‘Political repression is a self-replicating machine’

What Belarus’s recent past can tell us about Russia’s future

Observers have long compared Vladimir Putin’s regime in Russia to Alexander Lukashenko’s rule in Belarus. When protests swept the latter country in 2020 (only to be forced back into submission as winter set in), many speculated that Russia might be headed down the same path. In 2022, Moscow launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and the domestic repressions against anyone who dared speak out against Putin’s policies did indeed reach an unprecedented level, but it appears to be only the beginning of the Kremlin’s crackdown. At Meduza’s request, Artyom Shraibman, a Belarusian political scientist and a nonresident scholar at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, explains what Russians can expect if their country continues moving in the same direction as Belarus.

The news that politician Vladimir Kara-Murza was sentenced to 25 years in prison, and the fact that Alexey Navalny, by all appearances, will get a similar sentence, has left a lot of Russians bewildered and afraid. But for Belarusians, this is just one more confirmation that Belarusian comedian Slava Komissarenko was right when he told his now-classic dark joke:

It’s like our two countries are watching the same TV show, but you’re only on the third season, while we’re on the fifth. And sometimes we glance over at you guys and say: “Get ready — it’s about to get very interesting!”

It’s not just a joke. When you consider the scale and the cruelty of the repressions, Belarus has been ahead of the Putin regime at almost every stage of Lukashenko’s rule. The only exception was the brief span between 2015 and 2019 when Minsk was trying to behave better in hopes of thawing its relations with the West. But then the “equilibrium” was restored. The failed revolution in 2020 sparked repressions so harsh that it’s hard to find a parallel in the post-Stalin histories of either Russia or Belarus.

Though there’s one exception to that, too: the premeditated murders of journalists and politicians. For Belarus, that was and remains an extremely unusual measure that Minsk has taken only once: in 1999–2000, when the authorities abducted and most likely killed two Belarusian politicians, Viktor Gonchar and Yury Zakharenko, as well as journalist Dmitry Zavadsky and businessman Anatoly Krasovsky. At that time, even the official investigation found that security agents linked to Lukashenko, Viktor Sheiman and Dmitry Pavlichenko, were involved in the operation.

In Putin’s Russia, meanwhile, the murder (and attempted murder) of journalists and intelligence defectors has been a constant.

But when it comes to other repressive practices, the Belarusian security forces really are more brutal and less selective — and they seem to be a step ahead of their Russian colleagues. It’s not that there’s a specific channel through which the Belarusian authorities pass their knowledge to the Putin regime. To move on to new forms of violence and human-rights restrictions, the Russian authorities don’t need to “peek” at what the Belarusians are doing; it’s not a matter of patents or “know-how.” Every regime goes down this path at its own pace. But because Belarus started the process first, it does make sense for Russians who want to know how Putin’s regime will degrade further to look to its Western neighbor.

Torture is routine

The use of physical violence during arrests and in police stations and isolation cells has been normalized in Belarus. Torture and beatings are nothing new for Russian security forces either, but after 2020, violence against detainees for political reasons has become downright routine. While physical abuse doesn’t occur in every case, it occurs in far too many of them to chalk up to a few bad apples in the police force.

During the country’s 2020 protests, detainees were beaten as an additional preventative measure, in case 15 days in prison proved too light a punishment to deter them from protesting again. These days, beatings and torture and more often used when people refuse to unblock their phones, or when security agents want revenge for what they see as a personal affront — for example, when a suspect is believed to have leaked officers’ personal data.

In addition to physical violence, the authorities have begun using the tactic of humiliating people on video. In June 2022, security agents forced an arrestee to use a needle and ink to remove a tattoo that included a swastika. Other activists have been forced to draw things or stick protest symbols on their faces before recording “apology” videos.

Another practice that falls under the umbrella of physical violence is the administrative detention of political prisoners. People often spend weeks at a time in extremely overcrowded cells without mattresses, showers, opportunities to walk around, or the ability to receive packages from outside (in some cases, family members are allowed to send medicine), correspond in writing, or see a lawyer. They’re awakened twice per night and the lights are left on 24 hours a day. Many have reported being subjected to cold torture (when prisoners are left in cells with no heat and their blankets are confiscated). Prisoners serving sentences on felony charges experience numerous restrictions as well, but at the moment, the authorities’ treatment of administrative prisoners appears to be significantly worse.

