The end of the game? The arrival of Putin

With the arrival of Vladimir Putin as Russia’s new President, the crucial synergy between the agendas of the two political leaders that had been triggering the Russia-Belarus union since 1995 began to rapidly disappear. Unlike his predecessor, Putin was free from the sense of guilt for the break-up of the Soviet Union. Enjoying a broad public support in his own country, Putin therefore lacked a political need to engage into the integration game with Belarus to accumulate political capital inside Russia. In the first year of his presidency, the Russia-Belarus Union was at most a destination of honorary political exile, where Yeltsin’s ‘family’ members could be accommodated after their ejection from crucial posts in the government. Such was the fate of Pavel Borodin, a powerful head of the business office of Presidential Administration under Yeltsin, who was appointed secretary of the Union state in January 2000. One year after, Borodin was arrested in New York at the request of Swiss authorities, on the charges of corruption that surrounded the contract for renovation of the Kremlin awarded to a Swiss company. Remarkably, Putin met the arrest with conspicuous indifference and inaction.

On the international front, the reorientation of Russia’s foreign policy towards a greater degree of co-operation and even a potential alliance with the West in the aftermath of the September 11^[1] attacks on the United States undermined the rationale for adoption of Lukashenko’s regime as a bulwark against the eastward expansion of NATO’s political, economic, and military influence. Russia’s new rapprochement with the West relieved its leaders from the need to communicate to the society an illusion of the regained greatness through striking quasi-alliances with less respected members of the international community or pariah states. The westernization of the Kremlin’s political rhetoric diminished the credibility of Lukashenko’s propaganda machine since the Russian mass media were the most trusted source of information in Belarus and the national TV audience’s exposure was limited to the views of hardcore supporters of the president.

Putin’s push for economic liberalization produced a formidable challenge for the “Belarus economic model” that had to be adjusted in the face of a greater role of market mechanisms in the ally’s economy (which resulted in the withdrawal of barter and reduction of the importance of the bureaucratic trade; a tax cut and a more realistic monetary and fiscal policy that invigorated Russia’s domestic producers; etc.) and Russia’s increasing reluctance to unconditionally subsidize Belarus for predominantly political reasons. All this amounted to a simple challenge for Lukashenko’s political regime and his economic plans: Russia was neither prepared nor willing to pay for its integration with Belarus any longer. Instead, a continued pursuit of the economic and political integration with Russia required the Belarusian leadership and the Belarusian economy at large to pay a political and economic price. Even though Putin’s implicit support helped Lukashenko in his re-election campaign in 2001, Lukashenko had to buy this support by promising radical changes in his economic policies. In what may appear to be a final blow to the “Belarusian economic model”, Russian political and business circles intensified pressure on Lukashenko to allow privatization of Belarus’s most lucrative assets by Russian oligarchs. Most important, Putin himself crashed Lukashenko’s hopes on prolonging his political existence at Russia’s expense by suggesting in August 2002 that Belarus should join Russia in the form of six regions, effectively burying the confederal project that had been nurtured by the Belarusian president for almost a decade. Remarkably, Lukashenko rejected the offer, accusing his counterpart of imperial ambitions and virtually accepting the nationalist rhetoric of his archrivals.

As the inability of the Belarusian president to follow his colleague on the westward course may leave the Russian leader with no other option except for promoting political change of the ally that rapidly transforms into a liability because of his domestic and foreign policy agenda, the Russian factor in the Belarusian politics is rapidly transforming from the guarantor of stability to a potential source of crisis for Lukashenko’s personalist authority.

