Unexampled in its aggressiveness informational campaign in Russian mass media couldn’t but influence public opinion in Belarus (in June 64.5% of respondents answered that they get information on events in Ukraine from Russian TV). In the beginning it meant that pro-Russian moods were strengthening and thus the number of supporters of integration with Russia was growing. Later Russian nationalism began to arouse Belarusian nationalism. In June 71.3% of respondents agreed to A. Lukashenko’s statement “We are neither pro-Russians, nor pro-Ukrainians, nor pro-Polish, we are not Russians, we are Belarusians!” which he made during his Message-2014, while only 19.4% of respondents disagreed with that. The number of supporters of integration with Russia went down in comparison with March.
This aroused national sense prevented electoral rating of “the national leader” from a fall. And this despite the decrease of the financial standing index by 7.7 points (from –15.1 in March down to –22.8 in June)!
Another consequence of national sense agitation is reflected in Table 1. The share of respondents that consider Belarusian state theirs increased by 5.9 points in comparison with last year’s June survey.
Table 1. Dynamics of answering the question: “Which of the following statements on Belarusian state, built under the rule of A. Lukashenko, do you agree with?”, %
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Variant of answer
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06’13
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06’14
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Attitude to A. Lukashenko
|
|
|
Trust
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Don’t trust
|
|||
|
It is my state, it safeguards my interests
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33.2
|
39.1
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66.3
|
7.8
|
|
It is only partially my state, it doesn’t safeguard my interests enough
|
45.2
|
43.2
|
27.2
|
58.2
|
|
It is not my state, it does not safeguard my interests and I do not trust it
|
15.5
|
12.0
|
2.0
|
26.8
|
|
DA/NA
|
6.1
|
5.7
|
4.4
|
7.3
|
It is natural that the question on the attitude to the state turned out to be the most politically charged one. 66.3% of A. Lukashenko’s supporters and only 7.8% of his opponents consider the state theirs, thus the ratio is 8.5:1. This is probably the best illustration of unity of Belarusian nation.
The growth of positive attitude to the state didn’t really influence the attitude to people in power (all the variations in Table 2 do not exceed statistical error). In general the attitude is still negative. High rating of the head of state shouldn’t mislead you. It doesn’t change the critical evaluations of his entourage. “Paternalistic illusions, – states L. Gudkov, the director of “Levada-center”, – don’t change the structure of mass consciousness, but they may lead to a high exasperation caused by the power. If the power doesn’t fulfill its social commitments of fulfill it worse and worse, a primitive explanation of this appears in mass consciousness: it means that the power is egoistic, thievish and so on”.
Even among the supporters of A. Lukashenko only 23.5% of respondents consider people in power as a good team of politicians that lead the country in the right direction. Among the opponents of A. Lukashenko this share is extremely low – only 0.3%. The formulation “the tsar is good, the boyars are bad” wasn’t created today, but it’s still topical in modern Belarus. And the point is not the personal charisma of “batka”. It’s not the person or the throne that has the sacred status, but the person on the throne.
While analyzing the dynamics of answering the question of Table 3 one should remember that the results of the second column were obtained at peak of the economic crisis of 2011. That is why one should compare the first and the third columns to see the mobilization effect.
If desired mobilization effect can be seen in the decrease of number of respondents who had difficulties with the answer. In the moments of mobilization worldview becomes simpler and half-tones disappear.
The growth of popularity of the answer “The power and the people have different interest, but at the most difficult moments of perturbations and external threat their aims and urges become the same” by 5.5 points should be noted as well. The growth of international tension provoked by aggressive politics of Russia is probably regarded by a part of respondents as the approaching of “difficult moments of perturbations”.
In the conclusion of this analysis of questions on Belarusians’ relation to the state and to the power we want to cite A. Lukashenko’s Message-2014: “We, Belarusians, do not want to and should not allow a split of our society. Our independence and young nationhood surely annoy a lot of people. And if there is a crack in the unity of the Belarusian society, there will be those who will be interested to use it”.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions. The split of Belarusian society is one of its main characteristics. But not the only one. The state and its head openly neglect the interests of the economically active “minority”, while forming the internal and the external policy. Thus there is nothing surprising in the fact that more and more Russian dotations are needed in order to maintain Belarusian economic model.