Everybody’s an ‘extremist’

In early May 2023, Belarusian human rights advocates have counted almost 1,500 political prisoners in the country (which has a total population of a little more than 9 million). But even this number, they’ve said, is an undercount, as many people are reluctant to report the arrests of their relatives for fear of making their situations worse.

The majority of the country’s political prisoners have been convicted for one of two reasons: either they took part in the 2020 protests, or they allegedly engaged in “defamation” and were charged with “improper expression of one’s opinion.” This includes the Belarusian Criminal Code’s articles on “insulting the president” or other officials, “fomenting hatred” against societal groups (such as security agents), and “discrediting the Republic of Belarus”.

The concept of “fomenting hatred” is interpreted extremely widely; it can apply to as little as a rude word written on social media or in a community chat group against riot police in general. Hundreds of people have been jailed for expressing happiness about the death of a KGB officer during the raid of Minsk IT worker Andrey Zeltser’s apartment in the fall of 2021 or for conveying sympathy for Zeltser, who was shot in the same incident.

Participating in a protest becomes a felony offense in Belarus if a person enters a roadway during the demonstration. The pertinent article in the Criminal Code, which prohibits “organizing, preparing, or actively participating in actions that blatantly violate the public order,” has earned the nickname “the people’s article” for the number of citizens it’s been used to sentence. Walking around Minsk or any other city during one of the country’s Sunday protest marches in 2020 was enough to land a person in jail for up to four years. To this day, the authorities have continued arresting people for allegedly participating in those marches, using photos to identify people who don’t even remember being there.

The Belarusian authorities also apply laws against “extremism” more liberally than their Russian counterparts. Almost all non-state media outlets (including Zerkalo.io, Nasha Niva, RFE/RL's Belarusian service, and Belsat), as well as many popular Telegram channels (Nexta, Belarus Golovnogo Mozga), blogs (such as those of opposition politicians Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya and Valery Tsepkalo), and even chat groups, including some neighborhood ones in which participants discussed protest activity, have been declared “extremist.”

Subscribing to an “extremist” channel on Telegram is a misdemeanor offense. In many cases, to uncover these violations, officers order suspects to unlock their phone before searching through their messages and attempting to restore deleted files. In 2021, one married couple spent more than 200 days in custody for news articles they sent to one another in a private chat.

Even worse is the treatment of people caught working or interacting with organizations that have been declared “extremist formations.” This category includes anybody who has provided information or even comments to independent news outlets. Leading military expert Yegor Lebedok is currently serving a five-year prison sentence for two interviews he gave to the “extremist” outlet ​​European Radio for Belarus. The wife of well-known blogger Igor Losik (who’s currently serving a 15-year sentence) was sentenced to two years in prison for telling a story about her husband to the Poland-based independent TV channel Belsat. The couple’s four-year-old daughter now lives with her grandparents.

The BySOL and ByHelp foundations, which were founded in 2020 to raise money to support victims of repressions, were declared “extremist” in 2021, which retroactively made every donation to the organizations a felony offense. But because the donations numbered in the tens of thousands and many of them came from IT workers who managed to flee the country, the authorities decided not to pursue charges against every offender and to exact payments from them instead. Many people whose bank cards appeared on donation records received visits from KGB officers who suggested they make “donations” to state-run charities several times larger than the payments they made to help repression victims. The agents promised not to open criminal cases against those who signed confessions, but the documents give the authorities yet another means of pressuring these people in the future.

But anti-extremism laws aren’t the Lukashenko regime’s only means of purging the country’s third-sector organizations; they’ve also had no qualms about simply dissolving them. The authorities didn’t arrive at this approach through trial and error, nor did they waste time with hybrid forms of repression such as declaring groups “foreign agents.” Instead, beginning in June 2021, after the latest round of European sanctions, security agents began liquidating hundreds of NGOs, including ones that weren’t involved in opposition politics even tangentially. The targets included environmental associations, historical societies, cultural organizations, charity foundations, organizations for disabled people, groups for Lithuanians and Poles living in Belarus, and urbanist, birdwatching, and cycling clubs. Acting on behalf of a non-registered organization is also a felony offense.

