For years, the Lukashenka regime has been suppressing credible statistics on public opinion and independent sociological reports. As a result, the data on Belarus obtained by local grassroot initiatives, independent researchers, and established institutions both within and outside the country are severely distorted. The essay outlines how sociological work is hindered on many levels in Belarus. It then describes how various groups in the society try to compensate for the deficiency by deducing sociological knowledge from available sources or conducting surveys on the grassroots level. Attention is drawn to shortcomings of both locally produced data and external interpretations of “professional” data (i.e. from surveys conducted by acclaimed research institutes). Also, I point at how specific left-wing platforms express concerns about non-empirical claims on protests within the country. This results in a marginalization of both leftist voices from abroad within Belarus and Belarusian left who are present in the international public debate on the subject. Finally, the text presents arguments for more flexible and sensitive ways to approach empirical data given the major challenges that sociological work faces in the country.

CONTEXT: DESTROYED INFRASTRUCTURE OF SOCIOLOGY

In 2013, sociologist Aksana Shelest suggested that public opinion does not exist in Belarus. In the absence of public politics and a shrinking space for intellectual discussions, she argued: there is no “real public demand for surveying and measuring public opinion – as well as actual space for implementing their results.” Indeed, infrastructure for gathering, processing and disseminating credible sociological data in Belarus is dysfunctional. With further confrontation, or detachment of the state and society, the country’s scientific field faces ideologization and erosion. This affects working conditions of academic sociologists and civic activists. The Institute of Sociology, a division of National Academy of Science, can hardly be called a trustworthy source of data; moreover, it generally tends to omit politically sensitive issues in its surveys, although interior political news still occupies top positions in the media. The Institute‘s director Gennadiy Korshunov was fired shortly after he revealed, in July 2020, that support for Lukashenka was around 24% in Minsk while only 11% trusted the central election committee – figures that the regime could not tolerate. The last remaining independent sociological institution, NISEPI, was forcibly closed in 2016. Since August 2020, dozens of social scientists have had to look for positions abroad or even leave the country. Besides, the only way public surveys could be conducted “on topics related to socio-political issues” was to apply for a license, which in most cases was always rejected, making surveys all but illegal, even for individuals posting on their social network pages. And such activity is fined according to Administrative Code (with fines reaching 5400 BYN, or ca 1700 EUR).

Altogether, independent sociological knowledge is recognized by Lukashenka’s regime as potentially dangerous and is removed from the state-controlled mass media. This might be one of the reasons why only the leader gets attention within the media and not the Belarusian population. For instance, during the first wave of the coronavirus pandemic, international media gave more attention to Lukashenka who denied the pandemic than to the massive grassroots mobilization and distancing precautions by Belarusians, although ethnographic accounts and data generated by surveys were available (consider research by SATIO).

With the beginning of the presidential election campaign in 2020, the regime rushed to ban online-surveys in mass media. For all stakeholders – the regime, the protesters, loyalists, academic scholars and activists etc. – this resulted in biased ideas about public opinions. Today, the absence of credible sociological data hinders attempts to capture, analyse, and present the ideological complexity of the waves of protests in Belarus and their effects on society. The only unconditional demand of the protests was to end violence, and protesters pursue very different opinions on questions of economic reforms, language policy, external political relations, etc.

YEARNING FOR DATA

As independent polling is suppressed, the Belarusian public – when interested in politics – commonly relies on quantitative data that is not geared towards producing statistics. Most often, these are digital traces of other activities – such as petition writing or commenting on political news on most read news outlets. For context, already in 2017 more than 60% of Belarus’s population obtained news from the Internet, while the Internet access rate was 84% (according to the International Telecommunications Union). Thus, for instance, during the last years that Tut.by existed, the most read news outlet at the time (blocked on 18 May 2021), publications received hundreds of comments that could be liked and disliked. The first comments under the most popular publications received on average 300 and 500 reactions, consistently showing 80 – 90 % “likes” in favour of change. In local talks, likes and dislikes, as well as the number of followers politicians had on their personal pages, were used to claim that supporters of the regime constitute a minority.

