The Accidental Revolutionary Leading Belarus’s Uprising

On the north side of Independence Square, in the Belarusian capital of Minsk, is the House of Government—a row of cuboid white buildings, each with a checkerboard of identical black windows. Members of parliament go in through the main entrance, passing a towering statue of Lenin and a forlorn line of trees that stand amid several acres of pavement and brick. People who want to visit the Central Election Commission use a small entrance to the right. On the afternoon of August 10, 2020, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya went in through the smaller entrance, to complain that her victory in the Presidential election had been stolen.

Tsikhanouskaya was not a career politician; she was the daughter of a truck driver, a mother of two who had set aside a career as an English teacher in order to help her deaf son learn to speak. An improbable series of events had propelled her to challenge President Alexander Lukashenka, the last dictator in Europe, for the leadership of Belarus.

A few months before, Tsikhanouskaya’s husband, a journalist named Siarhei Tsikhanouski, had declared his own candidacy against Lukashenka, whom he had relentlessly derided as an incompetent autocrat, a “cockroach” who was despoiling the country. For years, Lukashenka had regularly staged Presidential elections, and each time claimed an easy victory. This time, though, there was a strong popular reaction, inspired in part by Siarhei’s reports. He was arrested and thrown into a “punishment cell,” a dank concrete box without a window. Hundreds of others had already been imprisoned for questioning the regime.

With Siarhei in jail, Tsikhanouskaya decided to run herself. At first, she was reluctant. When I met her recently, she radiated earnest charm: her face is broad, framed by straight brown hair, her voice plain and strong. “I am accidental,” she told me. “I am not building my career, I am not settling scores, I do not know the language of politics, I do not like this business. I am doing this for the Belarusian people, and for my husband. They jailed him for nothing.”

Tsikhanouskaya’s platform consisted of only three demands: freedom for political prisoners; a new constitution that reduced the powers of the Presidency; and fresh elections. But her speeches were galvanizing. “State officials have failed to understand that it’s not individual candidates but the people who threaten their power,” she told a boisterous crowd in Minsk. “And the people are fed up with living in humiliation and fear.”

Lukashenka declined to debate Tsikhanouskaya, and evidently didn’t consider her enough of a risk to have her arrested. “Our constitution was not written for a woman, and our society isn’t ready to vote for a woman,” he told a gathering at a tractor factory in May. “The President will be a man, I am more than sure.” But, with surprising speed, Belarusians took her side against the regime. The opposition adopted a white-and-red flag—a symbol of Belarus’s brief first attempt at independence, in 1918—which Lukashenka has since banned. They also began wearing white ribbons, as a signal of support. Tsikhanouskaya’s rallies drew enormous crowds. “We set up a stage and a microphone in a field, and five thousand people came,” a press aide named Gleb German told me.

On Election Day, August 9th, Belarusians flocked to the polls, with hundreds of thousands wearing white ribbons on their wrists. Tsikhanouskaya and her allies were certain that she had won. But, that night, Lukashenka declared that he had captured more than eighty per cent of the vote—a preposterous claim, which brought outraged protesters to the streets. As Tsikhanouskaya implored the crowds to remain peaceful, Lukashenka’s riot police threw stun grenades, beat and teargassed demonstrators, and arrested thousands.

The next day, with the streets again swarming with protesters, Tsikhanouskaya and her lawyer, Maxim Znak, approached the election commission to file her protest. Near the entrance, they found a cordon of security officers in dark suits, with guns at their belts; two men were waiting inside. They recognized one of them as Andrei Pavlyuchenko, a notorious enforcer who has served as Lukashenka’s head of security and his chief of Internet police.

The men told Znak to step away, then led Tsikhanouskaya to a dark room and closed the door. “Your campaign is over,” Pavlyuchenko told her. They gave her a choice, she recalled. She could go to prison, leaving her son and daughter to be raised by others. Or she could leave the country immediately; a car was waiting. “All I could think about was my children,” she said.

A few hours later, the two officials led Tsikhanouskaya toward a rear exit. On her way out, she passed Znak. “Sorry, Max,” she said as she was hustled out the door.

The men drove Tsikhanouskaya across town, past throngs of protesters, some chanting her name. The chants were so loud that the car windows seemed to vibrate. “Look what you have done,” one of the men said. Minutes later, they arrived at Tsikhanouskaya’s home, and the men told her to pack a bag. There she was joined by Maryia Maroz, her campaign manager. She, too, was being expelled.

The men loaded them into Maroz’s car, with Pavlyuchenko in the passenger seat and police vehicles ahead and behind. At about 3 A.M., they arrived at the Lithuanian border, where Maroz’s two young children were waiting to meet her. Pavlyuchenko got out and told them to drive through the border post, which seemed prepared for their arrival. Tsikhanouskaya thought for a moment that she might be shot, but the car kept moving, and she crossed into Lithuania.

The next morning, two videos of Tsikhanouskaya surfaced online. She looked exhausted, sad, broken. In the first, made while she was being detained in Belarus, she told the protesters to go home, that the protests were over. In the second, recorded after she had fled the country, Tsikhanouskaya was free, but her message was even more final. She told the people of Belarus that she had been defeated. “I thought that this campaign had really steeled me and given me so much strength that I could cope with anything,” she said, fighting back tears. “But I guess I am still the same weak woman that I always was.” Moments later, the video went dark.

When I visited Minsk, this past July, I expected to find a grim post-Soviet state, with concrete high-rises and downtrodden workers plodding the streets. I was half right. Much of the city center was hemmed in by brutalist buildings and Soviet monuments; the Avenue of the Conquerors was shadowed by the Stela, a fifteen-story obelisk with a knifelike point. In other neighborhoods, though, wide boulevards and outdoor cafés made Minsk feel as cosmopolitan as Berlin. I spotted only a few remnants of the protests: a white-and-red flag unfurled from a second-story window and quickly pulled back in; a procession of women dressed in white, who walked silently and soon disappeared.