Repression, the Belarusian way

All of the repressive practices outlined above are familiar to Russians, albeit on a smaller scale, but there are a number of other methods that are frequently employed by the Lukashenko regime that aren’t yet common in Russia.

In the last few years, the Belarusian authorities have held many of its high-profile legal proceedings behind closed doors, refusing to allow even the suspects’ relatives to attend. As a result, the details of many cases, including sometimes the defendants’ names, remain publicly unknown. And in open trials, police officers serving as witnesses, who often give boilerplate testimonies about how a suspect “was walking down the street, started cursing, and resisted arrest,” are allowed to use pseudonyms and wear masks so that they can’t be identified later.

Often, the authorities try to force well-known political prisoners and opposition leaders to observe this “regime of silence,” including by disbarring and arresting their lawyers. Alexey Navalny’s regular Twitter threads, for example, wouldn’t be possible in Belarus, because his lawyers could lose their licenses or wind up in prison simply for trying to transport his political statements out of prison.

Another difference between the Belarusian and Russian systems is that the former allows the death penalty, while Russia has imposed a moratorium on the practice. In the spring of 2022, the Belarusian authorities decided to expand the set of offenses eligible for capital punishment, making it applicable to “attempted terrorist attacks.” In March 2023, “state treason” became punishable by execution as well (though the authorities have yet to use this approach).

In early 2023, Minsk decided to revive the Soviet-era practice of depriving political emigrants of citizenship obtained through birth; the law will come into effect in July. By all appearances, the government plans to apply the new law to exiled opposition leaders, who have already been sentenced in absentia to long prison terms.

In some of its less brutal forms, the Lukasheko regime’s repressions stand out for their thoroughness. For example, the Belarusian authorities now keep a registry of hundreds of thousands of citizens who either appeared on their radar for political disloyalty — by participating in protests, for example — or who simply voted for other presidential candidates in the 2020 election. Since 2021, depending on the severity of their “crimes,” these people have been systematically fired from government agencies, banks, state companies, and public organizations, including medical, educational, and cultural institutions, and banned from reapplying for public-sector jobs.

The Belarusian government has also been known to pay extra attention to members of specific ethnic groups. Immigrants from Ukraine who work in public organizations, as well as Ukrainian citizens who have lived in Belarus for years, have reported being called in by the KGB for interrogations, sometimes with polygraph tests, as the authorities seek information about Ukrainian intelligence agencies. And government employees with Polish roots who receive “Polish Cards” — documents that entitle them to certain benefits if they move to Poland — have reported being forced to relinquish the cards in order to keep their jobs.

No end in sight

It’s impossible to predict whether Russia will follow exactly the same path that Belarus has in recent years. The sudden surge of repressions in Belarus had an obvious trigger: the attempted revolution in 2020. Russia’s crackdown over the last 15 months was sparked by the invasion of Ukraine. But there’s a real risk that Russians will face a significantly more far-reaching domestic clampdown when the Kremlin realizes it’s exhausted its potential on the battlefield, and it needs somewhere to channel its frustration. It might embark, for example, on a larger-scale purge of “traitors” and “domestic enemies” who it claims are preventing the country from uniting and keeping the army from winning.

But the most important thing Belarus can teach Russia is that it can always get worse. Yesterday’s “red lines” stop working; isolated excesses become the norm. Society adapts to the regime’s cruelty, and people who immerse themselves in the news start catching themselves feeling an alarming sense of relief when somebody’s sentenced to two years in prison instead of ten.

The government itself may not understand at every specific moment whether its clampdown has internal limits, but it gradually pushes the limits of what’s permissible. Repressions are like a gas. They always expand to fill the space available — until the ruling elites or society begin to resist.

This isn’t always because a specific villain decided to turn the terror up to ten. Repression is a self-replicating machine. They create a class of beneficiaries — career security agents for whom the fight against “enemies” becomes a career elevator, a Stakhanovite competition. As soon as these incentives start to work, they no longer need a command from above to start searching for new forms of cruelty.

The human psyche clings to the familiar, even if that means informal norms of coexisting with the state. But the Belarusian experience shows us that these norms are extremely unstable when the government is plunging into the abyss of reactionism, and society is too atomized and frightened to resist. The inability to realize in time that yesterday’s taboos no longer apply has cost many Belarusians their freedom. They failed to escape the threat because they didn’t believe the threat was possible.

Artyom Shraibman