppositions criticism of Lukashenko
Lukashenko went to Russia in August nine and his first
official visit abroad at head of the state. There, he
came to realize that Russia would not make any unusual
efforts to accommodate Belarus, especially its economic needs. Nevertheless, Lukashenko

(40:17):
kept trying, and in February nine, Belarus signed the Treaty
on Friendship and Cooperation with Russia, making many concessions to Russia,
such as allowing the stationing of Russian troops in Belarus
and hopes that Russia would return the favor by charging
Belarus lower prices for fuels. However, because the treaty included
no such provision, there was little hope of realizing this objective.
So he's not great at this at first um and

(40:40):
his main plan for being the president seems to be
be like, become a Russian satellite state, so they'll sell
you cheap oil, um, which is I don't know, not
a great plan, but I've never been in charge of
Belarus what do I know? So right off the bat,
Lukashenko had issues with Parliament, mainly over the fact that
he didn't think it should exist or be able to

(41:01):
tell him what to do, which is a problem to have. Uh.
He was convinced that as president he had the right
to dissolve parliament in any moment, although no one else
was really sure they had this right. He was just like,
I'm pretty sure I could do this, um. And there
were there were disagreements, including by the parliamentarians who did
not think that he could do this. So eventually the
Parliament of Belarus starts carrying out a hunger strike against

(41:24):
the president UM and the protest ends when all of
the striking deputies were evicted from the Parliament house in
the dead of night by police who claimed that an
alleged bomb had been hidden somewhere in the building. So
they all get forced out of the Parliament building and
they head over to the National TV and Radio building
to make a statement, and they find that those buildings
have also been closed up. The police stud to an

(41:44):
alleged bomb. You don't think there were real bombs in
those places? Well, yeah, this could have been something. So
after all this, Parliament gave into Lukashenko on a number
of his demands because thanks to Belarus's complete lack of
a free press, he'd made it impossible for them to
publicize their strike. There were the bombs. What else can
you do? There were bombs and now we don't have
a parliament. It's not no more. It's the problems happening

(42:07):
in Europe. It does you know you know who else
doesn't have a Senate right now? Us because September. Yeah,
I wish they're no. Not gonna make that claim on
don't need to have another conversation with anyway, um the parliament.
I'm gonna quote again from Helen Federer's right up quote.

(42:28):
The parliamentary elections held in May of nine were less
than successful or democratic. The restrictions placed on the mass
media and on the candidate's expenditures during the campaign led
to a shortage of information about the candidates and almost
no political debate before the elections. In several cases, no
one candidate received the necessary majority of the votes in
the May fourteenth elections, prompting another round on The main

(42:49):
problem in the second round was the lack of voter turnout.
After the second round, Parliament was in limbo because it
had only a hundred and twenty elected deputies, still short
of the hundred and seventy four members necessary to seat
a new ledge aislature. After another round, another round of
elections was discussed probably near the end of the year,
but the government claimed to have no money to finance them.
So basically he forces the old parliament out, which forces

(43:11):
a new set of elections, but he also makes it
impossible for anyone to report on this and makes it
impossible for any of the campaigns to be funded, so
that nobody can actually have an election or vote or
know that they even need to vote. Um. And he
kind of just does away with a parliament that can
do anything against him in this in this manner, which

(43:31):
is like a real anti corruption president. Yeah. Yeah, that's
how you get rid of the corruption. I mean, I'm
sure all of those guys were corrupt, probably probably, but
there's another god of one corruptions for another, that's right, um,
thus solving the problem forever. So they not to make
a not all that long story short, Lukashenko emerged from

(43:51):
his fight with parliament as basically a dictator, so in
the space of his first year or two in power,
he kind of does away with any of the restrictions
against him. Political analyst Valerie Karbalovitch, author of an opposition
biography of Lukashenko, cites two factors his explanations for why
Belarus went straight to a strongman dictator after the fall
of the USSR and just kind of, you know, they

(44:12):
had a democracy for like a minute there, and they
just kind of gave it up as soon as the
first guy came along, who was like, but what if
we said fuck that? Um? And her explanation is quote,
Lukashenko was hungry for power and rejected having his powers
curtailed and Belarusian society. Society yearned for a sense of
of Soviet stability. So in nineteen Lukashenko decided to change

(44:33):
the constitution on his own and allow himself to fire
Parliament whenever he wanted, which really made the situation a
lot easier for him. He got rid of all the
deputies who had provided even mild resistance to his whims,
and he replaced them with a parade of yesmen. Since then,
he has not dealt with any serious challenges his to
his rule from within the political establishment. In nineteen seven,

