The Career of Aliaksandr Lukashenka (Alexander Lukashenko)
Part 1: Early Life
I have visited the Republic of Belarus many times, starting in April 1992, and for all but that first visit, Aliaksandr Lukashenka was the president, legally or illegally. I have never met him personally, nor have I requested such a meeting. I have watched or read the transcripts of several interviews carried out by colleagues such as Grigorii Ioffe (at the end of his 2014 book), by the BBC Moscow correspondent Steve Rosenberg, and most recently, by the influencer Mario Nawfal.
My few meetings with his officials never ended well and I spent much of my time with members of the opposition. All the same, I was curious how he managed to remain in power for so long.
One of my friends in Minsk used to collect his public comments, usually from television and eventually published a book of them in St. Petersburg. After 2020, my friend’s home was visited by the militia, and as of the past year, I have not heard from him. His emails dried up and no one seems to have a clue as to his whereabouts. I began to suspect that he might be the latest victim of the vindictiveness and long memory of the only president of Belarus.
But what do we know of the early life of Lukashenka? Nothing is very clear, but from the two extant full-length biographies of him and through rumours and innuendos, we can ascertain a few certainties. His biography on the president’s page is short and generally unhelpful, other than its excellent photographs, which cover Lukashenka’s life from boyhood to the present.
He was born on 30 August 1954 in the settlement of Kopys on the border between Viciebsk and Mahiliou regions in the northeastern part of the republic. Though there are records of a Lukashenka in the region, who is likely Aliaksandr’s maternal grandfather, there is no indication of the presence of a father at any time after his birth. The father may have stayed in the home during the birth of an older brother who died prematurely. There is speculation that he may have been a Roma who moved from village to village without a permanent habitation—and presumably with the first name of Hryhorii (Grigorii).
His mother Ekaterina Trofimovna raised her remaining son, moving to the village of Aleksandriya close to the border with Russia, where she had relatives. They lived in poverty but survived through hard work. One can imagine that the son’s early influences in what was then called the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic (BSSR) might well have been its former partisan leaders. From 1956 to 1980, the BSSR was under the leadership of Kiryl Mazurau (1956-65) and Piotr Masherau (1965-80), the latter during a time when the leadership of Leonid Brezhnev in Moscow opted to revive the glories of the Great Patriotic War of 1941-45. Prior to his death in March 1953, Stalin had severely repressed some of the former partisans and the memory of the Great Victory.
In some respects, there was little to note in Lukashenka’s childhood that suggested a future dictator, but he would have needed to develop a thick skin to take the taunts of being fatherless, struggling with poverty, and survival in a postwar village. According to his own account, young Sasha was soon a leading personality in the village and there is no reason to doubt the veracity of the remark. According to Valery Karbalevich’s 2010 biography of Lukashenka (p10), his mother’s salary from various unskilled labour jobs, was 50-60 rubles in the summer and 15-20 rubles in winter. While the summer salary would have been close to the average in rural society, 15-20 would raise questions about survival.
In this period, Sasha seems to have adapted well, learning how to milk cows and other rural tasks. At one point, he and his mother decided to buy a horse from the collective farm, paying for it with samogon (illegally distilled alcohol, usually about 80% proof), since they were unable to afford vodka. Around 1961, they were using the horse to plough a field and crossed accidentally into the property of another neighbour, who yelled at Sasha and declared “Damn your mother!” Lukashenka declared that the event had remained in his memory and he would never again allow anyone to insult his mother.
Being quite athletic, and according to his own account, Sasha excelled in sports, particularly soccer and ice hockey, where as a child he had to play goaltender—not a position he every occupied as an adult. Evidently, he also became quite skilled at playing the accordion and was often called upon to perform at weddings (today his youngest son Mikalai is an accomplished pianist). He wrote some verses and could sing them with the accordion on his lap. Karbalevich notes in his book that some of these accounts may suffer from hyperbole. Still, one gets the impression that in the small village, the boy without a father was well known.
Whether he was ambitious as he later became is unclear. He was destined at least to be the family breadwinner, and could only do so through education. He had no patron or relative willing to support him financially.
To acquire the further education, he had to take a test for entry into the Mahiliou Pedagogical Institute, where his chosen subject was History. Indicators are that he did not do particularly well in this exam, but was permitted to enter because the Soviet government was more lenient to applicants from villages.
According an earlier biographer, Aleksandr Feduta (p19), Lukashenka was very active in social activities at the Institute, editing a journal and giving talks at the regional committee of the local Komsomol (Young Communist League). At one point he was made responsible for the food service in the Institute canteen, and staff there would describe the fear he instilled by weighing every piece of meat. The recollections indicate that he was a young man who liked positions of authority, and was prepared to take his responsibilities to extremes.
[to be continued]