International Dialogue Initiative
2020 Annual Meeting, Session 2
(Conducted by Zoom on February 13, 2021)
Because of the pandemic, the IDI had to cancel its Annual Meeting in the fall of 2020. We then held two online meetings, the second of which took place on Saturday, February 13, 2021. Nineteen participants were in attendance, including two invited guests: Peter McBride, the Director of Keene State University’s Cohen Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, and Xu Yong, a psychiatrist/psychotherapist who is currently the Deputy Director of the Department of Education and Training at Shanghai Mental Health Center in Shanghai, China. After an exchange of greetings and individual updates, members listened to a presentation by Dr. Xu on China’s approach to individual and group psychotherapy. We hope to create a report about that discussion sometime soon.
REFLECTIONS ON THE PROTESTS IN BELARUS
We then turned to a presentation by a Russian colleague on ongoing anti-governmental protests in Belarus (mirrored by similar protests in Russia). This member analogized protests in Belarus to the Arab Spring movement and suggested that recent disputed elections had been the last straw for a population long dissatisfied with the increasing totalitarianism and corruption of its rulers. He noted that while some protests in other countries bear the hallmarks of intergenerational conflicts, in Belarus the police cracking down on the protesters were young people themselves and a good number of the protesters were elderly. Younger protesters tried to speak to the police and soldiers: “Guys, we’re the same age. We are like your brothers. Neither you nor we belong to privileged strata of society. Stay neutral at least. Don’t beat us.” This effort at an alliance failed, however, and brutality ensued.
We then discussed the political and psychological dynamics that might be at play in Belarus, dynamics involving perceptions of Russian hegemony, an “old” order competing with hopes for something “new,” a corresponding competition between practical values (job security, income, mobility) and “sacred values” (perseverance, historical dreams, traditions). The protesters now seem to be fighting more for dignity and respect – respect for their wish to be told the truth, to be treated like adults and to participate in government – than for economic benefits. Because of this, they were joined by all age groups, borrowing on Russian dissident Alexander Navalny’s “Don’t be afraid” motto. Also of great importance is that, when the three leading dissident politicians were jailed, their wives took up leadership, thereby highlighting a gender dynamic within the societal dynamic.
In general, women played an essential role in the protests, especially by conducting regular women’s marches. Another remarkable example of courage was the act of a young woman, Maria Kolesnikova, who demonstratively tore up her foreign passport at the border as the KGB attempted to force her into exile abroad, preferring instead to be arrested and face the prospect of a long imprisonment.
One IDI guest noted Belarus’s “postwar identity of suffering and stubborn resistance” and asked whether there was a conscious collective memory within the nation. The presenter linked this post-war identity to the War itself. In the first part of the 20th century, Belarus had been a diverse society with a large Jewish urban population and a large native Belorussian population in the countryside. The War and the Holocaust changed everything. But it also bequeathed to the current generations a high respect for “stubborn resistance and suffering,” including the sacrifice of one’s own life, as their grandparents had. It is this historical identification that people seem to be drawing on for strength now. The presenter called this the “heroization” of resistance.
The IDI’s Russian members and others discussed Belarus’s current leadership and its failure to address the pandemic. The formal response to COVID was to deny and ignore it, which undermined the social fabric of the country as well as its health. President Lukashenko can be seen to exemplify certain aspects narcissistic leadership: denying currently reality, identifying himself with the fate of the country, and pushing a narrative of “chosen glory” – victory in “The Great Patriotic War” – as a basis for current identity. This was seen as a complete failure because it offered no real values, no vision of the future and no new national narrative. It was about “going back only” when people want to move forward.
Belarussians today long for an identity separate from Russia and linked more to the values and lifestyle of the West. Indeed, the collective memory of Belarus includes its relationships with Poland and Lithuania, both formerly occupied by the Soviet Union and now Westernized. In contrast President Lukashenko speaks Russian, not Belarussian. Having come to power in 1995, not long after the collapse of the Soviet Union, he was, and still is, part of a Russian effort to block this collective memory. But the protests in Belarus now – unlike protests in 2010 – have become national, as have protests in Russia. This was seen as speaking to a powerful wish for a new identity – not necessarily fully Western but freed to be self-determining. The question of whether there were leaders among the opposition who could offer a national vision if transition occurs is an open one. One challenge the Arab Spring movement faced was that there were relatively few leaders capable of stepping in, once protests led to revolution, to offer a compelling vision of a way forward.
One question is whether Mrs. Tikhanovskaya – seen by protesters as the real winner of the presidential election – would be able to serve as a consolidating figure and short-term leader during a future transition to democracy (if that were to happen in the foreseeable future). In any event, the phenomenon of her appearance “from nothing” – this brave woman, who had no political experience beforehand and registered as a candidate only because her husband was imprisoned at an early stage of campaign, became hugely popular (winning about 80% of the vote, by unofficial estimates) – deserves its own psychological analysis, especially given the rather masculine Belorussian society. An analogy with Corazon Aquino, who became the Philippine president after the assassination of her husband, may be illuminating.