Some are in prisons, detention centers and under investigation, others managed to escape abroad.

And how to carry out the next (and, obviously, not the last) "extreme purge" in such conditions?

Where to collect serious (higher than competitors) numbers of exposed and arrested enemies, "hidden cells", "exiled saboteurs" and other "extremists"?

When the obvious enemies are over, the only way out is to expose the secret enemies.

Those who for a while hid "under the plinth" and even, perhaps, pretended to support the regime and serve it.

Privilege fee

The security forces under Lukashenka have always been a privileged caste.

And after 2020, the prime time has come for them.

The reward for suppressing the protests was a real golden rain for the people in uniform - orders, epaulettes, additional funding, the creation of new structures... Despite the fact that the economy of Belarus is stagnating, budget revenues are falling, the population is shrinking, the military and police apparatus in the state has become like this a separate walled island, on which prosperity, wealth and a privileged position reign.

For them, the regime spares no money.

The problem, however, is that this privileged status has to be justified and substantiated from time to time.

Previously, such a role was perfectly performed by videos of violent crackdowns on peaceful demonstrations in 2020.

However, now, three years later, archival pictures are no longer to be accounted for.

We need new exposed conspiracies, prevented attempts, caught saboteurs and crushed "sleeper cells of extremists".

And all this, strangely enough, with appropriate efforts and organizational skills can be discovered (well, or pretended to be discovered).

Slavs dispersing a protest near a stele in Minsk, the then head of GUBaziK Mykola Karpiankov in the center with a baton.

2020

This is how Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs Mikalai Karpiankov

, one of the main executors of political repression in the country,

told state propagandists about the achievements of his subordinates the other day :

"We have all special units working daily.

"Rys" is training and detaining addresses... now "Berkut" is working at the border so that not a single mouse slips in if we step on someone's tail here;

SAHR works all the time.

That is why the security forces and the internal troops were assigned the task as part of a special operation conducted by the Ministry of Internal Affairs to clean up and restore order.

We do it.

And their cells remained..."

On March 17, GUBAZIK reported that it has recently been conducting 20 searches per day.

Arrests, detentions, and searches over the past two weeks took place in Brest, Vitsebsk, Vorsha, Gomla, Ivacevichi, Mazyr, Minsk, Myorakh, Navopolatsk, Pinsk, Polatsk and other cities.

Since March 15, at least 166 people have been convicted of political charges in the regions (not including Minsk).

Rivalry between security forces was a common phenomenon before.

And now, when their ranks have grown noticeably, and the struggle for influence, financing and "food base" has intensified, even more so.

During the last (March) meeting with them,

Lukashenko was even surprised:

"I've noticed a trend — every agency is trying to put itself in the best light."

Although there is no reason to be surprised here: the more generals there are, the fiercer the competition between them.

And how else to demonstrate one's irreplaceability and efficiency, if not by new arrests and exposure of enemies?

Accordingly, a competition arises: who will expose the most, arrest, imprison.

Lukashenko with the leaders of the security forces at the parade.

2018

Of course, it is possible to demonstrate one's abilities in another way.

The same Karpiankov, for example, recently boasted that his department would acquire about a thousand drones in a matter of weeks, with the help of which participants of the mass protest "will be identified, detected and, if necessary, detained with a certain surprise."

(By surprise, obviously, we mean the use of gas and stun grenades with the help of the same drones).

The gesture is effective, but how can it be demonstrated to Lukashenka in today's Belarus?

Is it possible to drive people to some kind of demonstration by force, and then arrest and decapitate everyone with the help of these unmanned aerial vehicles bought for a huge amount of money.

Those condemned to death were beheaded with an axe

Rivalry between security forces - who is the most adept at exposing the enemies of the people - is a common phenomenon in any totalitarian regime.

During the years of Stalin's repressions, the NKVD regional departments were actively identifying spies and saboteurs.

Plans and orders had to be made, which many overachieved.

In order to receive an order, a promotion or another rank, it was considered desirable and even necessary to ask for an increase in the limits of executions and camps.

Here, for example, is the head of the Kirov region,

Mikhail Rodin

in the summer of 1937, he turned to the Kremlin with a request to increase the limit for the region "for the first category" (execution) by 300 people, for the second (camp or prison for 8-10 years) - by 800. Stalin showed generosity: he allowed to increase the number of executions by not 300, and for 500 people.

True, he reduced the number of those who were to be sent to the camp - by 200. What is remarkable, he left the total number of those who were to be repressed unchanged.

Political prisoners killed by the NKVD during the USSR.

Lviv, 1941

On the ground, many NKVD functionaries showed a creative (as they would say now, creative) approach to working with "enemies of the people".

For example, in Vologda, those sentenced to death were not shot, but their heads were beheaded with an ax - with the consent of the local NKVD chief, Major

Zhupakhin .

(maybe not so harsh, if compared with Wagner's sledgehammer?).

Apparently, Zhupakhin counted on an additional bonus for saving revolver cartridges.

Ammunition was also saved in Kuibyshav: in the Kuibyshav UNKVD, out of almost two thousand executed in 1937–1938, about 600 people were strangled with ropes.

In the NKVD prison in Novosibirsk, Chekists competed with each other to kill the "enemy of the people" with one blow to the groin.

In Barnaul, those sentenced to death were killed with llamas.

And in Altai and the Novosibirsk region, young women were raped by Enkavedists before being shot...

Employees of the NKVD

The degree of atrocities in Lukashenka's prisons has not yet reached the level of Stalin's NKVD, but the trend is the same... What was described in 2020 by prisoners of Akrestin, which is now being heard from political prisoners in snippets of information from pre-trial detention centers and prisons, indicates a deep creative thinking by employees today's Belarusian Ministry of Internal Affairs has the experience of ideological predecessors, from which they clearly take an example.