Conclusion

The record of Lukashenko’s politics towards Russia questions the validity of a widespread vision of Belarus as a country that is “forming a unique example of failure to create a legitimate post-Soviet nation and state.”^[2] Ironically, Lukashenko himself may enter the history of Belarus as a creator of the state as an entity and an institution out of the ruins left behind by the break-up of the USSR. Moreover, for a substantial period of time, Lukashenko succeeded to secure a high degree of public legitimacy for his state-building project, that was inseparable from his regime-building strategy and framing of the Belarus-Russia relations. The apparent discrepancy between his tendency to “denationalize” Belarus and to strengthen state institutions will disappear if we take Soviet discourse (which, among others, vindicated a mix of a certain sort of political Belarusian patriotism with linguistic russification), rather than the ideas of panslavism and “little Russianism”^[3]as a starting point of Lukashenko’s practical ideology. Finally, even though the Belarusian-Russian economic relations resembled those of the hegemonic power and a dominion, it is hard to deny that the free riding on the economic union allowed Lukashenko to win some breathing space for the consolidation of his state-building project.

Importantly, Lukashenko’s ability to secure popular legitimacy for the political sovereignty of Belarus and for his own efforts in state building (but not nation-building) does not allow to interpret his political regime as purely sultanistic. In fact, the quasi-democratic legitimacy of Lukashenko’s rule (i.e., the president’s ability to secure a genuine popular support, even if the authority is exercised in a highly undemocratic manner) helped him to successfully defend his power together with the state from outside challenges, and little evidence exists that he may surrender Belarusian statehood (and his own presidency) at Putin’s first demand. And while Lukashenko still enjoys the opportunity to legitimize contradictory political projects by forming and remodelling coalitions of minorities, he may easily survive the crash of his confederal project.

The stalemates in the Russia-Belarus integration may be most suitably explained by the fact that Belarus is not another Russia to for the two countries to be unified according to the example of two Germanies. Likewise, Russia is not the Soviet Union that Belarus can join even as a nominally equal partner. Whenever the divergence between Russia and Belarus was most remarkable, the integration was stalled, and its pursuit posed a challenge of destabilization on the Lukashenko regime.

It remains to be seen, however, whether this challenge comes together with a threat of an ultimate loss of Belarusian statehood. The two most important outcomes of the decade of integration are highly controversial. First, it is consolidation of Russia’s position as a dominant external player in Belarus’s politics. Belarus is not a part of Russia, but its de-facto status of Russia’s satelite cannot be denied. Whether or not this influence and leverage will transform the relations between the two states into a semblance of current or pre-World War II Germany-Austria relation depends upon whether both Belarus and Russia will be able to put themselves on the path towards democracy and Europeanization. It is worth mentioning that the current shifts in Russia’s foreign policy orientation reflect the agenda of the presidency alone rather than the changes in the preferences of its political, bureauratic, and military elites. If authoritarian tendencies prevail in Russia and a cooling of the Russia-West relationships comes before Lukashenko’s autocracy disintegrates, and the new political elite consolidates the status of Belarus as independent state, the re-emerging synergy between Belarus’s and Russia’s politics may still allow the anschluss. In the short run, however, it is highly unlikely that Russian leadership will take the chances of incorporating Belarus without the consent of the Belarusian society expressed through democratic institutions, for in this case Russia’s emerging new relations with the West will suffer a deadly blow.

On the other hand, temporarily proximate games of high politics that underlined the Russia-Belarus relationship in the past decade stalled the process of unification and left open an opportunity for re-definition of Belarus’s political and cultural identity. The very fact of living in an independent country for the past decade made a deep impact on the self-identification of the Belarusian society, that seems to be finally coming to terms with living in its own state and being its own nation. Democratization in Belarus will dismantle Lukashenko’s system of personalist autocracy and increase the roles of political and bureaucratic elites, as well of institutions that are acting as intermediaries between the public and the decision-makers (such as the parliament and political parties). The elite’s interest in preserving a separate statehood in combination with a fair degree of public acquiescence with this political solution may be sufficient to effectively block integration initiatives from being materialized. If the current shifts in Russia’s domestic and foreign policy orientation accelerate political change in Belarus, the advancement of the nation-building process in Belarus may follow. This may come up as sheer surprise for Russia’s elite and the public that never meant to imagine Belarus outside its own state.