| Dmitry Bykov | Raskolnikov-2002
The history of all tyrannies is frustratingly predictable. Sooner or later, every dictatorship, even the most tragic one, enters the stage of the so-called “nomenklatura revolt” - when the people who created the regime, or at least pinned their hopes on it, begin to rebel against it. A tiny government entity can go through all these stages in a month. In Belarus, the process took a total of five years. However, it has been going on for a long time: the most fierce opponents of Alexander Lukashenko were once active figures in his headquarters (a classic example is Alexander Feduta). The Belarusian ambassador to Japan, Pyotr Kravchenko, who has just refused to return to his homeland, unwittingly, repeats the fate of Fyodor Raskolnikov, a Soviet diplomat, at that time plenipotentiary envoy to Bulgaria, who refused to return to the USSR when Stalin recalled him.
Naturally, they will object to me: Raskolnikov was an ardent revolutionary, famous for his cruelty, and therefore the analogy with Kravchenko is incorrect and incomplete. Kravchenko, after all, is an oppositionist, minister of foreign affairs in pre-Lukashenko times, and his appointment as ambassador in 1998 was in fact an attempt to push one of the most active politicians out of the country (Kravchenko was then a member of parliament). I’ll answer: with Raskolnikov, everything is far from simple either. Even though his ex-wife Larisa Reisner was an ardent supporter (and, according to rumors, not only a supporter) of Leon Trotsky, this did not stop the brave sailor from betting on Trotsky, and not on Stalin. He was in actual opposition to Stalin throughout the second half of the twenties, which is why he was pushed into diplomatic work. In the development of dictatorship there is also such a stage - the removal of opponents; the next stage is their extermination.
Opposition to the regime is maturing in the depths of the regime itself. Kravchenko, for all his opposition, is still a nomenklatura opposition, and therefore its chances of victory are negligible. It was mainly the old Bolsheviks who also tried to rebel against Stalin - people whose hands were up to their elbows in blood. And they had no idea that Stalin was the restorer of the Empire, a bureaucrat, a dictator - a natural result of that great Simplification that they carried out with their own hands in the seventeenth tier of the twentieth. They cannot understand that they are links in the same chain, and therefore their rebellion is doomed. For the only legitimate rebellion against the dictator is, as the same Lenin wrote, “the movement of the masses themselves.”
But in Belarus it is not yet visible. That is why the act of the Belarusian ambassador to Japan does not in any way add to my optimism regarding the situation in Lukashenko’s fiefdom. And the worst thing for me is to think about what the “tired slaves” will turn her into after the inevitable departure of their father...
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