Gulag was not built immediately.

"Economy of repression" tactics

Experts on the internal laws by which dictatorships grow and decline claim that the most stable tyrannies are those where the dictator follows the tactics of an "economy of repression."

That is, where repressions are deployed and expanded gradually, where they are not immediately abused.

The degree of repression, in order to keep the society in fear and complete submission, should not decrease, but increase gradually: then the regime is more durable.

This is what happened in Stalin's Soviet Union.

The Gulag was not immediately built, the identification of "enemies of the people" was not immediately put on stream.

Those kulaks, counter-revolutionaries and anti-Soviets who were identified and arrested, for example, in the late 20s and early 30s,

Gulag prisoners on a construction site in Magadan

In the late 1930s, almost all of these people were arrested again, and most often shot.

The machine of repression gained momentum, the NKVD apparatus expanded and demanded more and more victims in order to justify its own existence.

Real enemies were followed by imaginary enemies.

First, those who could be a secret, hidden opponent of the communist regime;

then, when all the suspects were replanted and shot, they took up their own ranks.

A great terror began, under which everyone fell: an illiterate collective farm worker, an ordnance-bearing marshal, a devoted communist, and Stalin's longtime associate.

In order to carry out the prepared plans for arrests, NKVD officers began to invent various kinds of "rebel", "Trotskyist", "terrorist" organizations.

Initially, the arrests of "anti-Soviet elements" were carried out on the basis of NKVD files, and later on the basis of "testimonies" obtained during the investigation.

Since the Stalinist regime allowed almost any kind of torture, it was not difficult to extract testimony from anyone (even the highest-ranking party functionary).

And knocked out.

According to an old Soviet anecdote, "as the Prosecutor General of the USSR used to say:

"The main thing is not to expose yourself in the process of investigative actions..."

The logic of mass political repressions is such that it turns out exactly as in the anecdote: in the end, those who carried out these repressions, who organized, coordinated and sanctioned them, who "conducted the investigation" fell under the knife.

Will it be different in today's Belarus?

Hardly.

So far, the security forces in Belarus, carrying out new "sweeps", mainly go to old addresses.

Those who once shined "in the bases" and served administrative arrest "for politics" are arrested.

But there are fewer and fewer such people: aware of the threat, most of them fled or are hiding.

It is impossible to continue and increase the "purges" without expanding the circle of those who are allowed to be repressed.

The logic of terror is such that sooner or later it will be the turn of those suspicious "friends" who hid "under the plinth", and eventually - of those whose hands carry out repression.

And this will be the final establishment of despotism in its classic Stalinist form.

As early as June 1937, the inventive Vologda state security major Zhupakhin, who came up with the idea of ​​cutting off the heads of "enemies of the people", was awarded the Order of the Red Star for "boiling Chekist work", and already in December 1938 he himself was arrested and shot as a "spy" and "saboteur".

Kliment Varoshilov, Vyacheslav Molotov, Joseph Stalin and Nikolai Yezhov (later executed) visit the Moscow-Volga Canal, July 12, 1937

The all-powerful 1937-1938 "Commissar-General of State Security"

Mykola Yazhov

, arrested in 1939, initially denied all charges.

But after his former colleagues used the "special methods" approved by him earlier, he immediately confessed that he was both a spy and a terrorist, and was preparing a conspiracy against Comrade Stalin.

However, at the trial, he refused the confessions extracted under torture and the only thing he regretted was: "I cleared 14,000 Chekists, but my great guilt is that I cleared not enough of them."

Later, Stalin, who directly managed the political repressions and in 1937-1938 showed Yezhov plans for executions, said about him with condemnation: "He destroyed many innocent people.

We shot him for that..."

"We are never wrong"

The Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs of Belarus Kozakevich, while thinking recently about who is subject to the "most severe purge" carried out by his department, claimed:

"We are never wrong, we come to those people who play underground and naively believe that modern methods of communication allow them to remain anonymous."

The sad irony is that almost exactly the same expression ("Our bodies do not make mistakes") was extremely common in the Stalinist USSR, where millions of innocent people fell under the knife of political repression.

...The rapprochement of the past election campaigns under Lukashenka in the 90s, in the "zero" years, and in the 2010s was usually accompanied by some political liberalization.

The authorities allowed themselves to imitate the democratic process: nomination of independent candidates, collection of signatures, campaign campaign, speeches on television and radio criticizing the regime.

Military personnel during the dispersal of protests in Minsk against the fake elections of 2020

The upcoming election campaigns (2024–2025) will be the first under Lukashenka, if nothing else is foreseen.

Never before was the fear of losing power on the dictator's face so obvious.

Today, we cannot expect anything but liberalization and a condescending attitude towards political opponents from him - everything points to the fact that these will be the first elections in conditions of severe political repression, in an atmosphere of suspicion, search for enemies and total fear in society.

It is hard to imagine who in today's Belarus would even dare to sign for any of the other candidates (besides Lukashenka), even if they are "spoilers" like Gaidukevich or Kanapatskaya.

Everyone is well informed about the prospect of receiving five years in camps "for extremism".

So everyone will join together to sign up and vote, except for "the only real candidate".

"As always, the people will decide.

If you decide that you need a different life, the Lord is with you, try it," Lukashenka said on March 22, answering a question about the upcoming elections.

After everything that has happened and is happening in Belarus, starting from 2020, the proposal to "try" to achieve "a different life" sounded from the mouth of this person in a particularly ambiguous, ominous and threatening manner.

The opinions expressed in the blogs represent the views of the authors themselves and do not necessarily reflect the position of the editors.

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