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The Anatomy of Impatience: Exploring Factors behind 2020 Labor Unrest in Belarus

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 May 2021

Volodymyr Artiukh
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Abstract

The wave of labor unrest that accompanied Belarusian post-election protests had no precedents in the country's independent history or recent post-Soviet political protest mobilizations. These protests challenge the prevalent trend in the current literature on the post-Soviet working class to stress its weakness in terms of organization, as well as structural and material resources. This article relies on a database of workplace-related protest events (August 10–September 30) and a selection of statements, interviews, and social media discussions among participants of the protests, in order to explain this unexpected activation of the seemingly passive Belarusian working class. The author hypothesizes that it was the vagueness of the Belarusian opposition's ideology and workers’ participation in the broader protest movement that helped them overcome the challenges of suppressed voice, bureaucratic despotism, and atomization. These mobilizing factors, however, limit the further development of autonomous labor organizations and their democratizing impact.

Keywords

labor unrestpopulismBelaruslabor organizationsprotest mobilization
Type
Critical Discussion Forum: The Sociology of Protest in Belarus—Social Dynamics, Ideological Shifts, and Demand for Change
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 80 , Issue 1 , Spring 2021 , pp. 52 - 60
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies

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References

1. Dada Lindell and Ivan Tkachev, “Kakov masshtab protestov na predpriiatiiakh v Belorussii. Chto vazhno znat΄,” RBC, August 26, 2020, at rbc.ru/economics/26/08/2020/5f453d989a79477eb37e2d96 (accessed January 28, 2021).

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6. Mihai Varga, “‘Working-Class Heresies’: Ideology in Protests of Ukrainian Workers During the World Economic Crisis 2009–2012,” Debatte: Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe 20, no. 2–3 (2012): 108; Mihai Varga, Worker Protests in Post-Communist Romania and Ukraine: Striking with Tied Hands (Manchester, 2014).

7. Volodymyr Ishchenko, “Far Right Participation in the Ukrainian Maidan Protests: An Attempt of Systematic Estimation,” European Politics and Society 17, no. 4 (March 2016): 453–72; Oksana Dutchak, “Unite or Fall: Labor Protests in Ukraine in the Face of the Crises,” Intersections East European Journal of Society and Politics 1, no. 3 (September 2015): 140–57; Stephen Crowley and Irina Olimpieva, “Labor Protests and Their Consequences in Putin’s Russia,” Problems of Post-Communism 65, no. 5 (2018): 344–58; Andrei Semenov, “Sobytiinyi analiz protestov kak instrument izucheniia politicheskoi mobilizatsii,” The Russian Sociological Review 17, no. 2 (2018), 317–41.

8. Conducted by a team of Ukrainian sociologists led by Volodymyr Ishchenko in 2013–14; more details atcslr.org.ua/en/ukrainian-protest-and-coercion-data-project/ (accessed January 28, 2021).

9. Introduced in 2004 in public administration, middle and large companies and organizations regardless of the ownership form, deputy directors responsible for ideological work are nominally charged with implementing the so-called “ideology of the Belarusian state,” but in practice they often have HR responsibilities, thus controlling hiring and dismissals.

10. Marta Kahancova, Trade Unions and Professional Associations as Civil Society Actors Working on the Issues of Labor Rights and Social Dialogue in Eastern Partnership Countries (Bratislava, 2020), at celsi.sk/media/research_reports/RR_35_d9jxqmA.pdf (accessed January 28, 2021). Exact membership is not known at the moment.

11. David Mandel, Perestroika and the Soviet People: Rebirth of the Labor Movement (Montreal, 1991) and Donald A. Filtzer, Soviet Workers and the Collapse of Perestroika: The Soviet Labor Process and Gorbachev’s Reforms, 1985–1991 (Cambridge, Eng., 1994).

12. Valer Bulhakau; Andrei Dyn΄ko, eds., Khryshchėnne natsyi: Masavyi︠a︡ aktsyi 1988–2009 (Vilnius, 2011) and Tatsiana Chyzhova, “Rabochy pratest u Bielarusi (2011–2013 hh.). Chastka piershaya,” Prasvet, 2013, at prasvet.com/1547 (accessed December 10, 2020; no longer available).

13. For factors behind the political quietude of Ukrainian labor, see Denys Gorbach, “Underground Waterlines: Explaining Political Quiescence of Ukrainian Labor Unions,” Focaal 2019, no. 84: 33–46.

14. For the distinction between “thin” and “thick” ideologies see Cas Mudde and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser, Populism: A Very Short Introduction (New York, 2017); for a discussion of “thin” protest ideologies in the context of Euromaidan, see Oleg Zhuravlev and Volodymyr Ishchenko, “Exclusiveness of Civic Nationalism: Euromaidan Eventful Nationalism in Ukraine,” Post-Soviet Affairs 36, no. 3 (April 2020): 226–45; for a discussion of populist ideologies and the east European working class: Don Kalb, introduction to Don Kalb and Gabor Halmai, eds., Headlines of Nation, Subtexts of Class: Working Class Populism and the Return of the Repressed in Neoliberal Europe (New York, 2011), 1–56.

15. For an analysis of the evolution of dominant and protest populist idioms in Belarus, see Volodymyr Artiukh, “The People against State Populism. Belarusian Protests against the ‘Social Parasite Law,’” Schweizerisches Archiv für Volkskunde 116, no. 1 (2020): 101–16 and Volodymyr Artiukh, “More Contagious than Coronavirus: Electoral Unrest under Lukashenka’s Tired Rule in Belarus,” Open Democracy, August 4, 2020, at opendemocracy.net/en/odr/electoral-unrest-under-lukashenkas-tired-rule-in-belarus/ (accessed January 28, 2021).

16. Varga, Worker Protests in Post-Communist Romania and Ukraine.

17. Probably a case of folk etymology by analogy withvoenkom (military commissar).

18. According to the chairman of Belarusian Free Metalworkers’ Union, political leaders of the opposition have not offered a clear program that would appeal to the workers’ interests, which left them split and hesitant. He cites an examples of Belarusian Metallurgic Plant, where, according to his source, “90% [of the workers] are against Lukashenka, [among them] 40% are in favor of Tsikhanouskaya and the rest are left without any choice” (website of the Free Metalworkers’ Union, at spm-by.org/news/1/2903/revolyutsiya-v-soznanie-naroda-revolyutsiya-v-strane/, accessed January 4, 2021; no longer available). Similar dissatisfaction with the opposition’s program were often mentioned in Telegram channels where workers discussed their protests in conversations with the author.

19. By early December more than 200 workers joined the strikes individually by presenting written statements in the media.

20. For discussion of a populist capture of working-class grievances in eastern Europe, see Kalb, Don, “Post-Socialist Contradictions: The Social Question in Central and Eastern Europe and the Making of the Illiberal Right,” in Breman, Jan, Harris, Kevan, Lee, Ching Kwan, and van der Linden, Marcel, eds., The Social Question in the Twenty-First Century: A Global View (Oakland, 2019), 208–26Google Scholar; and Ost, David, The Defeat of Solidarity: Anger and Politics in Postcommunist Europe (Ithaca, 2005)Google Scholar. For an overview of the failed participation of labor in the Arab Spring revolutions, see Gopal, Anand, “The Arab Thermidor,” Catalyst 4, no. 2 (Summer 2020)Google Scholar.