The iconography of the current regime is far more present. One morning, as I rode in a taxi past a convoy of military vehicles, my driver laughed and pointed. “Lukashenka,” he said. “Boom-boom-boom-boom.” Lukashenka is sixty-seven, a bombastic figure with a huge square head, a closely trimmed mustache, and a thick neck that bulges against his dress shirts. “He has a kind of negative charisma,” Pavel Latushka, a former culture minister who fled Belarus last year after denouncing the repression, told me. “From the moment you meet him, he is dominating you.” At cabinet sessions, his ministers are often afraid to meet his gaze. Once, Latushka told me, the President paused a discussion of government business to warn him, “If you ever betray me, I will strangle you with my own hands.”

Lukashenka has often met challenges with threats. After he claimed victory over Tsikhanouskaya, Western nations imposed sweeping sanctions on his regime. In response, Lukashenka oversaw a bizarre scheme to destabilize neighboring states, in which tens of thousands of people from Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere were invited to use Belarus as a springboard for migrating west. As refugees clustered in desolate camps on the borders of Poland and Lithuania, much of Europe was embroiled in the crisis. By the time it was resolved, this fall, the election that set it off was largely forgotten in the West.

Within his own country, Lukashenka has imposed a kind of harsh paternalism. “He considers himself to be the protector of Belarus—from the West, from Russia, from extremists within,” a person who has known him for many years told me. “He thinks that everyone else is an infant, a child, against his greatness.” Lukashenka, this person went on, has maintained order, mostly through the force of his will and the prodding of his security forces: “The streets are clean, people go to work. Belarus is still a Soviet state, and Lukashenka is a Soviet personality.” The country’s fearsome secret police force is still known as the K.G.B.

Lukashenka, the only child of an abandoned mother, grew up in the village of Kopys, in what was then the Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic. He began his career as a minor Soviet functionary, working as a border guard, an ideological lecturer, and the head of a state-owned pig farm. When the Soviet Union collapsed, in 1991, Russia became independent, and the Belarusian Republic, shorn of its anchor, followed. Lukashenka was thirty-seven.

Belarus had gained independence before, in the turbulent period near the end of the First World War, but it didn’t last long enough for a sense of national identity to flourish. Between 1937 and 1940, most of the élite was wiped out, as Stalinist purges swept the country. Many victims are buried in mass graves at Kurapaty, a forest outside Minsk, which might hold as many as a quarter of a million people. Visiting there, I found crosses extending so deep into the pines that the farthest reaches were invisible in the shadows. Belarusian nationalism was not so much suppressed as destroyed.

When independence came again, there was a chaotic period of adjustment. Then, in 1994, Belarus held its first and only free election. Lukashenka ran as a populist, battling corruption; during the campaign, he wore the same jacket every day. In office, he promised to preserve the safety net and the stable employment of the old order, standing against the chaos besetting the post-Communist states that had attempted rapid transitions to market economies. “We did not follow the path of destruction,” Lukashenka told Russian reporters in 2005. “We stood on the foundation that was created in the Soviet Union, here, on this land, and began to build a normal economy.”

In the following years, Lukashenka pushed through constitutional changes that allowed him to consolidate power. Several of his political opponents disappeared, and were presumed to have been murdered on his orders. In 2001, with the press silenced and parliament cowed, Lukashenka staged what was widely regarded as a rigged election; several others followed. “They decide ahead of time, Lukashenka is going to win eighty-eight per cent of the vote,” Jaroslav Romanchuk, who ran in 2010, said. Whenever protesters took to the streets, riot police cracked down. In a speech this summer, Lukashenka warned the country’s intelligentsia to stay out of politics: “Before you do something, think—watch your every step.”

The key to Lukashenka’s survival was an unspoken Russian guarantee. Beginning in the nineteen-nineties, Russia agreed to sell Belarus vast quantities of oil and natural gas at discounted prices. This arrangement insured Belarus a relatively high standard of living, while allowing Lukashenka’s government to resell the oil products abroad at market prices. Prominent Belarusians and Western diplomats estimated that over the years the profits to Russian and Belarusian energy companies amounted to tens of billions of dollars.

According to these officials, Lukashenka, too, grew rich from the sale of Russian gas and oil, and from smuggling between Europe and Russia. A report for the U.S. Congress, published in 2006, estimated his personal wealth at a billion dollars. It has almost certainly grown since then; a former senior Belarusian official put it closer to ten billion, adding that Lukashenka ran the country as “a family business.”

Lukashenka’s officials remain loyal, in part because they are allowed to get rich, from smuggling, kickbacks, and whatever other means they can devise. Stanislav Luponosov, a former security officer who investigated organized crime and corruption, told me that Lukashenka’s office and the K.G.B. routinely identified people not to pursue. “When that happened, one had to obey,” he said.

From the beginning, Lukashenka affirmed his country’s affinity with Russia, “our elder brother.” He made Russian the official language. Textbooks were rewritten to emphasize the shared culture of the two countries; immigration controls were all but eliminated. Lukashenka consistently downplayed Stalin’s crimes, once declaring, “I’m absolutely not of the opinion that Stalin is the enemy.” A few years ago, he voiced approval of a restaurant built in Kurapaty, overlooking the graves of Stalin’s victims. It was called Let’s Go and Eat.

In the late nineteen-nineties, Lukashenka proposed uniting Russia and Belarus into one country, which he imagined he would lead. Instead, Vladimir Putin came to power and began encroaching on Belarus’s independence. The two men often appeared together, Putin inscrutable and slight, and Lukashenka flamboyant and imposing. But it was always clear who dominated; in a photo from 2018, Lukashenka stood with his legs wide apart to lower himself to Putin’s height. During a meeting last year on the Black Sea, the Russian news media showed Lukashenka frolicking in the frigid waves, while Putin stayed safely on dry land. State television reported that Putin had asked him to get into the water. “Putin enjoys humiliating him,” Latushka, the former minister, said.