The state approved platform Petitions.by received a record number of signatures on petitions against the regime, indicating mass demand for change in the country. Before the 2020 elections, the most popular Belarusian media Nasha Niva, Tut.by, Onliner.by, Telegraf.by and other news outlets asked their readers whom they would vote for. Aliaksandr Lukashenka’s rating in all of such polls turned out to be very low (less than 10%) – which produced ambiguous effects. In the summer 2020, it created an effective political meme “Sasha 3 %”. The figure reassured protesters that they constituted a quantitative majority and pre-conditioned the reaction on official election results. However, it did not indicate the level of Lukashenka’s support across the entire population. Pro-regime discourse generally abstained from referring to statistics whatsoever.

Obviously, Lukashenka’s regime is trying to eliminate quantitative data about people who support change by any means, even beyond surveys. As of March 2021, Platform Golos (“Vote” ) initiated a voting for negotiations with the regime. The Ministry of Information blocked the platform’s website. However, the voting continued and resulted in more than 750,000 votes within one week. The regime reacted by placing alternative sociological data on utility bills; these data suggested that 66.5% trusted the president of Belarus. On one hand, these figures, with questionable origin, contradict any data available from grassroot polling; on the other, it indirectly admits the importance of the sociological data (interestingly, the only point where both the protesters’ and the regime’s data reach the same consensus is about the sovereignty of Belarus as the core value for Belarusians). The deficiency in stats obscures the protest’s class profile. Remarkably, in August 2020 left wing critics labelled Belarusian protests as both nationalist and pro-capitalist, despite the predominantly Russophone and pronouncedly neutral attitude on geopolitical topics, and Lukashenka’s regime having conducted neoliberal reforms since the 90s. The workers, their demands, and concerns remain virtually unstudied – especially on a quantitatively representative sample.

GRASSROOTS DATA COLLECTION AND ITS FLAWS

In Belarus, because of the lack of institutionalized sociology, multiple, horizontal initiatives have emerged that use social media to gather and publish statistics on public opinion around pressing issues. Grassroots sociology is the term I propose to contain the vast array of surveying, voting, mapping, and journalistic activities undertaken by activists, NGO workers, and civic initiatives in order to document the social transformation among Belarusians. The term had earlier denoted an idea to “build community in the discipline by breaking down the lines of stratification separating the organizational levels of the sociological enterprise and the different needs of our academic and applied endeavors.” In the Belarusian context, production of sociological data becomes a form of civic activism, with horizontality and decentralization being a condition for its survival. The anonymity of these projects means we have little to no information about their teams; however, we can clearly see they represent different methodologies and interests while aiming to clarify the otherwise silenced mass concerns and experiences.

Already before the elections held on August 9th, initiatives such as Zubr and Platforma Golos designed online platforms to aggregate all available voting protocols (in many instances, protocols were not shown to independent observers; some protocols were burned immediately after voting). Independent observers calculated the percentage of people who came to polling places with white bracelets on their hand indicating that they would vote for Tsikhanouskaya (at my polling place in Minsk, according to an observer, they constituted about 75% of voters). This was a rare moment when many Belarusians expressed their anti-Lukashenka position openly, hoping for rapid structural change. After the elections, no exit-polls could be conducted for multiple reasons: the regime had apparently no interest in disclosing real figures in support of Lukashenka; independent sociology is banned as “unlicensed polling”; to add that, in fact, there were mass gatherings at nearly all of the polling stations on 9th August when the ballots were being counted and when the result was declared. Protocols of voting committees collected by Zubr and Platforma Golos were put on the map and are available on initiatives’ websites. They present a complex, documentary account of what the election process in Belarus 2020 looked like.

Some of the grassroots data gathering projects in Belarus follow a strictly qualitative approach and do not even position themselves as a study. However, the logic of documentation, in-depth interviewing, and archiving of narratives resembles practices of qualitative research. For instance, project August 2020 collected “more than 200 stories told by the people who experienced violent treatment… Further hundreds of stories are being processed”. In a similar vein, Project 23.34 documented 5527 cases of violence, as well as compiled sociodemographic portraits of protesters and judges. In the context where thousands of victims of police violence were denied legal defence, the data from these collections widely circulate in the media and international reports – and present a data set for future in-depth research.

