The authoritarian regime of Aliaksandar Lukashenka, Belarus's president since 1994, has been repeatedly criticized for human rights violations and suppression of political dissent. Unable to introduce changes by constitutional methods, the political opposition often expressed its dissatisfaction by engaging in street protests. The most recent outbreak of civil unrest took place after the presidential election of 2020 as the vast plurality of the population challenged the incumbent's officially declared victory. Violent and efficient riot police dispersed the demonstrations, and after several months of public protests Belarus's political life returned to the status quo.
Attended by tens of thousands of people, mostly unassociated with established opposition parties, the protests were exclusively confined to urban centers. The countryside remained calm. How can the regime induce the enduring loyalty of the rural population? This question remained unanswered for many years. Political science and regional studies have not produced a sufficiently detailed answer. The help arrived from classical sociology combined with traditional anthropological methods of research.
Ronan Hervouet's book is immersed in Durkheimian sociological tradition. It is not surprising as he works at the University of Bordeaux, where Emile Durkheim developed the functionalist perspective in sociology. Hervouet is a member of the Centre Emile Durkheim.
The book is based on long and detailed anthropological research of the Belarusian rural population's behavioral patterns. The wealth of information collected by the author is impressive, even if published alone, without any further investigation. The book, however, is much more than a collection of facts hitherto unknown to a non-Belarusian reader. Hervouet demonstrates how everyday behavioral patterns are channeled into social functions that allow Belarus's peasants to cope with the oppressive and intrusive regime, maintain social integration within their communities, preserve a sense of personal dignity, and establish a system of norms, values, and symbols that help to find meaning in life.
Belarus retains the Soviet era agricultural system. The collective farm (kolkhoz) is the main economic unit in Belarusian agriculture. While the word is an anachronism—today's official categorization of agricultural enterprises is different and more detailed—all the categories, old and new, have the same core meaning, they demote the farms that are controlled by the state, fully or in part. Belarus's National Statistical Committee reported that in 2021 there were 907 such agricultural enterprises in the country. Kolkhozes are the end points of economic, administrative, and political governmental control of the Belarusian countryside. The villagers employed by them depend on the state for their livelihoods. Does this mean that the kolkhozes control the villagers’ political attitudes and ensure that they remain loyal to the regime? The real picture is more complex and its complexities are presented in the book in rich, profound detail.
While employed by kolkhozes, villagers live in communities, which are held together by rituals, traditions, close emotional ties, shared memories, and other things that the author documented during years of observation and research. The kolkhoz and the community interact in many ways. It is not the kolkhoz that dominates in those interactions. Kolkhozes can exercise administrative supremacy, but the managers who actually have to implement the rules and regulations are members of the community and cannot go against its interests. The kolkhoz might promote a particular political narrative but it can only succeed if it utilizes the community's shared memories and cultural symbols. The kolkhoz and the community must establish a mutually acceptable modus vivendi. How they do it is described in minute yet relevant detail by Hervouet.
An important aspect of this symbiosis is that the villagers have come to appreciate the kolkhoz and found ways to make it a useful neighbor rather than an alien, domineering representative of a distant state bureaucracy. The familiar neighbor is better than all the ideas of economic restructuring promoted by opposition politicians. The villagers do not support the regime, but they have learned how to live with structures of the regime that are closest to them. This would explain their lack of enthusiasm toward the opposition politics.
The book has more than one level. Political scientists will find that classical sociology offers help to explain those phenomena that are not easy to comprehend from a pure political standpoint. Those who are unfamiliar with everyday life in rural Belarus will find plenty of information on the subject. The book will help generations of scholars to study an important period of Belarusian post-Soviet history.
