The Shklou Field Syndrome: how Lukashenko is destroying officials' illusion of safety
Alexander Lukashenko's personal inspection of Shklou District ended in yet another purge of officials. The helicopter landed right on a field of the "Haviady-Agro" agricultural enterprise, where the dictator was supposed to be shown the flax harvest. But instead of a nice picture, a completely different one emerged: missed deadlines, a crop rotting in the ground, and Lukashenko's verdict: "Did you want to show how not to work? People should be jailed for this! This is horror, a nightmare! Put the region under martial law." Everyone without exception got their share: the head of the Mahiliou Regional Executive Committee Anatol Isachenka, Minister of Agriculture Yury Harlou, and the recently appointed aide Nadzeya Katkovets. They were told directly: if even one metre of land remains unploughed, they will lose their posts.
And behind this latest purge of officials, a deep systemic crisis is clearly visible, where officials' personal fear of a sudden inspection, repressive Soviet practices and the specifics of manual control all converge at one point.
What unsettles officials most in this situation? The absolute unpredictability of the dictator's reaction and the realisation that status no longer protects them. For years they lived within the familiar paradigm of "Potemkin villages". Before Lukashenko's visits, only the ceremonial routes and model fields along the roads were polished, while all the problems and decay were pushed out into the backcountry. But the Shklou case has shown once again that this camouflage does not guarantee officials any peace of mind.
And here a managerial paradox arises. The system itself drives the official into a trap: failing to show the required result is not an option, as punishment follows immediately. Showing the real state of affairs is not an option either, as it means dismissal. As a result, the only survival strategy becomes concealing problems until the very last moment. And when this illusion collapses because a helicopter happens to land in the wrong place, the repressive apparatus switches on its usual mode of searching for the guilty.
All of this refers directly to the Soviet cult of strategic crops and the Stalinist practice of fighting "wrecking". In the USSR, certain plants were brutally sacralised: under Khrushchev, for example, it was maize, and for failing to meet maize targets, party secretaries lost their party cards and careers. In modern Belarus, flax has been elevated to this rank: it is literally woven into the state coat of arms and has itself been declared the main national brand. In this sense, the spoiling of the flax harvest is, for the regime, essentially an attack on its very ideology and a personal insult.
Just as Stalin's people's commissars hunted for "class enemies" under the notorious "law of three spikelets", a harsh 1932 decree under which a spikelet cut in the field or a broken collective-farm tractor meant ten years in the camps or execution, today Belarusian officials are promised to have their "heads torn off" and are threatened with handcuffs for failing to meet agricultural targets. "You'll answer to me with your head! Rock solid!" Phrases like this have long become the dictator's signature style at any meeting. In the same way, in Soviet times agronomists and engineers were sent to the GULAG for "wrecking" by letting fields become overgrown with weeds or leaving machinery standing unrepaired. All because the command-administrative system simply does not know how to work with any incentive other than paralysing fear, even though it is precisely this fear that paralyses any initiative on the ground.
Parallels, by the way, can also be traced with other totalitarian regimes. For example, in the Third Reich, under Göring's "Four-Year Plan" and the concept of the "battle for production", agriculture was also subordinated to a rigid militaristic logic. Failure to meet agricultural norms or irrational use of land was treated as sabotage and punished by a tribunal or by being sent to concentration camps. The appointment of special aides to oversee the regions there is strikingly reminiscent of today's system of the dictator's aides for the regions and the introduction of "martial law" in the economy of Belarusian regions. The goal is to compensate for the system's inefficiency with harsh administrative pressure on its own executors.
And finally, the current rout near Shklou is a direct continuation of Lukashenko's personal repressive tradition: he has transferred his experience of running a state farm to the scale of the entire country.
And this practice of personnel purges has been built up over years. For example, in November 2012, after a visit to "Barysaudreu", heads rolled across the leadership of the entire industry for the failed modernisation of woodworking, and the plant's director Uladzimir Maltsau ended up in the dock and received a real prison sentence. In August 2018, a public dressing-down took place in Orsha District, with shouts of "The government is sabotaging my instructions! One month, and everything must be done!", which cost a deputy prime minister, two ministers and the head of the Viciebsk Regional Executive Committee their posts. In March 2019, there was the inspection of the "Slizhy" farm and the notorious case of the "shit-covered cows", with the screams "They are sick, they are dying! Have you lost your minds?", which instantly cost Deputy Prime Minister Mikhail Rusy, Minister Leanid Zayats and the chairman of the district executive committee their posts.
Over time, this system finally evolved: agronomists, economists and managers of agricultural enterprises were effectively pushed away from real management. The State Control Committee, the Prosecutor General's Office, the KGB and the Interior Ministry have become the main auditors of Belarusian fields and farms. Constant police raids checking fuel tanks and searching for siphoned fuel, criminal cases against farm directors for trying to conceal livestock deaths in order to meet targets, harsh prison sentences for failing to meet planned norms, and inspections of fertiliser storage have clearly proven that the agricultural sector in Belarus is not managed according to the laws of economics. The absurdity has gone so far that the regime involves military enlistment offices in overseeing sowing and harvesting, and security officers together with military commissars carry out inspections at agricultural enterprises, assess the quality of machine operators' work and threaten to send "negligent workers" and officials who fall behind schedule straight into the army or to corrective labour.
It turns out that today it is not the relevant ministers and industry experts, but the security forces and the prosecutor's office that have become the main managers of the Belarusian economy. And the rest of the officials are openly given to understand that failure to fulfil plans will be judged "according to the laws of wartime".
Do the officials themselves understand where all this is leading? When, behind every broken tractor and every unharvested metre of land, they can already quite realistically picture a prison escort. And what do they plan to do next with this understanding? After all, only yesterday they silently watched, and some obediently took part in, the mass repressions against the Belarusian people, expecting that batons and criminal cases would certainly not concern them. And today the repressive machine is turning on them.
The famous lines of the German pastor Martin Niemöller come to mind:
"When the Nazis came for the communists, I remained silent; I was not a communist. When they came for the social democrats, I remained silent; I was not a social democrat. When they came for the trade unionists, I remained silent; I was not a trade unionist. When they came for the Jews, I remained silent; I was not a Jew. And when they came for me, there was no one left to speak out for me."
After all, everything is happening according to exactly the same formula: when they came for civil society, the officials remained silent, because they did not consider themselves part of it. But today the regime has come for them, and there is simply no one left to stand up for them.
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