Translated material
Invincible Old Man
The thirteenth anniversary of his presidency, Alexander Lukashenko, celebrated the next conflict with Russia
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The celebration of the end of the Lukashenko era is scheduled for autumn. “It's over,” one of the leaders of the Belarusian opposition triumphed, “Lukashenko will not stand up for gas prices, without an oil freebie, he will no longer be able to feed the village, and if he blocks the oil pipeline, the Russians will land here, and he knows that.” The thirteenth anniversary of the presidency of Lukashenko, on July 10, almost coincided with another date - July 23, the day of reckoning with Gazprom for the last cheap gas, and for her personal holiday Lukashenko received another scandal with Russia. When six years ago a certain Belarusian clairvoyant predicted that Lukashenko will rule seventeen years, it seemed a bad joke.
- in defense of Feikhtwangger -
The Belarusian word “memorial” is definitely not translated into a single language, and Belarusians in an attempt to explain it vying the option by the option: a benevolent, kind -hearted, open, calm ... “Our memorial Belarus ...” - sounds in any appeal of power. “Here you are still an example of a national character - my grandfather, an old communist,” explains the Belarusian friend. “Here,” says the grandfather, “what did the Ukrainians do when the Russians came?” They took the machine guns and went to the forest, and added: - Well done! " I did not believe my ears, but he continues: "Or here are the Baltic - well done!" And then he paused, sighed and summed up: "Well done, of course, what's the point? .."
In one of the most crowded places in Minsk, at someone’s oversight, several opposition leaflets sagged for almost a whole day. Citizens stopped, quickly read and went further about their business. With sympathy, but without passion. In Minsk, something good is considered almost indecent about Lukashenko. But any opposition cluster of the people, even if it is declared the Belarusian Maidan, is arranged in the same way: in the center - bordering human resolution and maximum concentration along the periphery, which borders from the void, from where it is easier to escape when attacking the riot police. A friend-approval complains of his friends, who, not without malice, are interested in him at a meeting: "Well, when will you make a revolution to us?"
For those who have learned how to live in conditions for so long, to which it would seem impossible to get lost, any changes are a new breakdown. In addition, Belarus was as if created to the joy of those who are ordered to engage in the creation of its favorable image. Green fields, cottage villages, roads, which are better in any district center than in the center of Moscow. Here nothing needs to be specifically built for carefully selected Moscow guests, and they are delighted with the Belarusian lifestyle - and who will reproach Feihtwanger for the fact that he at one time has not deepened in particular Soviet happiness? And in addition, such a consumer boom could not be seen by any Feihtwangger. Well -groomed Belarusian courtyards are clogged with cars, and mostly new ones. Prices in gastronomes of Moscow, while the cost of a square meter of housing is rapidly approaching Moscow. Belarus in Europe, lives on loans, which its inhabitants gained on everything, from refrigerators to real estate, and the mortgage is worshiped to envy the entire CIS.
And for the rest you can learn not to pay attention. Or chuckle. Even if the president’s speeches stopped with such intensity to diverge into quotes, the official will always say their word, suddenly, say, requiring the drivers to keep condoms in the car first -aid kit. What some secretly from wives were even happy. The norm, however, has recently been canceled. According to people's experts, in connection with the national birth rate increase.
The figure of the average salary of $ 330, of course, for official reports. Officially, the state prescribes to pay a saleswoman in a stall $ 250. Nobody unofficially prevents its salary to form on a market basis, not exceeding $ 150 in Minsk and 100 in the province. With the existence of a Belarusian refrigerator or TV in Russia, only its price reconciles. In Belarus itself, the same “Atlant” costs as much as in Moscow “Samsung” or “Bosch”. But in any dining room, dry cleaning or hairdresser - a mournful book. Regardless of the form of ownership.
At the same time, the formula of the Belarusian economic miracle, of course, has never been to Newton's binom. The flagship of the Belarusian export Grodno Azot ceases to be profitable not only with the past 50 dollars per thousand cubic meters of gas, but even at 32, for which he receives gas even by personal order of the president today. A year ago, Moscow with deliberate surprise found that Lukashenko’s regime parasitizes in Russian oil. As a result of exposure, the Belarusian economy lost, according to various estimates, from 2 to 5 billion dollars. Plus a rise in price of gas. And the Belarusian opposition raised her head. Everything goes according to the script. Moreover, Lukashenko also did not receive a loan of half a billion dollars from Russia.
- The day of the sovereign forest -
Meanwhile, in the working quarters of Minsk, the former confidence reigns in the future and in the average factory salary of dollars at five hundred. "And if instead of five hundred there will be, say, four?" - “It won't. Old Man knows that we are not a popular front to him. If we block the area, it will not seem to him little. ” More thoughtful and wise, however, are full of skepticism: “Yeah, you will come out ... Who, besides the old man, will pay such grandmas?”
