We have perhaps come to the final chapter of the Soviet Union. What’s next for Belarus?

President Lukashenko appears to have been wrongfooted by his quick-thinking opponents, who want to restore the first democratic constitution of the country from 1994

President Alexander Lukashenko is standing for a sixth five-year term, but he is facing an opposition that is suddenly stronger and more united than ever before (Reuters)

Are we watching the last piece of the Soviet Union’s jigsaw finally breaking away? History tells us that the Soviet Union ceased to exist on 25 December 1991, when Mikhail Gorbachev resigned, Boris Yeltsin became master of the Kremlin as president of Russia, and the other 14 Soviet republics went their own way. That is history for the textbooks, but it is not the whole truth.

For a start, there were stages in the Soviet collapse. There was the democracy movement that had eaten away at the dominance of the Communist Party over the previous three years. There was the coup by Soviet hardliners in the August of 1991 whose aftermath included the haemorrhaging of power from the institutions of the Soviet Union to Russia. There was the restored independence of the three Baltic states that was recognised by most western countries soon afterwards. There was the gathering at the Belovezhskaya Pushcha hunting lodge on 8 December, when the leaders of the countries that had founded the Soviet Union renounced that treaty, supplying the “de jure” underpinning for the dissolution.

Less tangible and harder to chart is the real, de facto, disintegration of the Soviet Union. The Russian tricolour might have replaced the hammer and sickle over the Kremlin overnight, but the ties that bound could not be severed so simply. Arguably, it has taken the best part of 30 years for the political, economic, and, yes, psychological, ties to fall away, with those former republics closest to Russia naturally the last in line.

Ukraine was the next to last to go. Its departure began with its declaration of independence on 24 August 1991. But it was only in 2003, with an election successfully challenged by the Orange Revolution, that the process began for real. It continued with the Euromaidan in 2014 – also called in Ukraine the “revolution of dignity” – and it was sealed with the election of the outsider, Volodymyr Zelensky, last year. Some would contend that Ukraine’s independence will not, in fact, be complete so long as the conflict against Russia-backed rebels in the east of the country goes on. But the process is irrevocable. If Russia had ever hoped to hang on to Ukraine, that battle is lost.

And now – perhaps – for the final chapter. What we could be watching on Sunday is Belarus, the very last of the former Soviet republics, and the closest in very many ways to Russia, finally detaching itself from what remains of its Soviet moorings. President Alexander Lukashenko is standing for a sixth five-year term, but he is facing an opposition that is suddenly stronger and more united than ever before.

To describe Lukashenko as Europe’s “last dictator” is to flatter his power; thuggish autocrat might be more accurate – and survivor. He took power a good five years before Vladimir Putin arrived in the Kremlin, and has held on to it, with few serious challenges, ever since. His technique has been almost Chinese: stability and rising living standards in return for political conformity, with none-too-gentle police enforcement when necessary.

This time around, though, Lukashenko appears to have been wrongfooted by the determination and quick thinking of his opponents. They have united around Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, who stepped into the breach after the three main opposition leaders, including her husband, Sergei Tikhonovsky, were detained. A total political novice, she is now attracting tens of thousands to her rallies all over this country of fewer than 10 million people. In the past two weeks the crowds have been so big that the authorities seem to have given up either trying to ban them or break them up.

The opposition platform could be summed up as “Anything But Lukashenko”. But it is at once bolder and simpler than that. Tikhanovskaya insists that she is not campaigning for power as such. Rather, she would use a victory to restore what is seen as Belarus’s first democratic constitution – from 1994 – enshrining free speech, free elections and presidential term limits. Having done that, she would call new, free, elections.

The opposition have more going for them than anyone might have imagined at the outset, starting with the energy and commitment that Tikhanovskaya has brought to the campaign. The economy has been stalling, and there is growing discontent with the ossified state of politics. More immediately, there is Lukashenko’s initially dismissive and then cavalier attitude towards coronavirus, which he claims to have overcome himself, despite having to cancel a recent speech.

The opposition have also been able to use social media, bypassing the official state media to get their message out and to organise. They also know about revolutions and free elections in Ukraine and the relative prosperity to be found across the border in Lithuania.

None of this is to say that Tikhanovskaya can win. She could lose fair and square, or she could be deprived of victory by the incumbent’s dirty tricks. International observers have been banned, and homegrown volunteers are being locked up. Nor is it to say that, even in the unlikely event of her winning, and being allowed to win, the opposition would be able to remain as united as it has done in campaign mode.

And there are plenty more negative scenarios. If protests follow what is perceived to be a “stolen” election, it is entirely possible that they will be brutally dispersed, as happened in 2010. But 2020 is not 2010. Not only is the opposition more united, but Lukashenko is now less comprehensively orientated towards Moscow, while being quietly courted by the west.

So far, Moscow has stayed its hand, not least perhaps because Putin already has his hands full, what with Syria, Ukraine, and now protests in the Russian Far East. Lukashenko has claimed that 30 or so alleged Russian mercenaries, recently arrested in Belarus, had been dispatched to make trouble. But Minsk is the standard transfer point for Russians being deployed in Libya and other points in Africa, and would Moscow really want to queer Lukashenko’s pitch? What is clear is that any move by the Belarus opposition to emulate Ukraine’s Euromaidan – a wave of civil unrest in 2013/14 – would put not just Russia, but the EU and the US uncomfortably on the spot.

At the same time, the extent to which Belarus was ever completely in the Russian camp can be exaggerated. The idea was reinforced by periodic talk of a possible Russia-Belarus confederation – an idea that now seems permanently off the table. But it was always wrong to see Belarus as no more than a minor adjunct of Russia.

It has a long history of its own art, folklore and theatre, some of it grounded in its pre-war Jewish community. Marc Chagall came from near Vitebsk. As the Soviet Union was breaking up, it was Belarus that hosted the crucial meeting at Belovezhskaya Pushcha which renounced the 1924 Union treaty. It had suffered almost as much from the Chernobyl disaster as Ukraine, and had drawn similar conclusions about the Soviet system.

Belarus was also among the first post-Soviet states to print its own money, to change street names and to repaint its signs in Belarussian – a language dismissed by some Russians as a mere “dialect”, but a point of national pride. If the former Soviet republics had had the will, as was sometimes mooted, to form an EU-type grouping, Belarus had hoped that its capital, Minsk, would become its Brussels.

In short, while Svetlana Tikhanovskaya might well not prevail in Sunday’s election, for whatever reason, Belarus must be treated as a grown-up, independent country. From now, it can only be a matter of time before the real dissolution of the Soviet Union is finally complete.