Still, Lukashenka flourished. An ice-hockey fan, he sometimes played for the cameras, with conspicuous success. He fathered at least one child out of wedlock—a boy named Nikolai, who is widely believed to be his chosen successor. He has also maintained a string of mistresses. The woman rumored to be his latest, Maria Vasilevich, was crowned Miss Belarus in 2018. (Vasilevich has denied that the relationship is romantic.) The pair appeared together at hockey matches and at a formal dance. Early in 2019, Lukashenka awarded her a state medal for contributing to a “spiritual revival” in Belarus. In that year’s elections, which resulted in a sweep for parties loyal to Lukashenka, Vasilevich won a seat in parliament.

Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya was born in 1982, during the last years of Soviet dominion. She grew up in Mikashevichi, a granite-mining town in southern Belarus, where her father drove a truck for a cement factory and her mother worked as a cook in a cafeteria. In free moments, her parents read as much as they could, but they had to be careful about what they discussed with their children. “Like every family, we talked about politics,” Tsikhanouskaya told me. “But in the kitchen, whispering, so no one could hear.”

When Tsikhanouskaya was three years old, the Chernobyl nuclear plant melted down across the border, and a vast cloud of contamination spread. Some seventy per cent of the fallout landed on Belarus, and created an unprecedented public-health crisis. Radiation poisoned the rain, the grass, the milk and meat of cows. Thousands of people became ill. “We couldn’t escape,” Tsikhanouskaya said. In the hope of fending off sickness, her mother had her drink red wine—one small glass a day.

As a girl, Tsikhanouskaya studied English, in an experimental program that used American textbooks, and the language inspired curiosity about the world. “I knew there was something more than what we were living,” she said. In 1996, when she was thirteen, a charity called Chernobyl Lifeline invited a group of Belarusian children to spend the summer in Roscrea, Ireland, an ancient market town in County Tipperary. The children were selected because fallout had left them frail. Tsikhanouskaya was healthy, but her English teacher added her to the group anyway, because she was her star student.

Henry Deane, one of the organizers of Chernobyl Lifeline, told me that the Belarusian children were fed heroically, taken to doctors and dentists, and celebrated throughout Roscrea; when he organized garden parties for them, hundreds of locals came. On drives through the countryside, Deane put Sviatlana in the front seat, so that she could translate for the other kids. The conversations ranged broadly, across such contested subjects as God and politics. “Sveta was curious about everything,” Deane said.

Tsikhanouskaya returned to Ireland for three more summers, and was struck by how open and cheerful the citizens seemed. “I saw that people can be happy and polite every day—it’s not normal for Belarusians,” she said. “When I went home, I tried to be polite. I smiled. People thought I was strange.”

After high school, Tsikhanouskaya enrolled in college in Mazyr, a small city two hours’ drive from her home town, and began training as an English teacher. As it happened, Siarhei Tsikhanouski owned a night club in Mazyr—one of a series of ventures, which also included organizing concerts and producing music videos. He and Sviatlana met at the club, in 2003. They were married a year later, and soon had two children.

When their son, Korney, was born deaf, things changed. “I put my ambitions aside,” Tsikhanouskaya said. The family moved to Minsk when Korney was two so that he could be given a cochlear implant. By then, though, he was behind his peers in speaking and comprehension. Tsikhanouskaya spent the next eight years teaching him, often working ten hours a day. “He had missed a critical window, when children learn how to talk, so progress was very slow,” she said. She recalled an existence that was “half isolated.”

By 2020, Korney had caught up and was enrolled in a regular school. For the first time in years, Tsikhanouskaya had a measure of freedom. Then the coronavirus swept through Belarus. Although the government insisted that the case numbers were low, the virus was ravaging the country. Vladimir Martov, an anesthesiologist in Vitebsk, told me that covid-19 patients flooded the city’s hospitals, overwhelming the stock of beds and oxygen.

When Martov asked the Ministry of Health for help, he was reprimanded. “As a matter of policy, the coronavirus did not exist,” he told me. “Their slogan was ‘Just wait, and it will go away.’ ” Last March, Martov gave an interview about the situation to Tut.by, the country’s most aggressive online newspaper. He was fired soon afterward, and, when his colleagues protested, they were told that nothing could be done. “It was in the hands of the President,” Martov told me. A few weeks later, Tut.by was shut down and its editor-in-chief arrested.

In public appearances, Lukashenka derided his citizens for being afraid of COVID-19, suggesting that a hardy Slavic constitution could easily overcome the virus. “You should not only wash your hands with vodka but probably also drink forty to fifty grams of pure alcohol per day to poison the virus,” he said in a televised meeting. “It’s nice to watch on TV—people working on their tractors, no one talking about the virus. There! The tractor will heal everyone!”

The government’s assurances did not relieve Tsikhanouskaya’s fears. Though the schools stayed open, she pulled her children out; though Lukashenka didn’t wear a mask, she and her family did. “We were misinformed,” she said. In February, Lukashenka himself seemed to have contracted the virus. During a speech before the Belarusian People’s Congress, he lapsed into fits of coughing, as the cameras for state television jerked away to pan the audience. “This infection has come to me again,” he said, between coughs.

Many Belarusians told me the epidemic made them realize that Lukashenka and his ministers held ordinary people in contempt. An English tutor in Minsk, who asked to be identified only as Dmitry, said the virus killed so many of his peers that he drafted his own obituary. “Lukashenka started humiliating people, laughing at doctors, laughing at the dead,” he said. “In my opinion, that was when everything started.”

