George Kennan's 1945 is not yet here

I have spent the last week reading Sketches from a Life, which is a collection of travel diary notes by the American diplomat George Kennan, written in a time span stretching from the 1920s to the 1980s. George Kennan is most widely known for his so called Long Telegram from 1946, where he draws up the United States' strategy (as he would have liked to see it) for the coming Cold War. But my attention was caught by a diary note that he made a bit earlier, in June 1945, during a trip from Moscow to Siberia. In it, Kennan expresses admiration for the people he meets and compassion in face of their hardships.

"But," he writes, "there is no way of helping the Russian people. When a people finds itself in the hands of a ruthless authoritarian regime which will stop at nothing, it finds itself beyond the power of others to help. Gifts to it can be given only to the regime, which promptly uses them as weapons for the strengthening of its own power."

Are Kennan's words about the Soviet Union in 1945 relevant for Belarus in 2006? I have lately found myself thinking along lines similar to those quoted above. What is the effect, for instance, of all the Swedish projects in the social sphere aiming at helping the Belarusians? All those meetings and seminars on prevention of drug abuse among youth, on gender equality, and on combating trafficking in human beings, could they not be said to have strengthened the regime? In their wake local authorities have improved (?) their control of youth, Lukashenko did use the gender issue to semi-legitimise the hand-picking of winners in the last parliamentary elections (a third of them should be women), and the trafficking problem is now being used as an excuse for the government to control which young people may travel abroad.

Yes, Kennan's warning is relevant. But, Lukashenko's Belarus is still not quite Stalin's Soviet Union. As long as there are ways of circumventing the authorities, I think there may just be room for helping the Belarusian people without helping the regime. But this room is quickly shrinking, and I do see that people here in Sweden are reluctant to step into it, maintaining instead a more comfortable philosophy of constructive engagement with the regime.

Kennan continues:

"On the other hand, blows aimed in exasperation at the regime itself are no help to the people it dominates. Such injuries are promptly ducked and passed on to the people, while the regime, breathing sympathetic indignation, strikes one fiery attitude after another as the protector of a noble nation from the vicious envy of a world which refuses to understand."

This very well describes the behaviour and rhetoric of Lukashenko. But, once again, Belarus in 2006 is not quite what the Soviet Union was in 1945. Society is not yet totally cleansed from alternative interpretations of the world, and a large portion of the population (probably a majority) is still open for other ways of development than that which Lukashenko offers them. Left in peace, though, he may just be able to accomplish his ambition of a totally subdued people.

This is why I think it would be untimely to accept George Kennan's 1945 advice of leaving it to the "people – encumbered neither by foreign sentimentality nor foreign antagonism – to work their destiny out in their own peculiar way." Instead, we should do what we can before it is too late.

Happy New Year, Belarus.