This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, August 17th, 2020.

I'm Caleb Brown.

What can we say with confidence about the unrest in Belarus over a rigged election? What is dictator Alexander Lukashenko's

relationship to Moscow? And what's the role for the U.S. if any? Cato's Emma Ashford provides a big picture

view of the violence and political

repression now underway in Belarus. There's a lot of confusion about this and about

whether Belarus is part of Russia or not. So the kind of posited history is Belarus was part of the Russian Empire for centuries.

Then it was part of the Soviet Union, it was one of the separate Soviet republics, but it basically didn't become an

independent country until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

And since that time, Belarus has been what a lot of people refer to as Europe's last decade. Since that's not actually an

a lot of people refer to as Europe's last dictatorship.

Not not that's not actually an entirely accurate statement,

but Belarus is basically an unreconstructed Soviet style dictatorship.

There's still a lot of collective organization

in the economy.

The leader of Lukashenko basically resisted shock therapy

that happened in other former Soviet states. So the economy is still very

collectivized, the government is still a totalitarian dictatorship, and it's still very close to

Russia in many many ways people in Belarus speak Russian and

Belarus which is like a dialect of Russian but there's also a customs union between the two countries

there's freedom of movement between the two countries they basically have a

you know a European Union style deal that lets people work and move in both

...