Narodny Opros (People’s Survey) is the most prominent and large-scale polling initiative as of March 2021. The initiative polls from two to four thousand people weekly and traces the “mood of the protest,” among the “supporters of change,” a group that is far from being homogeneous. Following polls by Narodny Opros, blogger Anton Motolko published a larger research that investigated the public mood, major concerns among Belarusians, their recognition of political figures, opinion on positions of other states‘ reactions on Belarusian protest.

Thematically, grassroots sociology’s interest is not limited to the ongoing mass repressions, especially when it comes to smaller communities. One of the most prominent social phenomena in Belarus are the Telegram “neighborhood” chats that emerged all around the country in summer 2020 en masse. In these chats, neighbors communicate on different topics and support each other (Elena Lebedeva and Aksana Shelest studied them in detail). In these chats, the in-build survey function is frequently used to gather opinions among residents of a neighbourhood on communal problems and changes in their district. Such a solution has several advantages compared to offline, door-to-door canvassing. Not only can such polling be done distantly and asynchronously so that participants fill in forms when convenient for them; it also provides better inclusion of those groups that would usually not contact a pollster (it’s usually adult men who open the door to answer questions). In practice, surveys in hood chats simply have more chances to occur – since they require less resources. For communities, this new participation in surveys becomes an exercise in direct democracy – which they otherwise do not have access to.

For initiatives and organizations working with specific topics and spheres, analysing the life of Belarusians becomes increasingly difficult. Engaging in research through interviewing participants poses a security risk for both interviewees and interviewers, while surveys are promoted in social networks with advised caution – also when they focus on seemingly neutral topics such as eco-friendly lifestyles, urban mobility, education etc. Polling on the street receives almost criminal connotations, since there are cases of detainments at any kind of gathering – including instances when people collected signatures under letter to local deputies or even simply had a birthday party in their backyard. What is worse, the very practice of organizing and participation in surveys becomes political: the Belarusian regime is at war not only with dissent and plurality, but also with knowledge.

Data produced by activists can and should be approached critically. Since questionnaires are disseminated mainly through Telegram chats and among neighbours, samples under-represent some regime supporters – especially, the elderly who do not use the Internet. In some cases, bloggers and activists in Telegram integrate surveys into their communication with an audience that has some predefined agenda. Conversations surrounding the protests held in messaging apps or the language within leaders’ speeches might often prioritize quotes, narratives, and thick descriptions of mass repressions and violence over figures; emphasizing values and emotions over plans and programs. The state media does not often appeal to sociology research at all. Sociology in Belarus is mostly interesting for supporters of change. The more marginalized the sociological effort in Belarus is – the poorer the quality of data on the country, whether they are collected from within or outside.

PROBLEMS WITH DATA HIERARCHIES

While domestic grassroots and activist data on Belarus is flawed, the way that “established” academic data forms its analysis on Belarus must be problematized as well. Here, many interpretations of the data on a few (interconnected) issues imply a hierarchy of data.

The first issue can be called ethical – but cannot be omitted. Academic discussion about Belarus is clearly dominated by data collected from abroad, analyzed and interpreted by foreign researchers. More cited are Western European analysts who generally underline the scale of protest and deep split inside Belarusian society. Some of them had minimal previous contact with the field, had not spent a day in the country during 2020-2021 or, probably, have never been to Belarus. In some cases, it takes a Belarusian researcher to relocate from Minsk and take on the position of a “British sociologist” to make their finding respected (I am referring here to the case of Ryhor Astapenia who became an expert of Chatham House).

In comments on Belarus, the absence of a background on the topic is too noticeable and reveals itself in vocabulary used. Speaking about Belarus on behalf of the Russian left, writer Katya Kazbek and activist Alexey Sakhnin use distinct language in regularly co-authored and cited texts. For instance, in their text called “The Uprising That Failed” Sakhnin says the absolute majority of Belarusians called Lukashenka bats’ka (father) which was not the case among Belarusians, regardless of their attitude towards the regime, till late 2020, when the word was allegedly imported into Belarusian state television by Russia Today journalists (journalist of Novaya Gazeta Iryna Khalip wrote about this import in detail). Another case is opposition, not used by Belarusians to refer to leaders of the protest or alternative candidates until now. Within the country, leaders of the protest movement in 2020 are clearly distinguished from and opposed to institutionalized parties and political movements active from the 1990s – that is, to those whom Belarusians themselves call the opposition (both with negative and positive connotations). Sakhnin even uses Byelorussia in his Russophone publications, a name from the Soviet period, not figuring in official documents in today’s Belarus, absent in Russian and Belarusian speech in Belarus, but used in Russia (a hint on why in 2019 the Russian left were notoriously silent about Belarusian protests against “deeper integration” with Russia – a set of “roadmaps” envisioning unification of legislation between two states, in Belarus widely associated with absorption of a smaller state by a powerful neighbor).