(44:53):
Lukashenko established the Union State of Belarus and Russia with
Boris Yeltson. This was never a real organization, but it's
like it's like a fake EU for Russia and Belarus
that they tried to get a couple of other countries
on board with There was an idea that like they
might Russia might seed its sovereignty to this so that
Putin could be president passed his third term. But then

(45:14):
they just wound up doing that anyway. Um, but yeah,
it's just like this kind of fake political organization that
existed to kind of tie Belarus to Russia, and the
fact that it existed gave them sort of like political
cover for some of the things that like Russia wanted
to do. And in exchange for agreeing to this, uh

(45:35):
Lukashenko got the ability to achieve what would go on
to be the only real success of his reign, which
was like slow, steady economic growth and reliable payment of
state wages. UM. On paper, Belarus was a quasi Marxist state.
About eight percent of the economy is a troll controlled
by the states. Some people say sixty. It's somewhere in
that ballpark. UM. Belarus remains the only former Soviet state

(45:58):
where all farms are still collectivized. And while many Soviet
former Soviet republics have gone on to have tumultuous economies,
you know that of outright collapsed like Albania, and like Russia,
Belarus has, on the surface, like kept a relatively steady
course um and this has basically all been due to
Russian economic support. Belarus has survived by buying heavily subsidized

(46:19):
Russian crude oil, refining it, and then selling it to
the rest of Europe at a profit. This is kind
of like what funds everything in bell or what did
fund everything in belarust And An economy based on cheap
Russian gas allowed Lukashenko to mostly ignore Western complaints about
the human rights abuses within his country. Um. There were
many of these. He disappeared at least two of his
cabinet colleagues after they got too popular, and at least

(46:42):
four of his political opponents. Opponents like people running against
him in elections have just sort of been are no
longer there, whereabouts are no longer known. Um Now. Lukashenko
has felt the need, over the last twenty six years
of his rule to provide the occasional illusion of democracy
and choice to people Opposite Asian parties are generally allowed,

(47:02):
but then they tend to be either heavily compromised by
the get go, or they're very quickly banned and their
leaders are arrested, and in fact, it does kind of
seem like the only reason there are opposition parties in
Belarus is so that he can arrest the leaders of
those parties after the elections and throw them in dark holes. Um,
which is you know, one way to do it. Uh.
During the two six elections, Lukashenko warned that any Belarusians

(47:24):
who attended protests opposing his reign would have their next
run rung as one might have duck. Um. Yeah great, yeah,
that's nice. Um. And despite this, he consistently denies being
a dictator, stating at one point that my position in
the state will never allow me to become a dictator,
but an authoritarian ruling style is characteristic of me. So

(47:45):
like that's the that's his argument, and he's he's an
authoritarian and that's like no, no, no, no no, you don't understand.
I'm not a dictator. I'm an authoritarian. Yeah, very very different,
very different. It's like, um, it's like claiming you're a
civil libertarian as opposed to uh, I don't know, a Nazi. Um. Yeah. So,
Belarus's international political alignment has remained broadly Russia focused for

(48:08):
most of Lukashenko's reign, he made a point particularly early on,
of thumbing his nose at Western powers. In nine, he
bought a house in an upscale gated community in mink Minsk,
which was shared by twenty five ambassadors, including the British
and American envoys. And it was like nicer than most
housing developments and in Belarus tended to be. I'm surprised. Yeah,
Lukashenko decided he liked it and he wanted it all

(48:31):
to be, including all of the other people's houses who
lived there. So the British and American envoys refused to leave,
and so Lukashenko ordered water, electricity and gas cut off
to their homes. When they still refused to leave, he
changed the locks on the front gate so they could
no longer get back inside. Um, and eventually he got
his nice compound. There you go. That's how you do it,
and that's how you do it. That's how I procured

(48:53):
all my housing. Yeah, just change the locks, turn off
all the water and gas and change the locks. Then
people stop coming to exactly, and then it's yours. That's
a that's a good way to deal with the fact
that nobody in your generation can afford rent. So eventually
the U S and England withdrew their ambassadors in protest.
Lukashenko ignored this because he didn't give a fuck. But

(49:15):
his antipathy to the West has not been consistent in
recent years, nor his alignment in Russia. After the two
thousand six elections, the U S and the EU threw
a bunch of sanctions out at Belarus because you know,
because people protestion, yeah, and he beat them up, uh,
And then Russia invaded Georgia and around the same time,
um like, basically two dozen six, Lukashenko has some sham

