SUMMARY:

Maxim Rust surveys the history and practical logistics of Belarusian grassroots initiatives of community relief and assistance to the regime’s victims that have reached massive proportions with the rise of the Belarusian civil protest movement in August 2020. Conceptualizing this phenomenon as a process of societal self-organization, Rust shows how the logic of the situation in Belarus has turned its previously largely apolitical booming information technology sector into the economic and organizational backbone of political protest. The new economy employs the new Belarusians, who communicate their new subjectivity in street actions, on Telegram channels, or through coordinating sophisticated social self-help networks. This confluence of new people with new social and economic structures underscores the incompatibility of Aliaksandr Lukashenka’s repressive regime with the future of Belarus.