As the pandemic raged, Siarhei Tsikhanouski was making a name for himself as an independent video journalist, with a show called “Country for Life”—a mocking reference to one of Lukashenka’s favorite sayings. Tsikhanouski was charismatic, and he was doing what no official in the regime had done: travelling the country and talking to people about their lives. In the town of Hlybokaye, he interviewed a woman who identified herself as Lyudmila. She wore a medical mask, which both announced her position on the COVID-19 epidemic and disguised her face. While Tsikhanouski held the microphone, Lyudmila delivered a ten-minute tirade; she complained of pitted roads, substandard health care, scarce opportunities, high food prices, the lack of a coherent response to the virus. Barely pausing for breath, she spoke directly to Lukashenka and his inner circle. “You are not masters—you are servants of the people,” she said. Then she addressed the audience. “All of the officials, they live like kings. They prosper, while you live in poverty.” She went on, “People, rise! . . . If we do nothing, you will all just die.”

Moments like this one exhilarated Tsikhanouski’s viewers. Normally, the government would not tolerate such overt criticism. But the show was distributed by an encrypted messaging app, Telegram, which was nearly impossible to block without entirely shutting down both cell-phone and Internet service. Across the country, Telegram hosted an explosion of activity: news channels, some funded from abroad; independent local reporters; citizens discussing the country’s direction.

Many young Belarusians were also energized by travel to Europe; each year, the European Union granted about seven hundred thousand visas to Belarusians. Among them was Oksana Zaretskaya. In 2007, she was a young mother in Minsk when her husband was transferred to a job at the United Nations office in Geneva. Zaretskaya was captivated by the Swiss system of local governance, in which ordinary citizens influenced civic decisions, even on such questions as whether to buy a particular kind of fighter jet for the Air Force. “I participated in everything, every activity,” she said. “I was so amazed to see these people engaging in political life.” She took exhaustive notes. “I wanted to create the same story in Belarus.”

In 2018, Zaretskaya’s family returned home, and she began giving talks on Swiss democracy and its local possibilities. She formed a network of like-minded friends, often communicating on Telegram. Their discussions facilitated what Zaretskaya described as “internal emigration”—leaving Belarus in their minds. “You create a life in the country that is not touched by the government,” she said. “You are trying to save your soul.”

One of the places where this was possible was OK16, an arts center in Minsk. It was supported by Viktar Babaryka, the chairman of Belgazprombank, one of the country’s largest financial institutions. Babaryka was known for leading a revival of Belarusian art; he had helped secure works by Marc Chagall and Chaim Soutine, both of whom were born in towns that are now part of Belarus.

Babaryka, like others who gathered at OK16, found that the exchange of ideas about art led to larger questions. In early 2020, he declared that he would challenge Lukashenka for the Presidency. As his campaign manager, he chose Maria Kalesnikava, an intense and charismatic woman who was OK16’s artistic director.

Kalesnikava, trained as a flutist, had worked as a musician for twelve years in Germany. When she returned to visit, she would point out to her father, Alexander, that people in Europe enjoyed liberties that did not exist in Belarus. “Human rights, freedom—I didn’t understand them fully, and I did not fight for them,” Alexander told me. “One of the things that I have come to learn this year is that the children were smarter.”

Babaryka was an unprepossessing figure, whom Lukashenka dismissed as a “potbellied bourgeois.” But he was a wealthy member of the establishment, and his candidacy gave followers hope that things were about to change. Hundreds of thousands of people came out to support him. Everywhere he went, he told audiences, “Belarus has woken up.”

Others jumped into the race, including a former diplomat named Valery Tsepkalo. In May, 2020, Siarhei Tsikhanouski announced his candidacy. In videos on YouTube and Telegram, Tsikhanouski had enumerated the crimes and failures of the Lukashenka administration, urging his viewers to “stop the cockroach!” The government, which was mostly middle aged or older, had been slow to register what was happening online. But, as Tsikhanouski’s popularity surged, the regime began harassing him.

On May 6th, he was detained while campaigning in the city of Mogilev. The ostensible charge was participating in an anti-Russia demonstration, six months before. But the timing of the arrest suggested a different reason: it came just nine days before the deadline to file qualification papers. Tsikhanouski’s supporters, hoping to keep the campaign viable, released a prerecorded video, in which he affirmed his candidacy. “For twenty-six years, the dictator has been running the state, and running it with mismanagement and criminal negligence,” he said. But, with Siarhei in prison, someone had to file the paperwork for him. The task fell to Sviatlana.

On May 14th, she visited the Central Election Commission to register on his behalf, but officials refused to accept her signature. Tsikhanouskaya went home dismayed. “I thought it was over,” she said. That night, though, she hit on an idea: what if she filed to run for President herself? Tsikhanouskaya filed her application hours before the deadline. When the commission’s judgment was due, five days later, she returned to the offices, carrying a speech to read if her candidacy was denied. The commission’s chairwoman seemed surprised by her presence. She asked if Tsikhanouskaya really intended to run for President, or if she would just serve as a “sparring partner” for her husband. Tsikhanouskaya replied, “I’ve dreamed of this all my life.”

The same day, Siarhei was released from jail. Sviatlana told me that, when he arrived home, he was shocked to discover that his wife had decided to run for President. Although she was listed as the candidate, she promptly disappeared from public view. Siarhei began a whimsical campaign; on the trail, he posed with a life-size cutout of his wife. Sviatlana told me that her husband didn’t really think that Lukashenka could be deposed. He was running a protest campaign, in the hope of inspiring his fellow-citizens. “He showed people how to be brave,” she said.

Sviatlana did not consider herself the primary candidate. “It was Siarhei’s campaign,” she said. “Everyone understood this.” Still, there are indications that Siarhei was irritated by her place on the ticket. In a video recording, he can be seen talking to Sviatlana by phone while driving with a friend. She was reading a list of local campaign coördinators. “Have you got it wrong again?” he said. “Read on, please. People are waiting!” He signed off, “O.K., see you, Mrs. Presidential Candidate.” Before he finished, Sviatlana had hung up on him. He turned to his friend and said, “I have to put up with it now.”