Apart from ideologically loaded vocabulary, texts by Sakhnin and Kazbek suffer from multiple factual errors: stating that Lukashenka ”stopped delivering his presidential speeches in Russian,” although his every speech since 2015 was delivered in this language. With a considerably large number of publications on Belarus in leftist media, the range of authors presented is astonishingly narrow; ironically, criticism of this range then inevitably becomes personal.

Publications by many researchers that conduct archival, ethnographic and journalistic work in the country (also in Russian and English, let alone those written in Belarusian) remain less cited. And many of them are not going to be written – given that many academicians (including my best students) give vast amount of time to civic initiatives or applied research and are demotivated by the reality of publishing: Slavoj Žižek’s text on Belarusian protest gets published by The Independent; but there is no answer to the statement, signed by 45 academics in Belarus, explaining why Žižek’s statement is empirically wrong. Most expert interviews on Belarus are conducted with external observers; Belarusians are not really present among co-authors of texts on the subject. Less attention is given to remaining archives of oral history of police violence. Interviews, narratives, small-scale focused surveys from 23.34, Golos, Narodny Opros, etc. get ignored – in short, data produced in Belarus by its residents.

The result is that “foreign” publications on Belarus arouse pushback and disavowal on the Belarusian segment of the Internet – and this does not resonate externally. Local researchers, those physically spending time in Belarus, have little to oppose the good-looking survey layouts – except dozens of their personal evidence indicating, among other things, that their particular interpretations should be questioned.

With all that said, this is not just an ethical question of indigenous knowledge being eclipsed by respected “international” scrutiny. There are at least a few serious gaps that are missing in external interpretations and undermine their verifiability.

One gap is related to the specific distortions to survey data obtained in Belarus, domestically or from abroad. In Belarus today, any polling is perceived with suspicion even online. By the end of autumn 2020, any polling result in Belarus would be severely flawed even if, for some reason, the regime would not directly obstruct it. Chatham House experts noted that their respondents were likely to give answers they considered expected from them, or, otherwise, to abstain from any critic of the regime – simply because of fear. Such fear might be much more present in smaller settlements, where open dissent can also bring higher risks such as losing one’s work position without any adequate substitute.

Next, an assumption that Lukashenka’s support is higher in rural Belarus than in cities and towns in 2020-2021 might be questioned by numbers of protesters in August – in some small settlements including villages, a higher percentage of the population took to the streets in comparison to Minsk; on the Internet it is still easy to find video footage, protocols, and stories of locals that confirm it, but this is neglected by interpreters.

Related is the assumption that factory workers did not support the protest. Data from 23-34 show that factory workers made up about 10% of detainees, while another 10 % were from sales and ceded only to IT specialists (20%). Meanwhile, factory workers faced higher risks when participating in protests because of a special policy where employees record their colleagues’ participation in protests (usually absent in the private sector). Also, there is evidence of factory workers in Hrodna being physically forced to take shifts, beaten and threatened by weapons.

To sum up, it is risky to deduce, without triangulation, that “across Belarus ‘rebels’ and loyalists are of more or less equal numbers” from survey data showing 53.4% criticism of the regime and 30.6% support (ZOiS), “18 percent reported having voted for Lukashenka and 53 percent for the opposition candidate Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya,” or from survey by Chatham House showing 50.4% voted on 9^th of August for Tsikhanouskaya vs. 21.2% for Lukashenka.

