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Novaya Gazeta Europe

Thirty years ago today, a 39-year-old collective farm director named Alexander Lukashenko stormed to victory in Belarus’s first, and so far only, free election. Since then, he has slowly transformed a fledgling post-Soviet democracy into a brutal police state where today thousands of opposition figures as well as ordinary members of the public languish in prison for openly supporting political pluralism.

Despite a vast popular uprising against his decades of corrupt and violent rule in 2020, which Lukashenko was only able to put down with help from the Kremlin, in February the veteran dictator announced that he would be standing for a seventh term as president in 2025, which would see extending his grip on power into a fifth successive decade.

Novaya Europe looks back at three decades of “Europe’s last dictator” in photographs.

Novaya Gazeta Europe
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