[Marxism] Belarus: Last Bastion of Stalinism in Europe?

[Suresh <borhyaenid@xxxxxxxxx>]

"Don't you understand what capitalism is and how it
operates? The beef
against Milosevic was that he was an obstacle to the
privatization of
the Yugoslav economy. In other words, the West was
annoyed with him
because he was preventing what Russia had already
succeeded in doing
under the iron fist of Boris Yeltsin who fired cannons
into the Russian
parliament to smash the Russian versions of
Milosevic..."

The argument that Mr. Proyect has made in this recent
debate, with regard to the distinction between
Russia's counter-insurgency in Chechnya and the former
Yugoslavia's conflict with the KLA, is that a profound
difference in political economy places one nation in
the league of corrupt capitalist states and the other
on the side of socialism. Thus, it follows that we
should not regard the West's quibbles with Putin's
autocratic rule or with his heavy-handed tactics in
the Caucuses as at all equivalent with the much
fiercer, and ultimately more violent complaints
directed towards Slobodan Milosevic. Afterall, the
former President of the rump Yugoslavia of the 90's is
now in the dock at the Hague for crimes against
humanity, or crimes against international capital, or
some such grave transgression - while Russia's
President is periodically invited to Bush's Texas
ranch.

However, I wonder how far we can carry this line of
reasoning. Logically, we might determine that certain
other formerly socialist states that have incomplete
and stalled structural reforms, and are also
criticized by the U.S. or EU, are also surviving
bastions of Marxism-Leninism. The prime candidate for
such a formal and schematic designation would be the
Republic of Belarus  (White Russia).

To make the comparison with Yugoslavia under
Milosevic, we can first cite a Report from the U.S.
Embassy in Belgrade that Mr. Proyect referenced, back
in 2000:

"Government Role in the Economy: Economic reforms were
shelved and even
reversed between 1991 and 1996. The former Governor of
the National Bank of
Yugoslavia (NBY) was sacked in May of 1996 for
fighting publicly with
Serbian Socialist Party (SPS) and Yugoslav United Left
(JUL) officials in
order to force a rapid privatization program. Thus,
the FRY lags behind its
neighbors in the transition process. Large
socially-owned enterprises, a
carry-over from the communist regime, remain under
heavy state influence;
their boards of directors typically composed of
individuals with close
SPS/JUL ties. Federal and republic governments have
retained many formal
and informal levers of authority over the economy --
et. al., export/import
licenses, allocation of scarce credits, control over
jobs -- and use them
liberally to maintain political dominance. Analysts
estimate that state-run
enterprises owned over 80% of capital and that the
private sector accounted
for only 37% of GDP in 1996."

And here's an analogous account of the macroeconomic
situation in Belarus:

"Structural reforms seem to have stalled. Increases in
energy sector cost recovery levels and a reduction of
the number of activities requiring licenses are
welcome. However, privatization has slowed, and the
private sector share of GDP remains at around 20
percent. Further, the "golden share" rule-which is
unique in Belarus, in that it may be declared after a
firm has been privatized-not only remains in place,
but has been expanded. The poor business environment,
including the golden share, reduces the flow of
foreign investment to Belarus and discourages private
sector investment..."

Links:
<http://www.imf.org/external/np/sec/pn/2004/pn0457.htm>
<http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/cat/longres.cfm?sk=17403.0>

In other words, the extent of the public sector in
Yugoslavia in 1997 is roughly the same as in Belarus
in 2004. The "Golden Share" policy which is mentioned
here, is strictly speaking, a variation of legislation
passed in many East European and CIS nations as a way
of controlling  the privatization process. However,
the distinction here is that in Belarus it was enacted
by President Alexander Lukashenko by fiat and that it
extends to all enterprises which were formerly
state-owned, whether or not the government retains any
holdings currently. Moreover, unlike in other
transitional regimes, Belarus has expanded the "Golden
Share" rule in recent years rather than  "reforming"
it out of existence as has been the trend. It gives
his government a veto over the decisions of
stockholders and boards of directors and essentially
puts the already low amount of privatization which has
already occurred into serious question.