(49:37):
elections and he beats the ship out of people who protest,
and the EU and the US put sanctions on him.
But then Russia invades Georgia at around the same time,
and he like is vaguely critical of Russia. Um. And
that makes the EU and the US happens better, but
it makes Russia angry, so they double the price of
the gas they're selling Belarus. Well, you can't, you can't
win it at all. No, no, And it's like he's

(50:00):
kind of just been dancing between NATO, UH and Russia
for most of the last ten years in particular, which
is is like interesting. You'll see a lot of people
will claim that, like, like there's a lot of suspicion
that you know, he was gonna when the protests started
getting out of hand, he was going to call on
Russia to defend his sovereignty. Um, but Russia hasn't been

(50:21):
super positive towards Lukashenko lately. Um, and the Belarusian government
actually arrested like a bunch of Russian mercenaries at the
whole start of things. So it's like it's a pretty
complicated situation because like you also have people who will
be like, oh, this uprising in Belarus is just like
orchestrated by NATO to try to remove another you know,
a good old fashioned socialist leader from Europe. And it's like, well, actually,

(50:44):
there have been periods where like NATO was kind of
okay with Lukashenko, and it's it's it's much more complicated
than all that. Yeah, it doesn't seem super straightforward. No. Um,
he's basically like he's he's kind of like, um, he's
kind of a cock tease like that. That's Lukashenko within
the context of European politics. Is like he'll flirt with

(51:05):
Russia a little bit and then he'll run over to
the US to make Russia jealous and then like that's
just kind of happening. Yeah, yeah, gone with the sheep,
Russian un filtered gas. I don't know, um, so yeah.
This dance has continued regularly for the last like fifteen years.
And you might look at Lukashenko's position in the New

(51:26):
Cold War era as similar to positions taken by like
a bunch of African and Middle Eastern nations during the
Old Cold War, where they would kind of try to
play both sides. Um. The Bush administration gave Lukashenko his
last dictator in Europe nickname in two thousand five, but
after two thousands six, Western powers were a lot more
careful about how they referred to him UM, and Lukashenko
through them Ramy to releasing his nation's most prominent political prisoner,

(51:50):
Alexander Calzlan from prison after his two thousand and six
conviction for hooliganism for leading a demonstration that protested against
the Riggdpole Hoo. Luganism is how most a Larusian political
opposition leaders wind up getting charged with this, just like
we have felony mischief exactly, felony mischief. Don't call it
that guy like at least make it sound like a

(52:11):
serious crime as h and again he was still like
the guy that he was, so as he releases this
prominent political prisoner to make the West happier. He also
detained twenty independent journalists after a series of cartoons making
fun of him showed up on the internet. Um. Yeah,
so I don't know, you know, he he's he's continued

(52:32):
to be the guy that he is now the clearest
shortcut to guaranteeing a government response. Uh, In terms of
like being an activist, like because he was, it's always
been kind of weird, like what the state would respond to.
As a rule, Belarus would allow protests, um, but would
always punish the people who organized them. Um. But he

(52:52):
for years actually got a lot of political mileage out
of attacking the United States and the UK for tear
gassing crowds because you're like, we don't have to do
that in Belarus because we just torture and murder the
people who organized the protests. How things have changed. Yeah,
and they also he also tear gas Yeah, absolutely sure.
If there's no media that doesn't have to get out.

(53:14):
So yeah, there were a number of other kind of
weird rules that the media had to abide by in Belarus.
Television stations in Belarus have been ordered, on pain of
arrest and presumably torture, to never film him from behind. Yeah,
and this started because he went bald in the mid
ots and he didn't want his bald spot to be visible. UM.
I don't. I think he's bald enough now he's a

(53:36):
comb over. So I don't know that that rule is
still in place because it's very obvious. Um. But yeah,
he would imprison you for showing that he was bald
for a while. Uh. And it's probably fair to say that,
Like if you're gonna, if you're gonna, if you're gonna
like rank dictatorships, um, Belarus is pretty low in terms

(53:56):
of like if you're gonna, if you're gonna make a
list of like which dictator ships have been the worst
to live under? Um, I guess it's one of the
better ones. Like the level of oppression, you wouldn't really
compare it to like North Korea, um, so to speak,
or to Syria. UM. Like in Syria they have their
secret prisons where they torture people and they killed tens

