"PREVED, MEDVED!"*

With the help of this popular internet saying one can describe the attitude of the Belarusians towards the new president of Russia. In spite of the fact that the Belarusians have not seen any good deeds (as well as misdeeds) from the new Russian leader so far, he has received an advance of a considerable sympathy credit (Table 1).

At that respondents do not expect any particular changes in the relations of the two countries: 61.5% of the polled consider that bilateral relations are going to remain the same as they used to be by V. Putin, 14% suppose they are going to improve and only 9.3% expect worsening of the relations. Perhaps the friendly attitude to D. Medvedev is partly conditioned by this prospective stability.

This attitude becomes apparent in the answers to the question in which the new Russian president is assessed in the context of the whole Areopagus of the world powers leaders (Table 2).

Attitude towards leaders of this or that country is to a certain extent determined by the attitude to the country itself. For instance, as it follows from Table 2 the Belarusians quite highly estimate such different heads of the German government as G. Schreder and A. Merkel. Partly the same mechanism works with respect to the newly-made head of Russia: he found himself on the third place as soon as a month after his accession. However, the Belarusians estimated B. Yeltsin extremely low during the last years of his government. Apparently the sympathy splash towards D. Medvedev can also be explained by his appearance: he is young, educated, always with a smile and speaks coherently. It is possible that the friendly feelings which the Belarusians have to the patron of the new president of Russia partly spread on him, too – although the corresponding rating of V. Putin does not reach the record level of 2003, it has overcome the drop of 2006. As it has already happened at the beginning of the century, today the former Russian president and the present prime minister again surpasses among the Belarusians their own head in the level of popularity.

However, when respondents are offered to play a game under the name of "the union president", than their own leader gets the relative majority of votes (Table 3).

Table 3. Dynamics of answering the question "If the post of president of Belarus and Russia were established, whom would you vote for at the elections to this post?", % (the question allows several answers)

Variant of answer	11'99	08'01	10'01	09'02	09'03	11'04	09'05	12'05	03'06	06'06	08'06	06'08
A. Lukashenko	31.6	19.5	26.4	15.0	21.1	29.8	33.2	38.8	44.4	39.3	43.5	27.7
V. Putin	13.2	41.4	37.9	53.9	45.2	24.3	25.7	19.8	22.0	24.2	22.5	21.6
D. Medvedev	–	–	–	–	–	–	–	–	–	–	–	10.9
Another politician	17.9	8.8	4.3	5.1	6.9	2.0	6.5	3.5	5.1	6.0	5.6	4.5

It would be interesting to note that since 2004 in the answers to the question about the hypothetical "union presidency" A. Lukashenko has been leaving V. Putin behind regardless of the ratio of their ratings which were determined in accordance with the answers to the question of Table 2. In other words, sympathy and state self-consciousness disagree with one another – perhaps V. Putin is better than A. Lukashenko, but if it comes down to integration (may be it is a game, may be it is not), than it would be better if our own person were at the head of this magnificence – he might remember about his own people more often.

And Table 3 again demonstrates an ascent of sympathy towards D. Medvedev.

As for the attitude towards Russia itself it has not practically changed for the last three months: as far as the question of joining up the eastern neighbor is concerned the society is divided approximately in equal parts with a slight advantage of the opponents: in the situation of the geopolitical choice of "either…or" there is almost a half of the eastern direction supporters (in June of 2008 there was exactly a half of them), and there are about two thirds of supporters of integration with Europe (Tables 4-5).

Although by no means the majority of respondents would like to see Belarus in the European Union, the Belarusians treat the pro-European aspirations of the former "republics-sisters" of the USSR quite evenly. They are not much afraid by the prospects of Georgia and even the neighboring Ukraine entering "the frightful bloc" of the NATO (Table 6).

For comparison: in the course of the Levada-center March opinion poll of 2008 in Russia 30% of respondents answering a similar question said that the entry of Ukraine into the NATO constituted a serious menace to the safety of Russia, the same number said it might constitute some menace, 14% – minor menace, and 12% did not see any menace in it. As far as Georgia was concerned, the corresponding answers gave 36%, 28%, 13% and 11%.

It is difficult to correlate directly the data referring to Belarus and Russia due to different wordings of the questions. However, it seems that the Belarusians have an evidently weaker sensation of menace on account of Ukraine and Georgia entering the NATO than the citizens of mighty Russia.

The polled have expressed quite moderate assessments, when talking about the tough diplomatic conflict between Minsk and Washington (Table 7).

One could, of course, mention that there are more respondents holding the authorities of the USA responsible for the conflict than there are those who blame the Belarusian authorities for "the diplomatic war". However, 28.5% is, first of all, quite a modest result for the propaganda pandemonium raised by the state mass media on the occasion of the conflict. The traditional psychological mechanism "our-people-are-being-beaten" does not help either.

Secondly, this opinion does not constitute even the relative majority. The latter adheres to the opinion that both sides are to be blamed.

In this case the authorities confront with the mentality feature of the people managed by them. These people do not like to come up against anybody even if their important interests and prestige are infringed on, to say nothing about coming up against somebody strong and dangerous.

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