The streets of Minsk and other Belarusian cities have been battlegrounds since Sunday evening, when authorities announced that eighty per cent of voters had chosen to reëlect Alexander Lukashenka, who has been President for twenty-six years. His electoral opponent, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, has fled the country. At least three thousand people have been arrested, one protester has died, and an unknown number have been injured.
A lot is unknown, because authorities have tried to impose a blockade on information. On Sunday morning, as Belarusians started going to the polls, independent news sites vanished. Franak Viačorka, a thirty-two-year-old freelance journalist in Minsk, told me over the phone that a recently enacted law compels all Belarusian sites to be hosted on servers located in Belarus, which enables the government to disappear a site from the Web. Next, Viačorka said, foreign media outlets such as the Belarusian-language service of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty became inaccessible in Belarus. Finally, Belarus lost access to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and messenger services such as Viber and WhatsApp. “It was this terrible feeling of a city that had died,” Viačorka said. “Nothing was ringing, nothing was beeping, there were no responses or notifications.” Tens or perhaps hundreds of thousands of people, including many journalists, were out in the streets and public squares of Minsk and other Belarusian cities, but they could not transmit information.
Since Lukashenka first became President in 1994, he has presided over five so-called elections. None of them have been considered free and fair by international observers, and each has been accompanied by protests and mass arrests. In the lead-up to the 2001 election, four of Lukashenka’s opponents disappeared. The United States refused to recognize Belarus’s results in 2001 and imposed sanctions following the rigged 2006 election. In 2010, the authorities arrested Andrei Sannikov, a leading dissident who had tried to run against Lukashenka. The police beat him brutally and held him in an undisclosed location, with no communication, for two months. Sannikov was ultimately charged with inciting protests and sentenced to five years in prison. After sixteen months behind bars, he was amnestied in exchange for agreeing to emigrate. He now lives in the U.K.
By Belarusian standards, this year’s process of renewing Lukashenka’s Presidency proceeded as usual. Three men—the popular blogger Siarhey Tsikhanouski, the banker Viktar Babaryka, and the diplomat turned entrepreneur Valery Tsepkalo—tried to run against the President. Tsikhanouski and Babaryka were arrested, and Tsepkalo was denied a place on the ballot. Then something unexpected happened: three women—Tshikanouski’s and Tsepkalo’s wives and Babaryka’s campaign manager—joined forces, calling themselves United Headquarters, and launched a campaign of their own. Tsikhanouskaya, who is married to the blogger, became their candidate. The authorities allowed her to be registered as a candidate, perhaps because Lukashenka thought that a thirty-seven-year-old housewife would make a convenient opponent.
We may never know exactly how many ballots were cast for which candidate on Sunday, but it appears likely that, if they were actually counted, Tsikhanouskaya would prove the winner. Some observers see her as the ultimate not-Lukashenka candidate and her possible victory solely as a rejection of the dictator. Others see a spontaneous but sophisticated political campaign that spoke to Belarusians and has spurred them to unprecedented action.
“In the last days of July tens of thousands of people gathered for Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya’s campaign rallies not only in large cities but in small towns—something that hasn’t happened in Belarus in decades,” Elena Gapova, a Belarusian sociologist at Western Michigan University, wrote in an article published last week. For the first time in a quarter century, it seemed, the Belarusian election had somehow become a contest. Tsikhanouskaya made it clear that she did not want to govern, though: she said that her objective was to win the election, free all political prisoners, and organize a free and fair Presidential election within six months of taking office.
The movement inspired by United Headquarters seemed to be different in scale and spirit from earlier Belarusian protests against rigged elections. A group of software engineers that called itself Honest People created an alternative vote-tallying platform called Golos, or “voice”: they asked voters to send in photographs of their ballots with precinct information, in the hope of making it impossible for precincts to widely underreport the number of ballots cast for Tsikhanouskaya.
Opposition to Lukashenka seemed to be everywhere. “Before, whenever they announced falsified results of elections, claiming seventy or eighty per cent for Lukashenka, my generation always thought, ‘Maybe someone somewhere really does support him,’ ” Tatsiana Zamirovskaya, a forty-year-old music journalist who writes for independent Belarusian publications but has lived in New York for the last five years, told me via Zoom. “I always felt like I was in the minority. But this time everyone signed up to be election observers. Even my parents became socially engaged.”