Another problem is the left’s disregard of the violence that occured in the peaceful protests in their interpretations. For instance, Alexander Kolesnikov in his article “Why workers did not support the colorful revolution in Belarus” wrote that “Marches of many thousands had “melted away” (растаяли, Italics are mine) by mid-October,” He then continued his text with deliberations on why “petit bourgeoisie” failed to “conquer the hearts of the working class” and concluded the text with the paragraph “What can the Belarusian left do?” Shootings, beatings, mass detentions, and tortures do not appear in this text at all – and in the majority of left-wing texts the same happens. Inside Belarus the topic of violence occupies a key position in protest discourse till today and circulates widely in media but also in daily discussions (on public transport, in supermarkets, at hairdresser’s, on dating apps etc., if my ethnographic listening in Minsk 2021 counts). Actually that the protest does not have an economic agenda is something pro-Lukashenka commentators and protesters would agree about; while for the former, the reliance on emotions and absence of economic agenda is the target of criticism, the former accentuate the questions of violence and legitimacy as prior issues that must be resolved first.

Moreover, tolerance towards violence is the central reprimand articulated today by protesters towards those who did not support them, with the working class mentioned first (probably for no good reason). For many protesters, the revolution failed not when it missed workers’ demands – but where the workers (more than students, small scale private businesses, and IT enterprises) resumed going to the factory daily while hundreds of political prisoners were detained and systematically tortured. The state media admits that the protests stopped due to police brutality. The media frames it as professionality and not as a crime. This framing indicates how the split in Belarusian society is shaped by different attitudes towards police violence – much more than by the economic model sought for, or by a preferred politician. In this context, to reduce the scope of analysis to the class interests of workers and to leave out the rest of their motivations means to objectify and dehumanize them.

Violence is not only largely ignored in the leftist analysis, but in some cases is called inevitable. Sakhnin and Kazbek go as far to say the following: “the main lesson that we can draw from the Belarusian experience” is that “an escalation of violence is advantageous for both sides of the conflict”. For Belarusian protesters, whose main slogan throughout months was “Stop violence” this sounds like twisted logic, at the very best. Tellingly, Hleb Koran, one of a few left commenting on the situation from inside Belarus, notes that those who regard workers’ protests only meaningful if politically organized ”tend to underestimate the scale of state violence in the country,” “because for them protesters do not have class consciousness yet, [hence] there’s no pity for them”.

What cannot be forgotten is the wide circulation of explanations for the protests’ failure – “protesters did not suggest anything to attract workers” (by left-wing criticism) and “workers are indifferent to the atrocities of Lukashenka’s regime” (among some Belarusian protesters). These deductions omit the fact that every protester has a set of privileges and vulnerabilities which affect whether or not they can participate in the street protests. These privileges and vulnerabilities cannot always be described through a class lens (to mention a few – think about ethnicity, sexuality, marital status, family care duties, health issues in the context of pandemics, legal status etc). Attitudes towards and participation in protests cannot be equated; and an attitude expressed in the survey might add a third element to the equation.

Authors also argue it was “The collapse of his [Lukashenka] statist model of capitalism that fed mass discontent with his rule”, however it is unclear on which grounds such a conclusion was made. Mentions of neoliberal reforms and “capitalist values” were absent at streams and rallies just as working class interests. All alternative candidates, including Tsikhanouskaya, promised a state of law and fair elections, and the protest discourse (including its “popular” layer, available for study) was focused exclusively on legal, not economic, issues. Supporters of change virtually unanimously answer “ending the violence” when asked about the main goal of the protest. More than that, in Belarus, both among supporters and opponents of the regime, in any domain of public discourse, be that mass media (both state and non-state ones), NGO sector, cultural sphere, small talk on a bus, and even in schools, the questions of physical violence, the legal grounds of the regime, and geopolitical safety occupy most of the space. Questions of bare survival prevail over economic and social topics. In this situation, texts that omit the questions of bare survival and conduct analysis exclusively via a class lens fail to attract the attention of any considerable audience in Belarus, since the latter would not relate their own concerns to the concerns of external analysts.

IMPLICATIONS OF THE REGIME’S WAR AT KNOWLEDGE FOR QUESTION-POSING ON BELARUS

Leaving aside the discussion about what was the revolution’s failure and for whom, if we assume it did, fail, would carry significant implications in Belarus. One might ask, what should now be analyzed (by the left)? Whom in Belarus should the left address? And what should the left tell the world about Belarus?