Under Belarusian rules, anyone running for President needed to collect a hundred thousand signatures to qualify. In past elections, this was a desultory phase of the campaign. This time, Belarusians lined up by the thousands to give their signatures; together, Tsikhanouskaya, Babaryka, and Tsepkalo collected more than half a million. Each candidate represented a distinct constituency: Babaryka, professionals and young people; Tsepkalo, government workers; and Tsikhanouskaya, people from the towns and villages.

With popular enthusiasm surging, Lukashenka tried to seize control of the election. On May 29th, Tsikhanouski was arrested again, charged this time with assaulting a police officer; videos show that the confrontation was staged when he was attacked by an unidentified woman. Babaryka was also arrested, on charges that he had embezzled from his bank. Tsepkalo was denied a spot on the ballot; he later fled the country. Suddenly, Lukashenka was the only major candidate remaining.

Members of the defunct campaigns decided to draft Sviatlana, whose name was still on the ballot, to lead a combined effort. They found her reluctant, conscious that her husband’s aides didn’t respect her. “She was actually crying—it was very emotional,” a former aide told me. But she agreed. “I am doing it for my husband and the people who supported him,” she said.

Only three weeks remained until the election, and Tsikhanouskaya had no training in politics. “She knew nothing—literally nothing,” her aide Anna Krasulina told me. “We told her, ‘You will need a political platform,’ and she said, ‘What is a political platform?’ We told her she would need to meet journalists. She asked, ‘Why do I have to meet journalists?’ ” On the stump, though, she was fluent and forceful, portraying herself as an ordinary citizen stifled by an unresponsive autocrat. “I’m tired of enduring, I’m tired of being silent, I’m tired of living in fear!” she told a crowd in Minsk. “What about you?” The crowd roared back.

There was no time to plan. “We did everything on our knee,” Tsikhanouskaya said. “I was lost, really.” A part of her still wished that she were at home. “I would rather be with my children and my husband, frying up cutlets,” she told supporters. The team decided on a minimal platform. Tsikhanouskaya said that her career in politics would last no longer than it took to accomplish the release of political prisoners, new elections, and the writing of a new constitution. “This put a lot of her potential rivals at ease,” another former aide told me.

Maria Kalesnikava, the flutist who had run Babaryka’s campaign, signed on to join her. So did Tsepkalo’s wife, Veronika. At their first public appearance, a photographer captured the three of them, each making a distinct gesture: Kalesnikava forming a heart with her fingers, Tsepkalo flashing a V, and Tsikhanouskaya holding up a fist. The photo went viral, and they began repeating the pose wherever they went. The crowds grew quickly. Gleb German, the press aide, recalled, “It was like riding a big wave. Everyone just had this feeling that this is the moment we’ve been waiting for, for twenty-six years.”

Skeptical observers suggested that Tsikhanouskaya was merely the beneficiary of unusual circumstances. “The people would have supported whoever was in her place,” Igor Ilyash, a journalist in Minsk, told me. “She was a symbol.” But, to many Belarusians, her distaste for politics made her a more effective vehicle for yearning and anger. Tsikhanouskaya suggested that the right political model for the moment was not an intellectual like Václav Havel, the Czech playwright turned President, but a relatable victim of historical circumstance, like Princess Diana. “She connected with ordinary people,” she said.

The country and the candidate were remaking themselves at the same time, Zaretskaya suggested. “When your qualities are not necessary, they are sleeping inside you,” she told me. “Sviatlana, and many Belarusians, are now in exactly this position, when the times and the conditions demand the special qualities that we’ve been hiding.” Tsikhanouskaya’s role in the campaign required extraordinary resilience. Supporters of the regime threatened to kill her, and to harm her children. Terrified, she sent the kids to Lithuania, where her mother met them. Police arrested volunteers for the campaign, and eventually its manager, Maryia Maroz. “Many times, she told us, ‘I am quitting, I cannot do this,’ ” one of her aides, Anton Radnyankou, recalled.

As the election neared, Tsikhanouskaya and her aides sensed that a nation where civic engagement had been effectively outlawed was turning suddenly political. Andrei Vaitovich, a reporter who had been working abroad for French media, returned home and was struck by what had happened. “The only thing anyone was talking about was the election,” he told me. “That’s when I knew that the country was changing.”

After Lukashenka declared victory, demonstrations spread from Minsk to cities and towns across Belarus. The government shut down the Internet and deployed riot police, many of them wearing large round helmets that hid their faces; protesters called them “cosmonauts.” Luponosov, the former investigator, told me that the Ministry of the Interior ordered police to “beat and maim” the protesters. (In the next twelve months, they would make as many as thirty-five thousand arrests, carrying detainees away in black vans.)

Tsikhanouskaya urged the authorities to show restraint, but she felt increasingly responsible for the people who agitated on her behalf. With protests roiling, reporters pressed her about her plans to try to contain the violence. “The situation is starting to get out of control,” she snapped. “My appearance—would it strengthen the protests or would it, on the contrary, calm them down? I don’t know. I don’t know what to do next.”

When Tsikhanouskaya arrived in Lithuania, she was met by border guards and taken to a safe house in Vilnius. She had nothing with her except her clothes and a small bag containing her son’s spare hearing aid. She felt that she had abandoned the protesters and assumed that they would shun her. “People believed in me,” she told me. “I felt like I had betrayed them.”

But several of her aides followed her across the border, and, when Tsikhanouskaya saw that the demonstrations were carrying on, she gathered herself. Within days, she had declared herself the leader of democratic Belarus. “I am ready to take responsibility and act as a national leader during this period so that the country calms down and enters a normal rhythm,” she said in a video message.

