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MARGARITA M. BALMACEDA: Living the High Life in Minsk: Russian Energy Rents, Domestic Populism and Belarus' Impeding Crisis. Budapest-New York: CEU Press, 2014, 219 pp.
For more than the 20 years that Aleksander Lukashenka has been president of Belarus, scholars have been puzzling over the sustainability of his political regime. It would not be an overstatement to say that those who can at least locate Belarus on the political map tend to think of this country as a puppet of Kremlin, dependent on Russian energy sources and occasional financial donations. In this narrative, internal sustainability is ensured by a repressive mechanism that earned the country the title of the last European dictatorship. Way too often, contributions on Belarus take the whole country, with its history, politics, economy and culture, as a single unit for analysis, which forecloses opportunities for a more thorough inquiry. Margarita Balmaceda's book Living the High Life in Minsk: Russian Energy Rents, Domestic Populism and Belarus 'Impeding Crisis takes a different approach by focusing on just one element in the political system of Belarus, namely, energy policies. This enables her to present a well-researched and informed study into Lukashenka's quite resilient empire. This work continues the research of the professor of Diplomacy and International Relations at Seton Hall University into energy dependency in post-Soviet states.
Living the High Life in Minsk... challenges the common assumption that these are mere subsidies from Russia that help maintain Lukashenka's political model, and suggests instead that the picture is much more complex. Balmaceda's point of departure is the observation that Lukashenka has managed to maintain his hold on power despite changing economic conditions and, at times, a complicated relationship with Russia, which even featured a suspension of gas supplies in 2004 for the first time in Russian gas industry history. The main argument of the book is that it is not the Russian energy rents per se, but rather the way these rents have been extracted, managed, and re-distributed among external and domestic players that can help explain Lukashenka's political longevity. These "energy-related profits" (14) are at the heart of Belarus' "economic wonder," the collapse of which has been predicted repeatedly by many experts. The book demonstrates that these rents are not just subsidies or loans,...