And in the rural outback, where Lukashenko is also not too complained of, local oppositions are treated at all as eccentric. “Is this so that we, like in Russia, have a war, explosions? Or like these orange, in Ukraine? "
And the Belarusian government completes the maneuver begun several years ago.
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Belarus celebrates the day of forest. “We plant 10 million trees!”, On wood from each Belarusian. Social advertising is unpretentious, but it beats for sure. We are a small country. Not great. Not superpower, but we do not need it. Our blue -haired vicinetry Belarus is inhabited by calm and warming people, we only need to plant trees and preserve what fate gave.
That is, a small and self -sufficient European state. Which must be protected from those who teaches to live from the West and who will not be cured of Great Power in the East.
No more illusions and unions. Support on their own forces. The opposition is no longer a banner even in the struggle for independence. Her last revolutionary hope sounds so that not everyone decides to formulate it out loud: to throw Lukashenko with Russian forces and Russian money, so that tomorrow, whoever led the country, Moscow certainly accused him of the indulgence of NATO and the EU.
Lukashenko had never had such undivided power. The opposition in Belarus is activated every five years, to the next defeat in the elections, and it seems that the last demoralized it completely. So the need to deal with the opposition implements the regime solely based on the personal feelings of the president himself. Alexander Kozulin, once Favorite Lukashenko, who decided to assert himself as an opposition and presidential candidate, in prison, as people close to the president recognize for betrayal.
In the nomenclature of those who want to divide his fate are not observed. In addition, the vertical of power is actively updated by young personnel, and this is not the guard for which all the charms of the fraternity were limited to condo schemes for supplying cheap alcohol and tobacco to Russia. The current ones are not yet ready for such profitability, but they will not accept unicellular technologies. Yes, and in Russia, they do not converge with a business clin. In general, while they are all satisfied, although scary. "How much should the people get together for you to part?" - I asked one riot police, and he, condescendingly looking at the thousandth rally of the opposition, replied: "Fifty thousand." Signs of such a number, capable of making not only riot police, but also nomenclature, are not observed.
People who know Lukashenko well assure: the president who feels the skin policy never knew how and did not consider it necessary to calculate the situation strategically. There will be a problem - a solution will appear. Now the problem has appeared: modes similar to Belarusian need crazy money, and a shortage is found with them. But Lukashenko, contrary to naive hopes, is not in a hurry with economic reforms. If even someone could convince him of their safety for him personally, they do not suit him: the result is needed tomorrow morning, and not through the years.
But the updated vertical carefully probes the soil: what if you still start privatization? Sell, say, a cellular company. Or generally an oil factory. And right now, when there is a misunderstanding with Russia. The Belarusian vertical will not stand the privatization competition with her, which means that you need to rush and solve everything now and on its own. And then you can resell the same Russians. Or not Russians. How will it turn out.
These ideas gradually unite the nomenclature - and the old one, which has long been ready for a jerk, and a new one who, in his youth, does not yet know that the Old Man does not sell anything. And he answered everyone: we did not have oligarchs and will not be. And everything will be the same. There will be an economy in the style of Mikhail Tal: a buffoonery on a board in which government economists are able to figure out only, apparently, because of special genius. This is also called cross-subsidization: one enterprise gas of $ 30, another-the third debts, so that both are more profitable, from the fourth, preferably successful, take the shares and nationalize, the fifth to hang on the balance of a bank. The vertical humbles the ambitions and proceeds to execution. And waiting.
But the signals still do not capture any fatal signals for Lukashenko.
- The joy of symbiosis -
Not a cheap Russian gas, but the political economy Russian model itself serves as a key to survival of the Lukashenko regime. The overthrow of the Belarusian economy in Tartarara was suspended when oil prices were discovered for records, and the secret was not in the bonuses of Belarusian oil refining, but in the solvent demand of the Russian agricultural industry, which showed interest in Belarusian plants - museums of tractor building. And if in terms of this symbiosis to consider oil and gas schemes, the thirteen -year history of the Lukashenko regime ceases to look like a historical misunderstanding. Viktor Gonchar, one of Lukashenko’s opponents without a trace, shortly before his disappearance, claimed: Lukashenko is just a dispatcher in Russian commercial schemes, oil, weapons and any others. However, over time, it turned out that Lukashenko prepared much better for the conflicts that fraught with any symbiosis. What is an example of another gas scandal.