Tsikhanouskaya had no money, no government, and almost no staff, but sympathizers began showing up to help. One of them was Valery Kavaleuski, a former Belarusian diplomat who was living in northern Virginia and working for the World Bank. He told me that, when Tsikhanouskaya arrived in Vilnius, he decided to quit his job and join her, living on his savings until money for salaries could be raised.

Tsikhanouskaya began touring the capitals of Europe, demanding that leaders withhold recognition of Lukashenka. In Berlin, meeting Chancellor Angela Merkel, she wore a navy suit, borrowed at the last minute from a Belarusian stylist in Vilnius. “She didn’t have any clothes,” the stylist, Tatiana Chaevskaya, told me. “We had to tell her that a head of state couldn’t wear the same outfit every day.”

Her first weeks in exile amounted to a triumph of appearance over reality. “It was smoke and mirrors,” Kavaleuski said. She created a stream of images—in Berlin with Merkel, in Brussels with top E.U. officials, in Vilnius with the French President, Emmanuel Macron—that made her look like a European leader. On September 8, 2020, she warned the Council of Europe that “countries or parties that make deals with Mr. Lukashenka do so at their own risk.” Ten days later, the European Parliament voted to deny recognition to Lukashenka’s government after his term ended in November, effectively declaring Tsikhanouskaya the lawfully elected President of Belarus.

Soon after the election, at a construction conglomerate in the city of Hrodna, a worker called out to a gathering of several hundred colleagues, “Don’t be shy, raise your hand—who voted for Alexander Lukashenka? Nobody gets hurt.” A couple of executives raised their hands. Then the worker asked, “Who voted for Tsikhanouskaya?” A sea of hands went up, as the crowd roared.

Maryia Maroz believed that in the days around the election Lukashenka’s regime was close to collapse. “The system was shaking,” she said. When she was in prison, she told me, her guards brought her coffee and let her listen to the radio. “I think we were close.”

Even after the demonstrations subsided, residents of Minsk’s Central District continued to tend a small courtyard that they had decorated with art work and white and red ribbons. The locals called it Change Square. Residents congregated, singing protest anthems and discussing how to make their communities better. “Before the protests, people had never been active in their neighborhoods. People did not even talk to each other,” a resident named Olga Kucherenko told me. “For the first time, people were talking about how to fix things in their lives, like how to improve a playground. And the government was opposing it.”

One night in early November, several agents of the regime appeared at Change Square, wearing civilian clothes and masks, and started to cut down the ribbons. Residents asked them to stop. Kucherenko’s cousin, an Army veteran and aspiring artist named Raman Bandarenka, came down from his apartment to join his neighbors. A confrontation ensued, and the masked men pulled him into a van and sped away.

Five hours later, Bandarenka’s mother, Elena, heard her doorbell ring. It was a group of officials, saying that her son had been taken to a nearby hospital. When she arrived, he was in a coma, brain-dead. A doctor told her that Raman had been beaten, and that the back of his head had been crushed. “The doctor told us it was a professional job,” Kucherenko told me.

Bandarenka was one of at least six civilians killed by security forces; hundreds, perhaps thousands, had been hospitalized for injuries. Thousands more were beaten, and some were raped with nightsticks and tortured as well. No one in the police was arrested or charged.

In September, as Maria Kalesnikava, Tsikhanouski’s campaign partner, was walking near her home, masked men forced her into a van. They took her and two other campaign officials to the border with Ukraine, handed them their passports, and told them to cross. Instead, Kalesnikava ripped up her passport and climbed out the car window. “I won’t leave the country,” she declared. The agents, rattled, dragged her back to Minsk, where they put her in jail and charged her with trying to overthrow the government. She was sentenced to eleven years in prison. Maxim Znak, the lawyer who had accompanied Tsikhanouskaya to the election commission, was given ten.

As the upheaval continued, the spectre of Russian intervention loomed. Lukashenka and Putin spoke regularly, with Putin hinting that he would invade if necessary to keep Belarus from slipping out of the Russian orbit. In late August, he raised the possibility of sending Russian forces in to help the government. “For now, there is no such necessity, and I hope there won’t be,” he said.

By the time of my visit to Minsk, this past July, Lukashenka had reasserted control. The remaining members of the opposition were presumed to be under surveillance. One night, I met a Western diplomat, one of a few left in the country, at a public park, where we sat on a bench and talked. After about twenty minutes, the diplomat suggested we get up: “There’s a guy on the other side of the park who has been watching us the whole time.”

The country’s journalists were even more embattled. One of them told me during my visit that she left home every morning carrying a “prison pack,” a knapsack with provisions in case she was arrested: a toothbrush, socks, underwear. As I was arranging to meet Yahor Martsinovich, the editor of Nasha Niva, one of the country’s leading newspapers, he disappeared into police custody. Most of the journalists I spoke to believed that it was only a matter of time before they were taken in, but none seemed willing to censor themselves—or were even necessarily convinced that it would make them safer if they did. “As a journalist in Belarus, your freedom no longer depends on what you publish. It depends only on whether they want to take you,” Pavel Sviardlou, the editor of the independent broadcaster Euroradio, told me. “This situation makes us free.”

One target of the regime was an organization called Viasna, which for years has documented violations of civil and human rights. I rode with the deputy chairman, Valentin Stefanovich, as he went to meet a man whose brother had been killed in police custody. Four Viasna activists were already in prison, and Stefanovich was anticipating a full-scale crackdown. “I think they intend to clean the country of all independent media and civil-society groups,” he said.

As we drove, Stefanovich detailed the government’s recent actions—six hundred political prisoners detained, hundreds of people beaten or tortured in custody, thousands fired from their jobs. “Survival is the most important thing for Lukashenka,” Stefanovich said, “because he can’t imagine his life without power.”

Evidence suggested that political prisoners were being widely mistreated. “This whole year, they’ve been trying to make me regret what I did,” Maria Kalesnikava, the campaign manager, wrote to the BBC from her cell. “I’ve been in hot and then cold cells, without air or light, without people. A whole year with nothing.”

