In June the head of the state held a meeting on the issue of further improvement of the work of security agencies. The meeting was held on the base of Alphagroup under the Committee for State Security of Belarus. Speaking before the participants of the meeting, A. Lukashenko pointed out that in due course when the question was creation of special units within security agencies, it was decided to establish not one or two powerful units but a number of such units. First and foremost, these units must have been mobile, and secondly, a sound competition was also important. However, in emergency all the special units must have been operating hand in glove and fulfilling a common task. The ability of special units “to operate hand in glove” was demonstrated on the 18th-19th of March, when there were conducted searches in the offices of non-governmental organizations and the flats of activists participating in the civil campaign “Tell the Truth!” throughout the country.
When commenting on the March events, the majority of independent Belarusian analysts pointed out that the security operation conducted on a nation-wide scale served to promote the civil initiative of the poet V. Neklyaev. Recall that the campaign “Tell the Truth!” started in February 2010. It was supported by well-known public and cultural figures including R. Borodulin and G. Buravkin, the people’s artiste of Belarus Z. Bondarenko, the founder of the Chernobyl Children Fund professor G. Grushevoy, the academician R. Goretsky and others.
How far effective in PR-terms did the campaign conducted by the security agencies against the poet’s initiative prove to be? In June, when answering the question, “Do know anything about the civil campaign “Tell the Truth!”?” only 12.5% of respondents gave a positive answer. If we take into account that the events connected with the security operation had been the leading story in the independent newspapers and relevant websites, this level of recognition should be considered rather low. It goes without saying that in the governmental mass media the March events around the campaign “Tell the Truth!” were not covered.
It should be noted that in June 13.1% of Belarusians used the Internet every day, 16.1% used it several times a week and 9.8%, several times a month. Hence, the matter is not the unavailability of the information, but no interest in the information of this kind.
The socio-demographic portrait of people having some knowledge about the campaign “Tell the Truth!” is shown in Table 1. It is clear that the level of awareness depends on gender, age and education of respondents, but in general the difference might be considered insignificant. This conclusion is true for the groups with opposite political preferences as well. The initiators of the campaign “Tell the Truth!” were heard only by 15.5% of their potential supporters.
Table 1. Distribution of answers to the question, “Do you know anything about the civil campaign “Tell the Truth!”?” depending on gender, age, education level and trust to the president*, %
| Criterion |
Yes (12.5) |
No (87.2) |
| Gender: | ||
| Male |
15.0 |
84.9 |
| Female |
10.3 |
89.2 |
| Age: | ||
| 18-29 |
14.2 |
85.5 |
| 30-39 |
14.4 |
85.6 |
| 40-49 yrs |
13.5 |
86.5 |
| 50-59 |
12.3 |
87.7 |
| 60 + |
9.1 |
89.9 |
| Education: | ||
| Primary |
10.6 |
87.6 |
| Incomlete secondary |
9.1 |
90.4 |
| Secondary |
11.6 |
88.3 |
| Vocational |
11.7 |
88.3 |
| Higher |
20.5 |
79.1 |
| Trust to the president: | ||
| Trust |
10.6 |
89.1 |
| Do not trust |
15.5 |
84.1 |
* The table is read across
If we go from the quantitative indicator (the percentage of listeners) to the qualitative one, 5.1% of respondents assessed the activity of the organizers of the campaign “Tell the Truth!” positively, while 0.9% gave a negative assessment. The leaders among the informed proved to be the indifferent, 6.9%.
According to the sociologist Yu. Levada, “homo soveticus” may be found in two states: the ordinary state (the adaptive state) and the exited state (the mobilized state). The latter state could have been observed in the early 90-s of the past century and to a lesser extent at the peak of the second and third presidential election campaign. In the ordinary state the individual withdraws to his “small world” (family, close friends and colleagues) and practically has no zest for the problems not connected with his personal survival directly. The absence of the transition between the ordinary and the mobilized state of Belarusians was registered in the June survey of IISEPS on the example of the campaign “Tell the Truth!”