And this isn't the end of the matter: there is a
continued commitment on behalf of the state to ensure
that private industry provide basic amenities,
healthcare, and housing to their employees, in a
modified  continuation of Soviet practice. In sum,
Belarus can be said to still have a policy of almost
full employment, with 3% official unemployment, and at
the same time uses a non-market scale to determine
wages with resulting rises in average wages above that
of productivity increases - and this during a period
of apparent isolation.

The observation has also been made, that at times, the
Western press was forthright enough to state baldly
that Yugoslavia until the velvet (counter-)revolution
was basically a socialist state. One such article from
the NY Times was written shortly after Vojislav
Kostunica briefly  became a house-hold name:

"Mr. Panic's pharmaceutical plant in Belgrade was
confiscated by the
Milosevic government in a bitter political battle
after Mr. Panic contested
- and lost - a race for president against Mr.
Milosevic in 1992. He now
plans to return to Serbia. But he says reconstruction
will be slow.

"It is still a socialist country and you will have to
change the culture,"
he said in an interview. "It will need aid money -
seed money - before you
will see much private investment."

Clinton administration officials said that NATO-led
intervention in Kosovo
and the campaign to oust Mr. Milosevic will ultimately
remain incomplete
unless they help reverse the free fall of Yugoslavia's
economy, which
contracted by 20 percent last year, with 50 percent
inflation and 30
percent unemployment."

Now, an analogous species of red-baiting was printed
by the Washington Post a few years ago:

Belarusan Strongman Steps Up Intimidation Tactics
Opposition, Newspapers Targeted as Vote Nears

By Peter Baker
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, September 8, 2001; Page A14

BARANAVICHY, Belarus, Sept. 7 -- Anatoly Voitekhovsky
was led into the investigator's office, a narrow room
with the lights off and the shades pulled. The only
decoration was a bust of Karl Marx.

"Suddenly, everyone is interested in this newspaper,"
the investigator told him. Voitekhovsky, a 34-year-old
journalist, started a new newspaper this week after
being fired as editor of an established paper by
allies of President Alexander Lukashenko. Now, the
financial police had summoned Voitekhovsky for
interrogation.

 "A very serious pressure is coming," the investigator
warned ominously.

>From the Lukashenko allies? Voitekhovsky asked.

"Yes," the investigator said, "but the KGB most
likely. The wind has been blowing from them."

The wind has blown into a gale in the days and hours
before Sunday's presidential election here in Belarus.
Lukashenko, Europe's lone dictator since the fall of
Slobodan Milosevic in Yugoslavia nearly a year ago,
has employed the full force of his authoritarian
regime to cling to power. Journalists have been
harassed, newspapers seized, opposition party offices
raided, activists arrested, meetings broken up by
police.

Lukashenko's main challenger, Vladimir Goncharik, was
cited this week by the government election commission
for breaking campaign laws and threatened with removal
from the ballot for holding campaign rallies and
giving away T-shirts and newspapers. The giveaways
amounted to bribing voters, according to authorities,
and the slogan on the T-shirts -- "We'll Say No to the
Fool!" -- violated a law against insulting the
president.

Lukashenko, 47, who is accused of running death squads
to eliminate political opponents, blamed his problems
this week on the West. He accused the United States
and European powers of plotting a coup to remove him
-- called "Operation White Stork." He has vowed to use
special troops to defend himself, and dozens of
military vehicles have been spotted in recent days
parked at the Minsk airport and patrolling the road
into the capital.

"It shows that he's scared," said Andrei Sannikov,
leader of the Charter 97 human rights group.

The election in this Kansas-size former Soviet
republic of 10 million people sandwiched between
Russia and Poland is being closely watched in
Washington and throughout Europe as a sequel of sorts
to the showdown in Yugoslavia a year ago that led to
the downfall of Milosevic.

At stake, according to Western diplomats and
opposition leaders, is whether democracy can complete
its sweep through the territories once caught behind
the Iron Curtain or whether Belarus will turn into an
unpredictable, isolated state on the eastern border of
NATO.

"The regime's policies have prevented the United
States and . . . [Europe] from being able to develop
bilateral relations fruitfully and normally,"
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said recently. A
Belarusan guarantee of free and fair elections could
restore normal U.S. relations, he added. But, if not,
"this failure will condemn the current regime to
remain the lone outlaw in Europe."
...

