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Biography: Alyaksandr Lukashenka
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Born on:
1954,
August
30th
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Countries:
Belarus
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Categories:
Heads of state
Politicians
Presidents
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Related works:
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Alyaksandr Lukashenka was born on 30 August 1954, although exactly where is unclear. During the 1994 presidential campaign, the Belarusian president maintained that he was born in the village of Aleksandria in Mahileu Oblast. However, an official biography circulated by the presidential press service in 1997 claimed he was born in the town of Kopys in Vitsebsk Oblast.
The identity of his father remains unknown, with Lukashenka bearing his last name after his mother. (His official website tersely states that the president was "brought up without a father.") His patronymic, Ryhoravich, indicates that his father's first name was Ryhor (Grigory in Russian).
In 1975, Lukashenka graduated from the history department of the Pedagogical Institute in Mahileu. Subsequently he married Halina, a school companion, and fathered two sons.
Regional Official
Before turning to politics, Lukashenka pursued a number of low-key jobs in the provinces: 1975 -- an instructor of the Komsomol (Communist Youth League) at a school in Shklou (Mahileu Oblast); 1975-77 -- political propaganda officer in the Border Troops; 1977 -- Komsomol secretary in Mahileu; 1978-80 -- secretary of the "Knowledge" Association in Shklou; 1980-82 -- political propaganda officer in the Border Troops; 1982-83 -- collective farm deputy director in Shklou District; 1983-85 -- deputy director of a plant producing construction materials in Shklou; 1985-87 -- party secretary in a collective farm in Shklou District.
In 1985, Lukashenka graduated from the Belarusian Agricultural Academy after taking a three-year extramural course.
Lukashenka's big break came in 1987 when he was appointed director of a loss-making collective farm (sovkhoz) in Shklou District. Within a two-year period he managed to make the farm a profitable enterprise. Lukashenka became a media hero and subsequently boasted of being invited as an expert by the Soviet Cabinet of Ministers in Moscow to participate in the preparation of documents on agricultural policies at the end of the perestroika championed by the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev.
National Politics
In 1990, Lukashenka won a seat in the Supreme Soviet of the Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic, where he become a fiery critic of the ruling nomenklatura and a supporter of Belarus's freshly acquired sovereignty.
Following the failed communist coup in Moscow in August 1991, when the Supreme Soviet declared Belarus's independence and adopted new state symbols -- the white-red-white flag and the knight-in-pursuit emblem -- Lukashenka was reportedly the first lawmaker to bring the new flag into the session hall.
In 1993, Lukashenka was elected the head of an ad hoc parliamentary commission to investigate corruption in the government. On 14 December 1993, he delivered a memorable anticorruption report, blaming state officials for illegal commercial activities. The report, however, included no substantial evidence of misdemeanors, therefore no criminal proceedings were instigated against anyone.
To appease the public's thirst for blood in the aftermath of Lukashenka's speech, the communist nomenklatura in the Supreme Soviet found a scapegoat in democratically minded speaker Stanislau Shushkevich and voted him out of office for not accounting for some $100 during the construction of his dacha. The report, which was broadcast live by national television, once again made Lukashenka a people's hero in Belarus.
Becoming President
In March 1994, the Supreme Soviet adopted a new constitution, which introduced the post of president with broad powers. Lukashenka entered the presidential race, pledging to reintegrate Belarus with Russia, stop what he called "robber privatization," fight against corruption, and return the savings lost by people because of the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
Lukashenka received 45 percent of the vote in the first round of the presidential election on 19 June 1994 and qualified for the second round with then Prime Minister Vyacheslav Kebich. In the second round on 10 July 1994, Lukashenka won a landslide victory with 80 percent of the vote.
Extended Presidency
In 1995, Lukashenka organized a referendum asking Belarusians to approve his policy of close integration with Russia, give the Russian language official status along with Belarusian, replace the state symbols of independent Belarus with new ones resembling those of the Soviet era, and give him the right to dissolve the parliament if it has violated the constitution. Some 75 percent of voters said "yes" to all the four questions, thus delivering a heavy blow to democratic forces that pursued the ideal of reviving indigenous Belarusian culture based on the Belarusian language and of integrating Belarus with Europe rather than Russia.
In 1996, Lukashenka held another referendum on a rewritten constitution that provided the president with authoritarian powers and practically allowed him to rule the country by decrees. The referendum was decried by both opponents at home and international observers as heavily rigged in favor of the authorities. Lukashenka managed to crush the opposition to the referendum from the Constitutional Court and a part of deputies in the Supreme Council, which was replaced by a bicameral legislature under the new constitution.
In subsequent years, Lukashenka has imposed an authoritarian rule and all but eradicated the political opposition as well as the freedom of speech and assembly in the country. His authoritarian ways resulted in international isolation of Belarus in general and his regime in particular. Lukashenka's last official visit to the West was to France in mid-1996. But he continued to meet with Russian President Boris Yeltsin and his successor, Vladimir Putin. Minsk and Moscow signed a number of unification accords -- the last one in 1999 -- but their planned Russia-Belarus Union State has so far remained mostly on paper.
Lukashenka was reelected in 2001 in a ballot that was described by OSCE observers as neither democratic nor fair. In October 2004, simultaneously with parliamentary elections, Lukashenka held one more referendum, which lifted the constitutional two-term limit on the post of president in Belarus and allowed him to seek presidency for an indefinite number of times. |
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