I will be writing a weekly column for The Atlantic Council’s BelarusAlert and reposting here. Below is my column from January 27, 2021.
As tens of thousands of Russians took to the streets in scores of cities across eleven time zones on January 23 to protest the jailing of opposition leader Alexei Navalny, many of them also had Belarus on their minds.
In Moscow’s Pushkin Square, there were red-and-white Belarusian flags and chants of “long live Belarus” as Viktor Tsoi’s iconic perestroika-era rock anthem “Peremen” (Change), a song beloved and adopted by opponents of Belarus strongman Alyaksandr Lukashenka, blared from car radios.
The trend also extended to the online world. In a series of TikTok videos widely shared on social media, young Russian men donned police uniforms and ripped off their badges to assail police brutality during the protests, mimicking a form of political performance art that young Belarusians have been deploying for months.
The synergy between anti-government protestors in Russia and Belarus that was on display this past weekend is not new. When demonstrations in Khabarovsk in the Russian Far East broke out this summer over the arrest of a popular governor, protestors there also expressed their solidarity with those seeking to out Lukashenka by chanting, “Belarus We Are With You!” Protestors in Belarus returned the favor, chanting, “From Khabarovsk to Minsk, dictatorship has no place.” Continue reading…
