Let’s leave Belarus’s propagandists in a spin

By Edward Lucas

Date: 02/06/05

One minor plus of my years as a Cold War warrior was that Soviet-bloc propaganda, though usually mad and horrible, was also thought-provoking and even useful. Partly, it gave clues about their thinking: "Why does the Kremlin think this is our weak spot right now and why are they attacking it this way in particular?" But it also helped me think about what aspects of our own system were easy to defend and what were vulnerable to criticism.

That stimulus has largely withered with communism and I rather miss it. There are still echoes of it in Russia, but the focus is narrow: even the apologists who defend the Stalinist version of history do so for reasons of neo-imperialism and nostalgia, rather than out of conviction that Soviet ideology of the time - dictatorship of the proletariat, dialetical materialism and so forth - was actually right.

But that gap is at least partially filled by Belarussian state television programmes. They are direct heirs of now long-forgotten Cold War offerings such as East Germany's Schwarzes Kanal [Black Channel], whose venomous denunciations of West Germany's decadent warmongering were the highlight of my week when I was covering the German Democratic Republic in the late 1980s.

This week, for example, a top Belarussian propagandist, Yawhen Novikaw (that's the Belarussian spelling: in the Russian that he broadcasts in he would be Yevgeny Novikov), turned his attention to the BBC and press freedom in Britain.

"A large-scale political punishment of journalists is taking place right under their very nose, in their own city of London, and all British democrats have buried their heads in the sand: we do not see or hear anything. If such a shame were happening in any other country, they would come to that country like a clan of crows," he argued.

That's odd. On my many visits to Belarus, I never found any details of British internal politics, let alone the problems of cost-control in public-service broadcasters, greatly figuring in popular consciousness. But Novihaw's lengthy programme did its best to make the subject of the recent BBC strike interesting and relevant. It was not just that the BBC was the subject of a vindictive attack by the "Blair dictatorship", but the "thousands" of human rights lobbies in Britain were hypocritically silent about the BBC's plight.

Personally, I'm rather sympathetic to the BBC management's attempt, albeit belated and very limited, to cut the grotesque overstaffing and extravagance in the corporation. And Novikaw's argument is preposterous as his facts are wrong: the strike lasted for one day, not five; even the BBC's most ardent defenders do not link the death of the weapons scientist David Kelly (murdered by Blair's goons, according to Novikaw) to the current rows about job cuts.

But the interesting points are different ones. For a start, broadcasts like these are signs that foreign human rights outfits have the authorities in Minsk rattled. Belarussian television has been devoting much time lately to attacking their funding of local opposition activities. A few days earlier Novikaw attacked "the information war unleashed against Belarus by Western structures", saying that all revolutions lead to "blood and devastation".

Second, it is precisely because Belarus is a place where broadcasters are under government control and where people disliked by the authorities do end up dead, that commentators like Novikaw need to maintain that countries like Britain are no better. High ethical standards and strong institutions create the "soft power" that will eventually disprove Novikaw and topple his masters. So let's strengthen them.

Edward Lucas is Central and Eastern European correspondent for The Economist.

Article takes a look at anti-Western propaganda in Belarus' media.