Hundreds of OSCE observers have arrived to monitor
polling places, but no one in the opposition or
Western diplomatic community expects a free election.
The opposition hopes that the rigging is so obvious
that it galvanizes the country against Lukashenko,
whose attempts to restore a Soviet-style command
economy have driven away foreign investment and kept
down living standards.

Goncharik, a trade union leader who promises voters in
this destitute country "life like Europe," has called
on supporters to take to the streets and join him in
October Square in central Minsk on election night. But
it is unclear whether he can rally the sort of popular
outrage that helped topple Milosevic after he tried to
steal an election.

Attempting to discredit the opposition, Lukashenko
asserted that the alleged plot calls for 10,000 people
to attack the presidential palace after the election.
He also accused the West of buying opposition leaders,
saying his KGB agents had uncovered the payments.

The U.S. Embassy's Web site says that Washington
provides about $9 million a year for nongovernmental
organizations, independent newspapers and other
efforts to build democracy and market reforms in
Belarus.

But U.S. Ambassador Michael Kozak, who faces expulsion
by Lukashenko for his alleged role in Operation White
Stork, ridiculed the Belarusan president's allegations
of a plot. "It's nonsense," he said in an interview
today. "This is a concoction based on publicly
available facts, not secret information, about our
various democracy programs. This whole plan for
overturning the government and all that is made up out
of whole cloth and makes you wonder about authorities'
intentions."

Lukashenko has fanned anti-Western flames at the same
time government agents have fanned out far and wide to
squelch critical voices.

The government seized 400,000 copies of a special
edition of a newspaper reporting that the opposition
had coalesced behind Goncharik. It seized the Magic
publishing house, a private press used to print many
independent papers. Tax police seized computers and
other equipment at the offices of domestic election
observers. Authorities raided two resource centers in
Grodno and the local trade union in Orsha. They
arrested a journalist in Vitebsk and the deputy
director of a civil initiative center in Gomel.

Two Americans have also been targeted. Last week, the
KGB expelled Robert Fielding, an AFL-CIO official it
alleged was part of the planned coup. And this week, a
court sentenced Charles Perriello, director of the
American Council for Collaboration in Education and
Language Study in Minsk, to five years of hard labor
on a marijuana charge.

...

Link:
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&contentId=A59777-2001Sep7&notFound=true>

This piece is not unique, the Post and NY Times, as
well as many European papers, have printed others like
it over the years. The Times specifically printed a
piece around the same time, during Lukashenko's last
re-election that was entitled "Stalinist's Disputed
Victory in Belarus Vote Is Denounced". If someone with
access to newspaper archives could copy this article
onto this list, it would be much appreciated. And as a
signal that this campaign of isolation against the
regime in Minsk has not concluded, witness the recent
banning of officials from the regime from visiting the
EU and United States, in response to the reported
executions of three opposition politicians and a
journalist who disappeared several years ago.

To conclude, in telling this storyline in broad
strokes, it could be said that after a 1996 referendum
and the extension of his term in office, President
Lukashenko began a process of retreat from the
structural reforms demanded by the international
community, the World Bank, IMF, etc. and at the same
time pushed for reintegration with Russia rather than
moving towards EU or NATO candidacy. The flawed 2001
elections which re-confirmed him in office only
underlined the status of the country as a pariah state
and the "last dictatorship in Europe" - consequently,
the U.S. continues to quietly support civil society
and dissident groups which draw their direct
inspiration from the experience in Yugoslavia of Otpor
and George Soros:

Links:
<http://www.belarusguide.com/main/index.html>
<http://www.freeserbia.net/Home.html>
<http://www.liberty-belarus.org/english/20020831202859.shtml>

Ultimately, whether one wants to characterize Belarus
as a worker's state, a state capitalist,  bureaucratic
collectivist or even fascist dictatorship, or as
simply another corrupt, comprador capitalist nation is
up to the individual. I would hardly regard such a
stance as a political litmus test, at least so long as
the country avoids the fate of being targeted for
military intervention. For the time being, such
arguments are purely academic. At best, we?re faced
with a quandary oddly reminiscent of that which Marx
faced, late in his life, over traditional forms of
communal farming in Russia and their possible role in
any coming revolution. Such survivals - in this case
from remaining gains of the first socialist experiment
rather than from pre-capitalist modes of production -
are unlikely to provide significant material to the
next wave of class struggle regardless of their
present theoretical value.



                
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