With the protests suppressed, Lukashenka moved to expunge any trace of dissent; he even purged school curricula of books by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and by Svetlana Alexievich, the Nobel Prize-winning author who was one of the revolt’s leaders until she fled the country, last year. In May, Lukashenka ordered a fighter jet to force down a Ryanair passenger plane, in order to arrest a journalist named Raman Pratasevich and his girlfriend. Pratasevich was beaten in jail and forced to confess in a surreal televised interview.

Lukashenka also launched a campaign against opponents outside the country. One tactic was to use Interpol, the international police agency, to gather intelligence on dissidents living in exile and to issue arrest warrants on trumped-up charges. European governments picked up at least two such people, but released them once they realized the mistake. Lithuanian officials told me that they were worried about Tsikhanouskaya’s security; the location of her home was a secret, and not even her closest aides had been there. In August, a Belarusian activist helping dissidents flee the country was found hanging from a tree in Kyiv.

In July, just after I left Belarus, security forces embarked on a nationwide crackdown of civil society, closing fifty N.G.O.s in a single day—ranging from groups trying to protect human rights to organizations helping the disabled. Police arrested several people I had interviewed, including Stefanovich, Viasna’s deputy chairman. In the past, Belarusian dissidents were usually released after a few days or weeks, but this time was different; family members were not allowed to visit detainees, and were given no information about charges against them. Stefanovich’s wife took her children to Georgia. “We are thinking it will be a long time,” she told me.

When the European Union stiffened economic sanctions, Lukashenka gave a rambling hour-long speech, in which he accused the West of conspiring to topple his government. “Look at the unprecedented pressure on the country today, how they want to aggressively teach us a lesson, put us in our place, provoke us using the dirtiest methods and techniques. All this escalation, impotent rage, and envy arise from their failure to stage an insurrection and coup d’état in Belarus,” he said.

Cut off from the E.U., Lukashenka worked to strengthen his ties to Russia. In September, he and Putin met for the sixth time in a year; Putin announced that he would lend Belarus six hundred million dollars, promised to maintain the flow of cheap natural gas, and said that the two countries had agreed to more closely align their tax and legal systems.

When reporters for Belarusian state-media outlets began resigning, Russian journalists arrived to replace them. In September, the two countries undertook a military exercise that involved two hundred thousand troops; the armies simulated a NATO invasion and a Russian-led response. The Russian military opened two joint training centers in Belarus, putting Lukashenka’s security forces increasingly under Russian control. “Lukashenka knows he is a hostage,” Latushka, the former minister, said.

Many Belarusians worried that Putin had his eyes on valuable state-owned assets, including oil refineries and potash-processing plants, which Russian oligarchs have expressed interest in buying. According to a former senior member of the Lukashenka regime, a joint team of Russian and Belarusian officials has begun meeting regularly to make important decisions on the country’s security.

Western officials told me that a formal merger of the two countries was unlikely, if only because such a move could ignite a popular rebellion. “He’s made himself much more vulnerable to pressure from Russia,” a second Western diplomat in Minsk told me. By crushing dissent, Lukashenka seemed to be mimicking his Russian benefactor, and thus obviating the need for Russian intervention.

Latushka told me that Putin had tacitly approved the scheme to funnel migrants to Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia. (A Kremlin spokesperson denied this, saying, “President Putin and Russia have nothing to do with the migrant crisis.”) In late spring, the first of thousands of Iraqis began arriving in Minsk, lured by a promise that they would be allowed to migrate to Europe. During my visit, I found myself waiting out a downpour under an awning with a middle-aged man dressed in a cheap suit. He told me that he was from Iraq. When I asked how he’d come to be in Belarus, he grew flustered—“I have to go”—and hurried off into the rain.

European officials told me that the Iraqis were driven in government buses to the Lithuanian and Polish borders, where they were ushered across. By late summer, hundreds of migrants a day were crossing the frontiers. “Lukashenka has weaponized migration,” Gabrielius Landsbergis, the Lithuanian foreign minister, told me. The migrants were obliged to pay local officials as much as five thousand dollars apiece to reach the border, so it seemed likely that people inside the regime were profiting. On Lukashenka’s watch, some six thousand migrants crossed into neighboring countries.

Tsikhanouskaya, following the developments from outside Belarus, argued that the scheme was merely a symptom of Lukashenka’s ruthlessness. “Supposing this abuse of migrants is somehow stopped, do you really believe the regime’s threats beyond its borders will end there?” she asked the European Parliament. “Do not let the regime manipulate migrant smuggling in order to obscure the human-rights catastrophe inside the country. Both Belarusians and migrants are now hostages of the regime.”

In November, under diplomatic pressure, Lukashenka stopped openly encouraging migrants to come to Belarus, and began sending some home. But there were indications that he was merely pausing his operation; thousands of migrants remained in Belarus. “They have dialled it down,” the second Western diplomat told me. “But they could dial it back up whenever it suits them to do so.”

This summer, Tsikhanouskaya came to New York’s Battery Park and addressed several hundred Belarusian Americans. The Statue of Liberty stood in the background; a sea of red-and-white 1918 flags waved in the crowd. “Over the past year, your actions have directly shaped the events unfolding in Belarus,” she said. “Your demonstrations, your conversations with journalists and politicians, your assistance through solidarity funds—even from so far from home, you are participating fully in the life of our common motherland.”

Her words, though true enough, could have been uttered by nearly any exile leader in the past century. In the history of political exile, leaders forced to flee their countries have often been able to expect two things: they will usually be safe, and they will nearly always be irrelevant. After Poland was captured by Communists, the Polish government in exile met in London drawing rooms for fifty years, but it took a group of dockworkers in Gdansk to spark a revolution. A handful of exiles have returned to power, including Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, in Iran; Ho Chi Minh, in Vietnam; and Lenin, in Russia. But few of them effected change without the military at their backs, and even fewer established democracies.

