Paper short abstract:

Belarus is ruled by a populist, although national nihilist leader, who is challenged by nationalist pro-market labor unions. I trace the genealogy of their populist tropes originating in late Perestroika via archival and ethnographic research of the labor organizations.

Paper long abstract:

This paper deals with competing populisms in the Republic of Belarus: the official discourse of the president Lukashenka and that of the opposition trade unions. In a historical chiasm, the populist president moved from Soviet nostalgia to promoting flexibilization of labor, while the originally pro-market trade-unions had to invent a new language to defend workers' rights. By way of a historically-informed ethnography, I trace the genesis and permutations of the images of the father-figure of the leader and the workers.

Belarusian political regime seems a textbook example of populism. Lukashenka, Belarusian president since 1994, cherishes the fatherly image, sensitive to the grievances of the common people and uncompromising to the corrupt officials and greedy profiteers. He boasts on having created a national economic model of socially-oriented capitalism, which benefits the broad masses and keeps in check the chaos of market. However, as opposed to the textbook wisdom, the Belarusian leadership lacks nationalist ideology and increasingly resorts to neoliberal templates in labor regulation. Labor organizations that resist these policies struggle to formulate a coherent counter-ideology and produce an idiosyncratic populist mixture of nationalism, free-trade liberalism and workerism.

How did this unusual antagonism of paternalistic neoliberalism and labor entrepreneurialism come about? My archival and ethnographic research shows that its roots lie in the ideological climate of Gorbachev's Perestroika, whose heirs were both the Belarusian president and his working-class opponents, as the protests in 1991 which toppled the communist elites, clearing the way for Lukashenka, lacked resources to produce a viable labor movement.