(54:18):
of thousands of people in those prisons, and Belarus they
kill a handful, and they they do eventually let most
people go. Um, so, you know, not great, but I
guess it could be. I don't know. I don't want
to say that either about a horrible dictatorship. You know,
it's it's just it's just that's where they that's where
they land on the worldwide things like you get information

(54:38):
out of Belarus. People are able to report on things,
but you also never know if reporting on something happening
in Belarus is going to get you beaten and tortured
by state authorities. But it might not. It could not, Yes,
it could not. I love the uncertainty of if I'm
going to get abused by the state for doing journalism.
That's what makes it a good place. Favorite part of journalism.
Yeah so uh yeah. And again for most of this period,

(55:02):
like Lukashenko, there there would be kind of regular frustration
with aspects of state repression, but most of the country
was kind of on board with things just because like
things were pretty stable. There was like slow, steady economic growth. Um.
Belarus kept enough of the old Soviet era institutions around
to ensure that social inequality remained very low. Belarus has

(55:23):
one of the lowest levels of social inequality of any
place in the world. Um, so you didn't see a
lot of like regular people on the street. Nobody had
nobody was really rich, Like they wouldn't have known anybody
who had like a lot. But also like you didn't
know anybody who was dirt poor for most of the
history of Lukashenko's reign. Um like people people there wasn't

(55:45):
like it wasn't like, um, you wouldn't see homeless people
on the street or whatever, right, um, And so people
were like, well, at least things are stable and we
don't have to worry about like all of these because
like you look over at Albania and a bunch of
other places that like experimented with capaalism suddenly in the
nineties and they wound up like people lost everything and
wound up on the street, and like that didn't really

(56:06):
happen in Belarus. Um. So that made that helped him
like maintain popularity, and they were still kind of quasi
Marxists for a little bit. Yeah, aspects of it, Like
it's one of those things where people actual Marxists and
stuff will point out like a bunch of ways in
which that actually is not the case, and really people
people pointing out differences between Marxism. Really, I'm shocked, but yeah,

(56:30):
broadly speaking, life in Belarus continued on from under under
Lukashenko pretty similarly to how it had been under the
Soviet Union, and that is, in the in the good ways,
and that like people continued to be able to benefit
from sort of some of these state institutions that got
taken away in other parts of Eastern Europe and in
the bad ways, and that like, there was still massive

(56:51):
political repression and no real free no real like freedom
to to you know, pick your own political leaders or whatever.
Early on in his reign, Luke Shenko earned the nickname Vodka,
which means father, and that's broadly how he's attempted to
portray himself ever since it's like the father of the
Belarusian people, um. And this kind of differs a lot
from dictators like Kadafi, Turkmenbashi or the Kims, because he

(57:14):
never portrayed himself as a superhuman figure um like. He
he preferred to kind of the image. He seemed to
prefer himself as, like as a farmer. So there's a
lot of propaganda about how Lukashenko, you know, as opposed
to like the which you hope from like the Kims
where it's like, oh, they built a rocket ship, you know,
or whatever, they invented the game of golf. With Lukashenko,
the stories that they tell about him and were like

(57:36):
he went to a collective farm and saw that cows
were being abused and so he fired his minister of
agriculture to like make sure that cows are taken care of.
Now in BELARUSI he's like the father farmer. That's kind
of that's the image he tries to put out. Yeah,
that's that's sort of like yeah, like yeah, yeah, yeah,
farming dad is the is the way Lukashenko wants to
be known. And it's like worth like when Steven Seagal visited,

(57:58):
like they went and hung out at a farm and
Sago all had to eat gigantic carrots that Lukashenko pulled
out of the earth. It's a weird video very often.
So yeah, it's probably accurate to say that Lukashenko never
really had a cult of personality like most dictators we
talk about. Um, it's just not something he really went for.
And I'm gonna quote now from an article in Politico

(58:19):
about this. It cites an expert on Belarus named Lushenko quote,
on the face of it, that's a weakness, but Lashenko
argues it differently. Ideology, she writes, is one of the
most successful undertakings by the Belarusian leader, Unlike traditional Soviet ideology,
though it does not consist of truths, but attitudes, principally
feelings of security and pride. Belarusians are constantly reminded by

(58:39):
the state propaganda machine that the outside world is dangerous,
whereas life in Belarus is enviably calm and well protected.
Wages and social payments are on time, there is no terrorism,
no political upheavals as in Ukraine or Georgia. The constant
struggle by authorities against external and internal enemies is not
just successful but grounds for pride. Belarus, Or argues Lukashenko
in two thousand three, has been endowed with the great

