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.
