BELARUS: THE POLITICAL CRISIS OF 2020

The article shows the causes of the Belarusian political crisis in 2020-2021. The authors give a situational analysis of the events in Belarus, in particular, on the problem of foreign interference in the internal affairs of the state. Attention is focused on the fact that it is a complex systemic crisis: of domestic and foreign policy; socio-economic, identification, intergenerational; as well as a crisis of the legitimacy of the political regime and personal power of President Lukashenko. The authors outline the reasons for the formation of protest groups from among the seemingly loyal Lukashenko's electorate. They note that the situation of a split in society persists and a new round of the crisis is possible. Since 1994, Belarus and Lukashenko's regime have faced unprecedented protests. After the presidential elections on August 9. there was a clash between the forces of law and order not with separate groups of politicized radicals, but with prolonged protests throughout the country, in which representatives of different social groups were involved. The Telegram revolution followed the so-called strategies of "spontaneous coalitions" (Russian political scientist V. Solovey), which grow on the basis of spontaneous protest moods without a clear initial platform and are concentrated around a certain negative event (in the case of Belarus, rather tough police actions against demonstrators) - with the subsequent development of events in the right direction. Protest speeches developed in waves - the youth maiden was replaced by a factory-strike, a factory-strike by women's one, etc. Belarus is in a large-scale and long-term crisis of domestic and foreign policy; a socio-economic crisis of the "Belarusian model"; a crisis of identification (problems with the national and cultural and civilizational identity of Belarusians); an intergenerational crisis; a crisis of legitimacy and penetration in the implementation of already adopted power of decision; a crisis of the regime of personal power of President Lukashenko. Lukashenko's internal and external political game is complicated as one of the causes of the crisis - maneuvering between Russia and the West, an attempt to integrate a part of the national-democratic (nationalist) opposition into their own political discourse with the exclusion of prominent opposition figures from the political and public space of Belarus. The Belarusian (pre)revolutionary situation was qualitatively different from the Ukrainian one: the Belarusian state and the regime of Lukashenko were not as corrupt as the Ukrainian state and the regime of Viktor Yanukovych in 2013; Lukashenko (unlike Yanukovych, against whom members of his inner circle were actively intrigued in 2013) managed to maintain control over the Belarusian elite; he acted firmly with the unconditional support of law enforcement agencies (which Yanukovych did not do in 2013) and refused to negotiate with the opposition (which led Yanukovych to a dead end); the nationalist and national-liberal opposition in Belarus did not have such massive support (as in Ukraine in 2013), and the protesters in Belarus were not ready for radical and violent actions against the current government, and could not throw a really serious challenge to the state power system and paralyze it. The stabilization achieved with the participation of Russia and the temporary retreat of the opposition do not mean that a new round of the crisis will be ruled out in the foreseeable future, since the causes of the crisis persist. At the same time, the fall of Lukashenko's regime, a sharp internal political reformatting of the situation in Belarus and a sharp change in its geopolitical orientations are undesirable for both Russia and China, since they will damage both Eurasian integration and China's long-term interests in the implementation of the OBOR project in the European direction. Filling the Union State of Russia and Belarus with real content could give Belarus a chance to get out of the current crisis in an evolutionary way, but this requires a clearly expressed will of the political elites of both countries and a well-developed mechanism for implementing the decisions made.