Two days before the vote, Tsikhanouskaya’s supporters hijacked a government-sponsored outdoor concert in Minsk. The d.j.s put on a song called “We Expect Changes” by the late Russian singer Viktor Tsoi. In 1989, when the Soviet Union was undergoing its own unlikely transformation, the song was an anthem of hope. Now, the two d.j.s and many people in the audience raised their hands in a victory sign; many wore white bracelets that have served as symbols of United Headquarters. Officials turned off the sound before the song was over. The d.j.s, Kirill Galanov and Vladislav Sokolouski, were arrested a few hours later and sentenced to ten days’ administrative arrest for “hooliganism.”
On the eve of the election, Tsikhanouskaya announced that she had gone into hiding after her campaign manager, Maria Moroz, was detained. Two weeks earlier, Tsikhanouskaya had said that she had sent her two children out of the country because of threats against the family.
Tsoi’s song now became the anthem of Belarusian resistance. On election day, the Nobel laureate writer Svetlana Alexievich, who lives in Minsk, texted a friend in Berlin, “Internet is dying already. The last thing we saw was military vehicles, driving through the town all night. The city is also surrounded by troops… Hundreds of cars moving through the city are blaring Tsoi’s ‘We Expect Changes!’ I am falling in love with my people…”
Around ten on Sunday evening, Viačorka told me, Belarus’s Internet silence was finally broken. Journalists, activists, and savvy tech users had been scrambling to find and install software that would allow them to bypass the channels blocked by the government. Psiphon, a Canadian app originally developed to help users in China get around censorship, proved effective, but few people had it installed on their phones or computers, and the government had blocked access to the Apple and Google app stores. “People were passing it around on thumb drives,” Viačorka said. One after another, journalists and activists started uploading content to Telegram, an app, popular in the post-Soviet space, that allows people to create “channels” for multimedia content as well as exchange encrypted messages. “From this absolute emptiness, I was transported to photos of carnage,” Viačorka said. Police and the military in Minsk and other cities were brutally crushing the protests.
Viačorka decided to start checking the information he was seeing and, if he could confirm that it came from a real person reporting from a real place, start posting it on Twitter in English, to let the world know what was happening. It turned into the longest work shift in his life. By the time we spoke—around four in the morning, Minsk time, on Tuesday—Viačorka had been working for thirty-eight hours. At first, he said, he thought that people were protesting in a dozen cities and towns, but by Monday morning he realized that number was over thirty.
Most people in Belarus, including those who were in the streets, had no access to the news. Zamirovskaya told me that she had spent Sunday and Monday calling friends and family in Belarus to tell them what she could gather from reading protest Telegram channels in New York. “For example, my friends were protesting nearing Pushkinskaya Metro Station, and I told them, ‘Don’t go to Sportivnaya, they’ve already started using stun grenades there,’ ” she told me. Otherwise, she said, “It’s a black fog, and no one knows what’s happening in it.”
Tanya Lokshina, associate director of Human Rights Watch’s Europe and Central Asia Division, travelled to Minsk from Moscow on Monday. A taxi driver who picked her up on the Belarusian side of the border asked her if she knew anything about the outcome of the election, she said. He explained that he could not get any information online and had heard nothing on the radio. By this time, the government had announced that Lukashenka had won with more than eighty per cent of the vote. Golos, the alternative vote-counting system, became inaccessible in the afternoon on election day.
“It’s unbearably hard to work without Internet,” Lokshina told me over the phone from Minsk. “You just end up running around town, not knowing what’s going on.” She said that the city had felt normal during the day: it was hot, cafés were open, people were out strolling or shopping. Around seven in the evening, she said, Minsk turned into a city of very young people: “Someone over thirty would stand out.” More and more young people emerged, she said, “in pairs and in clumps, drifting together, drifting apart, like in a movie.” At some point, there were about a thousand young people assembled in the center of town. They had only three slogans they chanted: “Leave!,” “Liberty!,” and “Long live Belarus!” They were not merely peaceful, she said, but observant of all the normal rules of this overly orderly city: even where traffic was blocked off, they crossed the streets on the crosswalks and on a green light, and they took no shortcuts that would have involved trampling grass.
