“A perfectly illegal and dangerous action”

[Jefferson23]

June 22, 2011

By Sam Knight

The official story behind the story behind the story of the Belarusian non-revolution.


In the July issue of Harper’s Magazine, I tell the story of Andrei Vardomatsky, the last independent pollster in Belarus, who became a target during the country’s most recent presidential election. Belarus is an eastern European nation of forests and ghosts that has been ruled since 1994 by an autocratic president called Alexander Lukashenko. On December 19 last year, after the polls had closed, tens of thousands of Belarusians took to the streets of Minsk to protest against his latest, fraudulent election victory. The demonstration—by far the largest of Lukashenko’s reign—brought down the fury of the authorities. Riot police descended, beating protesters indiscriminately. Seven of the nine opposition politicians who dared to stand as candidates against Lukashenko were arrested, along with more than 600 other people. The regime remains convinced it was the victim of an attempt by Western governments to ignite a “color revolution” similar to those that took place in Georgia and Ukraine in 2003 and 2004 (an anxiety that has doubtless been reinforced by the events of the Arab Spring). In trials concluded in recent weeks, candidates and activists have been sentenced to several years in prison for their part in what the government calls “The Conspiracy.”

There is no better, or more alarming, guide to the interpretative thinking of the Belarusian state than its own account of the protest, which was published earlier this year and still features on the government’s official website. This 15,000-word document ran in full in Sovetskaya Belorussiya, the main state newspaper, on January 14, and was translated into English a few days later. It reads as a kind of collage, an assembly of ornate rhetoric (“an absurd notion is being obtruded upon public opinion”) and WikiLeaks-inspired extracts from surveillance reports and documents confiscated from the offices of opposition groups. The different sections describe clandestine meetings in cafés and intercepted conversations on Skype, and include detailed instructions for how best to smuggle funds for the uprising into Belarus.

Some of the people named in the document (including Vardomatsky, the subject of my article) denied to me the accuracy of the authorities’ claims; others admitted that some of the opposition materials are genuine. One Belarusian contact, who has given evidence at several trials arising from the protests, described it as a mosaic of truth and fabrication. He is, as the following distillation suggests, almost certainly right.


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From “Behind the scenes of one conspiracy: Some declassified documents on the events of December 19”

The attack of the Government Residence caused indignation in Belarusian society.

The hidden motives of these events are known: foreign analytical centres formed and financed certain pro-radical structures. They made an attempt to overthrow the legal authorities and impose their understanding of “democracy” on society.

in full: http://www.harpers.org/archive/2011/06/hbc-90008128