(59:01):
mission of being the spiritual leader of Eastern European civilization.
So that's interesting to me because you've got this country
where there's a strong history of like half of the
nation dying in horrible violence, and so a lot of
Lukashenko's kind of argument for why he should stay in
power has been like nothing happens we haven't had a

(59:22):
massive genocide in our country. Yeah, like yeah, leader, yeah
here since we were all killed or whatever. Yeah, um,
which is you know, I guess one thing. So yeah. Again,
no real cult of personality for Lukashenko, but he has
had some songs written about him, and his favorite is
a ditty called Master in the House. Uh and it
includes I don't I don't know that how to sing

(59:45):
this to a tune? Um? But here's here's the English
translation of kind of the most relevant chunk of the song.
He is a hard nut to crack. He wouldn't teach
you anything wrong. He can call everybody to order. He
is really cool. He can easily redress all grievances. He
is reliable and calm. That is that. That is a
good ditty. That's a good ditty. Yeah. I I love

(01:00:08):
it when people can easily redress all grievances. Um. But
like also you see that, like he's kind of a
boring dictator, and it seems like it seems kind of
the only way he's gotten some support. Just he's just
kind of boring. Yeah. Yeah, that's like what people like
about him because things have been so tumultuous that's what
people liked about him. Um. I think, like, you know,
in some places you need to have like the dictator

(01:00:31):
is you know, holds up the sky and is the
only thing keeping you know, uh, you know the Western
Hordes Backer, he invented all these wonderful things in Belarus.
It's like he's calm, he's reliable, he keeps everybody chill. Um. Yeah,
So the rest of the song goes on for a
pretty considerable length of time. Um. Anyway, it's it's he's

(01:00:54):
a weird guy. He's kind of hard to get your
hands around. And I he's definitely not the kind of
colorful figure that we tend to cover on behind the Bastards. Um.
He is a terrible dictator who's suppressed a lot of
people very violently. But he's also just like kind of
a boring middle manager. He seems like a boring dictator. Yeah, he's, he's,

(01:01:17):
he's he's kind of a boring dictator at the end. Um,
and yeah, I found a quote from him, another quote
from him where he kind of talks about himself as
an authoritarian from an August two thousand three interview, where
he says, again an authoritarian style of rule is characteristic
of me, and I've always admitted it. And the notes
you need to control the the country and the main
thing is not to ruin people's lives, um, which is

(01:01:41):
a really self aware thing for a dictator to say, Like,
as long as I don't fuck people up, um, Albeit,
people will support me. They're gonna keep letting me be
a dictator as long as I don't do something massively terrible.
So in part two we're going to talk about the
time Lukashenko did a bunch of massively terrible things that
made people not want to support him as a dictator anymore.
But first this episode's over, Garrison, you want to tell

(01:02:04):
people where they can find you on the internet before
we talk more about Belarus. Yeah, if you want to
see me talk about protests and getting shot at by
police and federal agents, you can go to my Twitter
at hungry bout I hungry as in the accessory, not
the country. Um yeah, that's where. That's where most of
my stuff lives right now. Work working on a few

(01:02:25):
other things, but yeah, mainly on my Twitter right now.
So follow Garrison's Twitter, tweet things at him. Uh, fill
up my mentions with any anything that's legal yeah, yeah,
that's legal. Uh follow me on Twitter and fill my
mentions up with anything that's illegal. Um, that's how it works.

(01:02:45):
Crimes to me, laws to Garrison, that's how the Twitter goes. Yeah,
but you're at the I rights all right, Yeah, that's
that's the thing. So the podcast is over. Um, you
can find us on the website at behind the Bastards
dot com. You can buy t shirts. We have masks
that will cure your diseases at the approved guaranteed to

(01:03:07):
cure all diseases. Which first, okay, I thought this was
a fake ad for you until I saw one of
these masks in person. Days again, like, oh no, these
masks are real. This isn't just a joke you do
at the end of the podcast, I don't know they were.
Actually Yeah, they're real FDA approved masks to prevent all diseases.
And if the f d A has a problem with
me claiming that, then they can come. They can they

(01:03:27):
can attack Tea public Yeah, they're Canta te publics. Uh,
mountaintop compounds with the basement full of children. Um, bring
it on, f d A.

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Part One: Alexander Lukashenko: The Dictator of Belarus