But unlike the near-teetotal judo enthusiast Putin, Lukashenko was a very conventional type of strongman, already retro in 1994. With his combover and thick moustache he was the perfect image of a Soviet regional boss, as if he had been cloned in a test tube kept on a shelf at a dacha between a jar of pickles and a bottle of home made vodka that made grandpa go blind. [...]
Lukashenko, in fact, was not at all keen on this whole independence thing. He opposed the break-up of the USSR and retained close contacts with the Russian communist party; in 1994 he addressed the Russian parliament and called for the creation of a new union of Slavic states. Lukashenko was less of a friend-to-oligarchs type and more of a state power type, seeking to preserve the USSR he had grown up in like one of those mammoths you occasionally find intact in a block of ice in Siberia. [...]
His Soviet style was a strength in other ways: Europe’s last dictator he might have been, but he came from the tradition of dull Eastern European despots whose names and faces you can’t quite remember unless, for some reason, you take an interest in these things. Unlike Kim Jong-il he wasn’t a megalomaniac intent on starving his people into submission while drinking cognac and collecting nuclear warheads. The success of his policy of sustained dullness can be measured by a quick look at the archives of Vice which has 5,594 articles on North Korea and 149 videos compared to 29 articles and no videos on Belarus. If you’re boring, nobody cares; you’ll be left to your own devices. [...]
But this was not actually a sign of anything much: Lukashenko remained cautious and conservative. When Putin annexed the Crimea, he gave his first ever speech in Belarusian and attempted to distance himself from his powerful patron, but before long he was holding joint drills with Russia again. Earlier this year in a fight over energy prices with Russia he bought some Norwegian oil and invited Mike Pompeo to Minsk, but he was still a long way from the bitter exchanges that characterise Russia’s relations with Ukraine.
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