Tsikhanouskaya and her aides are determined to avoid the fate of similarly situated groups before her. “We are not a government in exile,” she said. Her organization occupies a single floor of an office building in Vilnius, with about thirty employees; exiled Belarusians from Poland, Ukraine, and Lithuania meet with her staff regularly. She said that her team was trying to build a permanent opposition inside Belarus. Her staff is in regular contact with dozens of people; if, as many expect, Lukashenka calls a nationwide referendum to reaffirm his rule, they are talking about organizing a campaign of protest votes. Allies of Tsikhanouskaya’s circulate dissident literature, including the weekly Honest Newspaper; at least a million copies have been distributed in Belarus. I saw one in the stairwell of the building where I stayed in Minsk, stuck to the wall with decals of the 1918 flag.

There are limits to what Tsikhanouskaya’s movement can accomplish from afar. “If you want a beautiful picture—of demonstrations, of protesters—we can call people to the streets,” she said. “But how many victims will it cost us?” Yet, she added, even a regime as repressive as Lukashenka’s had limited means available to control a population that it had already lost. “Lukashenka can’t keep on arresting people anymore,” she said. “Now, when he arrests one person, two more step forward.”

The journalist Igor Ilyash, a veteran of many police detentions, believes that Lukashenka’s government has entered a long period of instability. “It can keep its power now only by violence,” he told me. “History shows it’s almost impossible to continue with force and violence for very long.”

At times, the regime’s efforts to assert control seem merely to demonstrate how little power it has. After the protests, the phrase “Long live Belarus” was banned. But during my visit I heard people call it out on the street, signalling their allegiance. By contrast, in two weeks in Belarus, I saw just one public display of support for the regime: a middle-aged man, wearing shorts and dress shoes, evidently drunk, wandered up to my café table in Minsk. “Long live Lukashenka,” he said, and then belched and wandered off.

The most important pillar of Lukashenka’s government is the security forces. At the height of the protests, some officers quit in frustration; a few threw their uniforms in the trash. But there was little other visible evidence of dissent. Aliaksandr Azarau, who until two years ago was a senior official in the Ministry of the Interior, told me that police officers had been given generous bonuses to keep going. The institution is still largely intact, he said: “Most people in the security forces have not made up their minds.”

In September, I was invited to sit in on a video conference of local leaders inside Belarus. But, by the time of the meeting, about a dozen of the leaders had been arrested. Others had fled the country; they suspected that the regime had placed a mole among them. “People are quite scared,” one of the participants on the call told Tsikhanouskaya. “They are packing their suitcases.”

Some opponents of Lukashenka have attempted a more forceful response. In the past six months, Belarusian officials have arrested several people who had smuggled weapons into the country, in the hope of setting off a revolt. Vadim Prokopiev, an exile leader who lives in Warsaw, told me that he thought Tsikhanouskaya’s measured approach was doomed. “I am pushing her and pushing her,” he said. “But they prefer talking.”

A senior official in the Biden Administration told me that it was difficult to foresee an early end to the Lukashenka regime. In July, Tsikhanouskaya visited the White House; the U.S. tightened sanctions soon afterward, and did so again this month. But more assertive measures to remove Lukashenka seem likely to provoke a regional confrontation. Putin will not relinquish his influence in Belarus without a fight. “She needs to think about the long game,” the official said.

Tsikhanouskaya said that she had no wish to confront Russia; she hoped that some accommodation would be possible. Still, she conceded that it was Europe, not Russia, that could provide a vision of the country’s future: “Europe’s experience in guaranteeing the rule of law, human rights, an independent judiciary, and free media are of primary importance to the new, reborn Belarus.”

The political situation makes fund-raising difficult. Tsikhanouskaya’s group gets very little money from supporters in Belarus, where the government has tracked down donors and put them in prison. The team’s initiatives are supported by Western N.G.O.s and by private contributors, mostly Belarusians living abroad; the Lithuanian government also provides security, office space, and housing. But, if the group accepts money directly from the U.S. government, it risks being depicted in Belarus as a puppet of the West.

Lukashenka’s regime already seems determined to smear Tsikhanouskaya. In July, Grigory Azarenok, an anchor on state-owned TV, called her a “mustached cow” and a “dastardly woman” with “a rotten stench.” Of Tsikhanouskaya’s visit to the White House, Azarenok said, “Such boot-licking, such servility, such joy.” He cut to scenes of bombing in Ukraine, which he falsely claimed were caused by Americans—a prelude to what Tsikhanouskaya’s efforts would bring.

Despite the odds, the opposition professed optimism that Lukashenka couldn’t continue such intense repression indefinitely. “When he begins to reform, it will all unravel,” Franak Viačorka, a political adviser, told me. I found a similarly upbeat mood inside Belarus, even after waves of arrests. Many opposition members cited the example of Havel, who was a political prisoner six months before becoming President. Among the hopeful was Olga Kucherenko, whose cousin Raman Bandarenka had been killed in police custody. “We’re going to win,” she said.

Last month, I spoke to Tsikhanouskaya again. When I asked if she could picture herself fighting the Lukashenka regime five years from now, she recoiled. “I can’t imagine this,” she said. “That my children will go five years without their father—absolutely not.”

Lukashenka seems to have settled in for the long haul. With the possibility of open protests cut off, Tsikhanouskaya said that it was impossible to predict how long he could hold on: “It could last a long time—many months.” But she maintained that his administration was mortally wounded, its legitimacy beyond repair. “The regime has cracked, and the crack is widening. Processes are going on inside the regime that we cannot see.” With the opposition shut out of the homeland, the decisive blow might come from within. “The regime is trapped by its own actions—there’s no one left to blame,” she said. “Someone inside the inner circle may decide that the time has come.” ♦