Police employed “kettling,” a technique that has become familiar to Americans during recent protests: police alternately squeeze the crowd into smaller spaces and cut between protesters, creating smaller and tighter groups. “Once they got them down to groups of fifteen or twenty people, they would give chase after them through courtyards,” Lokshina said. Some people were able to run away; others were detained. The chasing went on until the wee hours, she said. All the while, the police made ample use of stun grenades: “They use them so much it’s almost like they are trying out a new weapon.” She said she also heard rubber bullets being fired. Farther from the center of town, Lokshina said, protesters tried building barricades, which were repeatedly demolished by police, and some protesters threw Molotov cocktails.
I spoke to a twenty-five-year-old software engineer who spent Monday evening and night out in the streets in Minsk. Boris (not his real name) told me that he had not been actively engaged withpolitics before this summer; he went to his first demonstration in June. On Monday, he went all over the city: He saw thirty or forty heavily armed troops chase a couple of hundred protesters into a store; he saw people building barricades and heard screaming from courtyards and the sound of one stun grenade exploding after another. “I wouldn’t call this protest,” he said. “I’d call this being beaten up.”
Some have compared the situation in Minsk to the beginning of Euromaidan, the protests that toppled the Ukrainian government in 2014, But Zamirovskaya says the parallel doesn’t hold up: a revolution from below happened in Ukraine, she said, whereas in Belarus, “Lukashenka lost the vote and is now staging a military coup.”
Lokshina said that she had not seen military force in use yet; from what she had been able to observe, the current crackdown is being carried out by police. It is beyond doubt, however, that police are using excessive force and arresting people at random. The police appear to be targeting journalists specifically. Maxim Solopov, a correspondent for the Russian publication Meduza, was detained for three days before being located and freed on Wednesday; on Tuesday, a video emerged in which police in riot gear hit Solopov with nightsticks as he shouts repeatedly, “I’m a journalist!” Another voice is heard asking, “What do I care?” A Belarusian journalist was wounded with a rubber bullet. Several dozen more have been detained. The military is everywhere, Lokshina said: there are water cannons and armored trucks parked all over the city, and trucks full of soldiers in camouflage. “I fear that he may impose a state of emergency or martial law,” she said.
Viačorka told me that he had always been convinced that Lukashenka, for all his sabre rattling, would not use force against protesters. He had jailed and disappeared opposition activists before, but there had seemed to be an economy to Lukashenka’s terror that fit his image of himself as reasonable, and of Belarus as a nation that keeps peace with all its neighbors: Russia, Ukraine, and the European Union. “I’m afraid that grenades and bullets will now become a part of our daily life,” Viačorka said. “We have spent so much time saying that we—those who oppose Lukashenka—will never be violent, but now we are being forced into a cycle of violence.”
On Monday night, news spread that Tsikhanouskaya had disappeared: Her staff had not heard from her for several hours. Viačorka reported that Tsikhanouskaya went to the Central Election Commission to file a complaint about voting violations. She was detained there for three hours, and when she emerged, she told journalists, “I have made a decision.” On Tuesday morning, Tsikhanouskaya posted a video announcement on what had been her husband’s YouTube channel. It was captioned, “I have left to be with my children.” Tsikhanouskaya, who looked drained, spoke softly and with evident difficulty.
The foreign ministry of Lithuania announced that Tsikhanouskaya was now there. Tsikhanouskaya’s spokeswoman in Belarus then announced that the former Presidential candidate had agreed to leave the country in exchange for the release of her campaign manager.
Soon after, Belarusian state-controlled media published another video of Tsikhanouskaya speaking. Unlike her many other videos, it is poorly lit and framed. Tsikhanouskaya is seen seated on a large leather couch against a window with office-style vertical blinds and reading a statement flatly from a piece of paper, without looking up: “I, Svetlana Tsikhanouskaya, thank you for taking part in electing the head of state. The people of Belarus have cast their vote. With gratitude and warmth, I am addressing the citizens who have been supporting me all this time. Belarusians, I call on you to be wise and respectful of the law. I don’t want to see blood and violence. I ask you not to resist police, not to go out into the streets, so as not to endanger your lives. Take care of yourselves and your loved ones.” Belarusian internet users quickly found photographs of an office that appeared to have the same couch and window blinds; it belonged to Lydzia Yermoshina, the head of the Central Elections Commission.
When I spoke to Boris, the software engineer, around three in the morning on Tuesday—a few hours before Tsikhanouskaya released her statement—he told me that he would go out and protest again in the evening. “I will go tomorrow and until something changes in our country,” he said. “I’m not talking about a change of regime anymore, but at least until the government is willing to engage in dialogue with the people.”
