Minsk, 2020, meets Budapest, 1956

As a Soviet child appropriately indoctrinated at school, I took interest in politics. My main, or rather only, source of information was Pravda, the paper my parents read.

In the autumn of 1956, Pravda was screaming about the imminent sword of Damocles hanging over the head of communist Hungary. West German troops were poised at the border, ready to take advantage of the mutiny staged by some anti-communist vermin.

It went without saying that the mutiny was instigated by the West German neo-Nazi government and the CIA, along with MI6 and every other body the Soviets didn’t like very much. Therefore it was the USSR’s moral duty, and also in her national interest, to help the fraternal regime as best she could.

All that was missing was a formal plea from the fraternal regime, and on 23 October Hungarian communist leader Ernő Gerő requested Soviet military intervention “to suppress a demonstration that was reaching an ever greater and unprecedented scale”.

The Soviets obliged by invading, drowning the Hungarian Revolution in blood and managing to prop up the evil regime for another 35 years. Sorry we had to do that, explained the grown-ups to me, but otherwise those neo-Nazi panzers would have rolled.

Replace Hungary with Belarus, Gerő with Lukashenko and Khrushchev with Putin, and today’s situation is eerily similar.

Hundreds of thousands of Belarusians are out in the streets, staging peaceful protests against the blatantly rigged elections and chanting “Leave!”. Though every exit poll showed a roughly 70 per cent majority for the opposition candidate, the final ‘count’ delivered an 80 per cent majority for Alexander Lukashenko.

Having had the pleasure of witnessing, as one of the British observers, Lukashenko’s first electoral triumph in 1995, I must compliment him on the giant strides in rigging elections he has made since then.

In 1995 the process was unnecessarily encumbered by a whole bag of time-honoured tricks: denial of TV time to the opposition, withdrawing dangerous opponents from swing ballots, stuffing the ballot boxes and so on. By now, however, Lukashenko has taken on board Stalin’s maxim: “What matters isn’t how votes are cast, but how they are counted.”

Or not, as the case may be. Why bother with involved calculations, when it’s so much easier to decide in advance on a desirable majority and then declare it has been achieved?

Alas, Lukashenko has discovered that his innovation isn’t universally popular with the people. Forgetting about the fatherly care he had provided them for 26 years, those ingrates felt cheated. Incensed, they took to the streets.

Lukashenko responded like any caring father does when faced with his offspring’s unruly behaviour. He sent in his police and special forces to maul, kill and imprison the peaceful demonstrators.

At least 7,000 of them were arrested – which in Belarus also means being savagely beaten up, tortured and threatened with truncheon rape. Of course truncheons also saw the light of day in their primary function, leaving hundreds writhing on the ground in their own blood.

The situation was reminiscent of the 2014 revolution in the Ukraine, but with one salient difference: Putin’s Ukrainian stooge Yanukovych didn’t dare do a Gerő, whereas Lukashenko has no such compunctions.

The other day he went on TV, saying that the events in Belarus threatened not just his rule, but “the whole post-Soviet space”. The choice of words is telling.

The “post-Soviet space” is another term for the former Soviet Union of 15 republics run from the Kremlin. Today’s ruling KGB junta is committed to restoring it to its past grandeur, thereby undoing what Putin honestly called “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20^th century.”

The trouble is that the inhabitants of the “post-Soviet space” aren’t quite so nostalgic about the good old times. Specifically, one doesn’t detect any worry on the part of, say, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia that the rebellion against Lukashenko can have a domino effect on them.

They, on the other hand, are being portrayed in the Russian press exactly as West Germany and the US were depicted in the Pravda of my childhood. The Baltics are Nato members, and the Russians have been expertly indoctrinated to believe that Nato, along with the EU, is the instigator and abetter of any opposition to any post-Soviet regime Vlad Putin doesn’t favour.

Thus I’ve heard from even educated young Russians that the naked aggression against the Ukraine in 2014 was prompted by the dire necessity to preempt Nato and EU aggression. Those Dutch and Italian tanks were as ready to roll as the West German panzers had been in 1956.

Wary of a similar threat to Belarus, Lukashenko emulated Gerő and asked Putin for help. Should external military threats be deemed imminent, “Putin and I,” he declared yesterday, “have agreed that, on our first request, Russia will provide comprehensive assistance in protecting the security of the Belarus Republic.”   

Specifically, Lukashenko is concerned about the military threat of the Nato exercises taking place in Poland and Lithuania. Their only possible aim has to be a frontal attack on Belarus and the rest of the “post-Soviet space”, emphatically including Mother Russia.

I don’t know to what lengths Putin will go to honour the putative agreement. His own popularity slipping in Russia, he may want to flex his muscles again – even at the risk of making his country even more of an international pariah than she is already. Then again, he may hope that the mere threat of a Russian invasion may suffice to quell the rebellion.

One way or the other, the situation is fraught. One can only hope Western governments can show more resolve in dealing with this threat than they did over Hungary (c. 1956), the Ukraine (c. 2014) and for that matter Czechoslovakia (c. 1938).

That last example ought to have taught the West the awful consequences of appeasement. Alas, like all such lessons, it’s unlikely ever to be learned.