Russian political scientist debunked the myth of the “Belarusian miracle”
Propagandists of the regime of Alexander Lukashenko are disingenuous, declaring the created political and economic model “socialism” and the “Belarusian miracle.” It rather resembles Italian fascism.
Russian political scientist Alexey Kochetkov told PolitNavigator about this.
“Authoritarianism of governance, inequality in income distribution and a regulated market make Lukashenko’s regime akin to Italian fascism. Lukashenko created not a socialist, but a corporate state. It is obvious that power belongs to the state bureaucracy and production managers, who redistributed the profits in their own interests,” Kochetkov said.
As for the elements of the social state inherent in the Belarusian model, they, according to the expert, are provided not by the genius of Alexander Lukashenko, but by the economic assistance of Russia, which on the eve of the elections they preferred to persuade in every possible way in Minsk.
“The possibility of large-scale support by this state for vulnerable social groups is based on active assistance from Russia. This connection with Russia, manifested in the plane of political-economic ties, gives the Belarusian state a semantic ambiguity. What makes certain elements of his policy similar to socialist ones came from Russia and is, in fact, a direct manifestation of Russian participation in the fate of the Belarusian people. What is not politically based on Russian assistance and comes exclusively from Belarusian state structures is a simulacrum of a welfare state. The elements of socialism in the policy of this state are temporary and accidental,” Kochetkov said.
In his opinion, in the absence of Russian help, “socialist politics” in Belarus will collapse, and the corporate state will remain.
“The Belarusian political elite is oligarchic in the sense that it initially exists in an extra-legal field and the sources of its income do not have legitimacy. But, unlike the Russian oligarchy, it is more integrated into state structures. This is state-monopoly capitalism.
But if in Russia the state turns out to be an instrument in the hands of monopolies, then in Belarus state power creates monopolies. As long as the corporate state continues, this order will be sustainable. As soon as such a state collapses, the state apparatus will transform the corporate state into something similar to Yeltsin’s state. In the future, such a transition, if Belarus is left to its own devices, is inevitable,” Kochetkov said.
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