«

»

BULLETINS INFOFOCUS № 9

E-bulletin of IISEPS Center for Documentation, N 9, 2013 – ISSN 1822-5578 (only Russian)

Content:

Introduction
1. Basic trends of September
2. Chronicle of key events
3. Politics
3.1. Politics as a business and business as a politics
4. Economics
4.1. The ghost of Karl Marx haunting the world
4.2. Investments within the country not compensated
4.3. “Such a country, in such a place, with such a people…”
5. Finances
5.1. A forecast from a man who had never made a mistake
6. Our forecast for October
7. From the IISEPS desktop

Introduction:

Dear readers!
The conflict triggered by the arrest of Uralkali’s general director V. Baumgertner surprisingly quickly turned into a smoldering stage. It never got up to the top officials’ level. The conflict began with a monologue of A. Lukashenko, and this monologue developed incrementally during almost all of September. The Kremlin and Russian President Vladimir Putin personally did not turn it into a dialogue. Assuming in our forecast minimal chances for a favorable outcome of the conflict for the Belarusian head of state, we were confident that the conflict from the level “Belarusian state – Russian oligarch” would reach up to the level “Belarusian state – Russian state”, but we were wrong. Something which seemed to be the Russian state due to a number of formal criteria, turned out to be something different. We have taken for the state a situational union of pro-government groups preoccupied with permanent redistribution of assets, and therefore the conflict of A. Lukashenko with the principal owner of Uralkali was seen in Moscow as a strengthening of certain groups at the expense of others.
But does that mean that the winner of the conflict has already been determined? We wouldn’t hurry with such a conclusion. Any phenomenon has an infinite number of various projections. While A. Lukashenko increases his rating due to the victory over another enemy, the workers of Belaruskali are being transferred to the two-thirds of the monthly wage, and the losses count up to hundreds of millions of dollars. This economic projection on the globalized reality cannot be cancelled by any PR campaigns. It will determine the future course of the conflict, and it’s far from being a fact that the “game” will end up with a zero sum. Both sides can become losers.
Social indices, as we have predicted it, decreased simultaneously but not significantly. The resources of the Belarusian social state are melting before our very eyes. The announcements about the increase of the prices appear all the time. There is an impression that a serious struggle for the right to increase the prices broke out between the ministries. A powerful propaganda campaign raised by the state media on the subject of Russian “crooks” increased the electoral rating of A. Lukashenko, but it failed to improve the public moods. The gap between the reality perceived by the population in senses and the television picture is approaching a critical limit. This explains the contrary directions of social indices and president’s electoral rating.
IISEPS executive board

Download full version (in Russian only)