According to Belarusian economists, 460 million dollars, which Lukashenko intended not to pay for Russian gas in July, were not at all an unbearable amount for Minsk. The famous Belarusian political scientist Valery Karbalevich remarks: Moscow is generally inclined to overestimate the scale of financial cataclysms that fell upon Lukashenko. Then why did the scandal suddenly burst out? According to Belarusian experts, it is not a matter of current payments - rates are much higher. "Or in the Kremlin, they really believed that Lukashenko would give Russia" Beltransgaz "?" - the interlocutor smiles, who knows firsthand the features of the Belarusian power. In accordance with painfully reached agreements after phased payments of two and a half billion by June 2010, Gazprom should become the owner of a 50% stake in Beltransgaz, the main strategic property of Lukashenko. But in the same way everyone understands that he cannot give them to. This means that the scandal is inevitable, and Lukashenko is already starting to rehearse it, including in order to check how the world, already excited by the Russian energy concept, will react to this. If the version is correct, then the results of the audit Lukashenko may be satisfied.
Lukashenko
- against Lukashenko -
But the crown of this miracle may turn out to be a uniform paradox. All his events Lukashenko prepares the country for a jerk better than any reformer. As he rules, no one can rule, which means that changes are inevitable, and any changes can only be for the better, because only the eternal Lukashenko can be worse. Suppressing the privatization ambitions of his nomenclature, he will not leave any more or less strong group after himself, which again can become the basis of normal competition. Table pieces in the economy, for which it is customary to shoot each other, in Belarus once or twice and, you can be sure, will not appear under Lukashenko. Therefore, nothing needs to be cleared, unless somehow you have to explain with tens of thousands of deprived proletarians. And medium -sized business has already learned to live with Lukashenko.
So no one really wants to win it. He does not particularly interfere with the humbled West, and in a polemic with Russia he can even come in handy, which, by the way, the high -ranking “vertical workers” are already convinced of Europe. Since for the Kremlin the current symbiosis is the only form of fraternity, any alternative to Lukashenko is more nightmare than any budget losses. Being still confident that he plays with Belarus in the offensive genre, Russia repeats the favorite Belarusian moves over and over again: and the vertical of the power that Lukashenko was the first to come up with, and national projects, which are called national programs. A colleague from one district Belarusian newspaper, thinking with whom I would talk from the Vertical, suddenly dawned: and meet the head of the ideological department. The expression of my face, apparently, alerted. "Do you have no ideological departments?" “Not yet,” I admitted. And he himself felt how uncertainly I did it.
By analogy with the Soviet legal practice, political prisoners in Belarus are officially not. Meanwhile, according to the Vesna human rights organization, four people are serving a sentence exclusively for political activities and three more awaits the court under the article “Actions on behalf of an unregistered organization”, which allows you to hold representatives of the opposition to justice.
The political nature of the prosecution is often hidden behind economic articles. According to Vesna, about 3 thousand managers of enterprises have been convicted for economic crimes. In addition, the practice of the detentions of representatives of the opposition in administrative order is widespread, mainly under the article “Hooliganism”. In 2007 alone, 500 people were brought to administrative responsibility and approximately the same amount was detained, but released without trial. There is no exact data regarding political emigration. According to the human rights activist Ales Belyatsky, the bursts of such emigration are observed during periods of exacerbation of the political process, for example, during the elections, when from political motives the country leaves from 200 to 300 people.
In modern Western political science, there is the concept of “sultanic regime”, the characteristics of which are extremely close to modern Belarus. It turns out that among the “relatives” of Lukashenko - Trukhillo from the Dominican Republic, the Cuban dictator of the batista, Nicaraguan Somos, the dictator of Haiti Duvalier, Iranian Shah Pekhlevi, the Philippine Marcos, the Romanian dictator Chausky.
According to the Ministry of Statistics and Analysis of Belarus, GDP in 2006 in dollar terms amounted to approximately 37 billion 27.6% of GDP - industrial products, the share of agriculture fell from 15% to 7.5% compared to 2005. The official accrued average salary in June 2007 amounted to 710,232 Belarusian rubles, or about $ 330.
In 2006, about 21 million tons of raw oil received Belorussia from Russia. Of these, only 7.5 million tons went to meet the internal need, 13.5 million were used for export processing.
The need for Belarus in gas is about 21 billion cubic meters. The population pays for gas in full, industrial enterprises and agriculture are provided with subsidies, the amount of which is determined in each case. The well -known Belarusian economist Yaroslav Romanchuk of subsidies for agriculture estimates $ 4.5 billion, or 12% of GDP.
In small and medium -sized businesses, according to Romanchuk, 450 - 550 thousand people are employed, or about 10% of the able -bodied population. According to his estimates, the contribution of private business to GDP is about 10-15%. According to official Belarusian statistics, this figure does not exceed 8%. At the same time, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development believes that the share of private business in GDP is at least 20%.