The price is wrong

The chronicles of trade oppression in Belarus

It all started with a dismembered corpse. A chicken corpse, to be exact. It is amazing how such a small thing can lead to eighteen criminal cases.

During a government meeting on 6 October, Belarus’ Alyaksandar Lukashenka accused Belarusian vendors of bypassing the country’s anti-inflation regulations and of searching for loopholes to raise prices. According to him, one of such loopholes is when one product is passed off as another due to its packaging or some additives sold at a higher price: “You see, there was bread and chicken, and all of a sudden there is a new product! Chicken parts are packaged and here it is — a new product,” he said, quoted by BelTA news agency. “And people are forced to buy the same products at a higher price. This is nonsense! A whole chicken costs Br2 [Belarusian rubles, about €0.8] for instance and a chicken in parts — Br5 [€1.98]. Why is there a two or threefold increase in the price? Is it because you have cut it?” he added.

Those who dismember dead chickens are “hucksters with palaces abroad”. Meanwhile, Belarusian military officers cannot get their apartments on time, Lukashenko says. And the state must immediately join the fight against dishonest vendors. Head of the national statistics committee Inna Medvedeva pointed out during the same session that a third of the annual inflation is due to the increase in food prices. However, she noted that regular products are passed off as new ones by food producers, not vendors.

But you cannot go against food producers. The motto says “let’s support our domestic manufacturers”, not the other way around. On the other hand,

vendors are one of Alyaksandar Lukashenka’s favourite targets. Over the years, he called them hucksters, mobsters, and even invented a new biological species just for them — “lice-ridden fleas”.

This is all part of a long-standing dislike for the “damn bourgeoisie”. So, Lukashenka gave a clear order to Vasily Gerasimov, chairman of the state control committee: “I gave you all the authority, and you keep holding sessions. What sessions? You came, you saw, you put them in handcuffs.” He also ordered the prices to stay where they are: it is now forbidden to raise them.

If Lukashenka orders to put someone in handcuffs, his henchmen always rush to put people behind bars, even if the man himself only meant is as a figure of speech. On the next day, government officials of all kinds, from prosecutors to executive committee clerks, rushed to the shops to take pictures of price tags. The state control committee immediately liquidated the firms responsible for the infamous dismembered chicken incident. The chicken was patient zero. At first, they decided to steamroll meat suppliers: companies that dismember chickens (and livestock, too), package the meat and sell it. The committee reported that it had detected 130 dishonest suppliers, stopped their unlawful activity, banned the issuance of veterinary certificates, opened 8 criminal cases, documented the loss of livestock and the sale of meat with falsified documents. The committee has set up a hotline that citizens can call to report inflated prices in the shops.

On 10 October, the state control committee said on its Telegram channel that 10 criminal cases had been opened. The hotline received 350 calls over two days, with all the information handed over to regional and city state control bodies. Special quick-response task forces were established that inspected 400 trade facilities over the weekend. Meanwhile, Lukashenka started going back on his words, saying that he did not mean anything like that, and that the price increase ban is just for a few days, until the government develops a state control mechanism: “Some have started lamenting and moaning, especially those from abroad... The main thing is not the ban on price growth. It is not. Please read the directive. The main thing is to develop a pricing control system. Before this system is there (it’s only a few days), prices should not rise indeed,” he said. So, a few days, then. But there was no new order to back up his words, so the authorities continued their raids on shops.

On 11 October, the state control committee announced that citizens could now report inflated prices online. On 12 October, criminal charges were filed against the Druzhba poultry farm in Brest, which raised the price for a “socially significant product”, half a broiler chicken. Reportedly, the poultry farm cut the chicken in half and then sold it at a higher price bypassing the existing regulations. The illicit profits received from half a chicken reached 6 million Belarusian rubles (€2.4 million).

In Homiel, the authorities detected a vendor who illicitly inflated the prices for cabbage. A shopkeeper in the Minsk district raised the prices for certain goods in the period from 6 to 8 October, when the ban was in place. Criminal proceedings were launched in both cases.

Similar violations were detected in Hrodna, Vaukavysk, Brest, Kobryn, Biaroza. Price inflation goes hand in hand with unfounded discounts. This helps build the image of the authorities knocking on the door of every dishonest vendor in the country. On 15 October, the state control committee reported that a village in the Minsk region sold tomatoes at a higher price than it was on 5 October. In the village of Malinauka, a wrong markup was added to the price of sausages and milk.

On the evening of the same day, state TV channel ONT showed a confession video. This is a normal thing in Belarus, but it is usually done with people who attended protest rallies or who follow “extremist” Telegram channels. The script is always the same: a person sits in one of the offices of Belarus’ Main Directorate for Combating Organised Crime and Corruption and says on camera: “In 2020, I took part in unsanctioned rallies and subscribed to extremist Telegram channels, which I am deeply sorry for.” Not many come back after shooting these videos. Their names are usually added to the lists of political prisoners.

And now, the script has changed slightly. The man in the video says: “I am the deputy director of a shop. On 7 October, I deliberately raised the prices for a category of products. I fully accept the blame.”

As of 15 October, 18 criminal cases have been launched against unscrupulous vendors, the Belarusian prosecutor general’s office says. Every day, the state control committee and the TV report new cases and new arrests.

The scale of it is so big that it seems as if

vendors will soon replace political prisoners in jail, and the prices will remain frozen for good.

But the truth is that these measures will continue until Alyaksandar Lukashenka thinks of something new. All mass campaigns on detecting, exposing and eradicating criminals only last until Lukashenka switches his focus to some other target. Before the vendors came along, Belarus waged a war against private schools, completely ignoring the prices. In late September, there was an incident at Smart School, a private school in Minsk where a pupil shot a toy gun into his classmate’s eye, injuring her. Criminal proceedings were launched, the headmaster was arrested, and the school shut down.

However, this was not enough for Lukashenka. On 20 September, he met with Alyaksandar Valfovich, head of the Belarusian Security Council,

“According to the primary reports, the school management is very anti-government. How can a school pursue anti-government policies? It enrols 26 kids. What kind of school is it?! Therefore, I have instructed to impose licensing in education,” Lukashenka said, calling on the authorities to sweep all educational facilities. And they did: all private schools were forced to suspend their work indefinitely on the same day. Every day, there were inspections held at these schools. They were looking for children who were taught “in a clandestine manner”. Everyone was involved in these raids, from educational officials to firefighters. And you know when they stopped? That’s right, on 6 October, when Lukashenka announced a new war on prices and dishonest vendors. So, the authorities had to go shopping instead.

The vendors just need to hold on for a bit, and then a new campaign will begin. Maybe their next quest will be to measure the height of walls in private houses. Or to look for drunk factory workers. Or to catch unemployed citizens in cinemas. Though the latter already happened in the USSR. But they can turn it into a tradition! At the end of the day, there has to be a dismembered chicken left unaccounted for in the kitchen of a cinema café.