Many of the Russians who took to the streets last weekend to protest the jailing of opposition leader Alexei Navalny also had Belarus on their minds.
There were red-and-white Belarusian flags and chants of “long live Belarus” on Moscow’s Pushkin Square as Viktor Tsoi’s iconic perestroika-era rock anthem “Peremen” — a song beloved by opponents of strongman Alyaksandr Lukashenka — blared from car radios.
Navalny’s supporters say they have been closely studying the developments in Belarus since mass protests broke out in August, hoping to draw lessons for their own battle against the regime of Vladimir Putin.
But the solidarity and synergy between the Russian and Belarusian protestors is about much more than the contagion effects of political and social change in two neighboring former Soviet states.
In uniting the separate struggles against Lukashenka and Putin – turning them into a common cause against a Putin-Lukashenka axis – the Russian and Belarusian streets are changing the dynamics in both countries, and the dynamic between them, in unpredictable ways.
The Power Vertical Podcast is produced by The University of Texas at Arlington’s Charles T. McDowell Center for Global Studies and the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center.