Sakhnin and Kazbek have argued that the protests could not change the regime – which is false: the changes are mostly the opposite to the protest’s intentions, but they are there and affect Belarusian society at large. Even formally, Belarus became a significantly less free country (with 11 points of 100 in 2021 against 19 in early 2020 in ranking by Freedom House), less safe (Minsk dropped from 16th to 114th position in Numbeo rating of destinations), and more impoverished. The number of people detained exceeded 35,000; the number of criminal cases against them is now over 3,000. As of early May, more than 360 people are listed as political prisoners by local human rights groups. In-custody inhumane treatment has become widespread. The Belarusian parliament “keeps stamping new laws limiting freedom of media, protest, association, expanding police powers to use firearms, enhancing criminal liability for various speech crimes like ‘discreditation of the Republic of Belarus’.”

For Belarusians themselves, what is left unanswered is the question about how we live after we “failed”. This should be addressed if the analysts want to preserve empirical and ecological validity of their research. What are the examples of effective resistance in comparably repressive regimes? Which data do we interpret for a just sociological representation of Belarusian case? How do we take into account, in left critique, factors of mass repressions and officials’ threats to suppress the strikers with weapons and violence? What do we do with the explicit verbal denial of the state of law by the regime (consider Lukashenka’s saying that “sometimes there is no time for law”)? And how can the international left produce visions that do make sense, and seem convincing, to any segment of Belarusian society, including workers?

This is where the function of the analysis of Belarusian NGOs should be contextualized as reviews of an early version of this text guessed that it was written from the position of an NGO activist, perhaps unusual in Western Europe when writing a scholarly text. However, given the circumstances, it is natural that in Belarus a university lecturer with a Ph.D. degree from German university would quite likely choose to combine academic research and participation in a local initiative: my case is not exceptional and even not rare. At the same time, in Belarus, a German Ph.D. degree and/or “working” at an NGO does not make one less vulnerable than a grassroots activist, as I discussed elsewhere: my students, my university colleagues, my activist peers, and my partner got detained during the last year, while my status as an activist reduces the merit of my statement. However, in the local landscape, scholars are often activists and educators, and activists are experts – since other actors are even less familiar with the context. International sociology’s interest in Belarus is very limited since only digital tools can be used to generate knowledge, while in many thematic areas – mobility, ecological behavior, everyday life, education and circulation of information etc – there’s no alternative to data from grassroots initiatives and NGOs.

To automatically label native ethnographic and practitioners’ (interviewer’s) knowledge as “biased” creates another obstacle for understanding people’s experiences and social processes on the ground. This results in external statements that do not have an understanding for people “out there” in Belarus but invoke in them the feelings of detachment, misunderstanding, and being unimportant for the commentators (left-wing ones, in the case discussed). So far, texts on Belarus published, predominantly in English, on respected international left platforms are hardly ever cited by popular Belarusian mass media and are discussed on Belarusian social media with disappointment – including by local left, with students among them; I am more often a reader of such criticism rather than its author. And the place is there to be taken by another pool of commentators ready to comment on the “re-birth of a nation,” “moral victory,” “adulting” of Belarusians, and further delves into psychologized identitarian discourse. If there’s a will to provide a left alternative to that discourse, collaboration between local and international actors of knowledge production should be prioritized – instead of downplaying the meaning of non-academic empirical materials. In 2021, access to information and, thus, the ability to conduct scientific research continues to deteriorate. A law was passed that would punish media outlets who did not receive official accreditation, essentially banning them from publishing any survey result that would give insight into the socio-political situation in the country or the republican referendums and election. Even just publishing hyperlinks was banned. ”Ecoinitiatives, volunteering initiatives, urbanist initiatives, private education“ are listed by pro-regime newspaper Belarus Segodnya among social phenomena that threaten to ”destroy Belarus”. Bloggers Anton Motolko and Stsiapan Putsila (Nexta) are declared “extremists” and put on a wanted list. The personal data of Petitions.by users is leaked. The human rights organization Viasna that systematically collects data on detainments and political prisoners is continuously attacked (with Marfa Rabkova, the coordinator of Viasna’s volunteer service imprisoned since September 2020).

So far, relatively free and ubiquitous Internet access (84%) makes Belarus quite different from most comparably repressive regimes, which have low digitalization rates or separate their populaces from WWW by Firewall. Lack of information from those countries is bemoaned today but also taken for granted. What happens in Belarus is that it is still open for analysis to a great extent, at least via digital channels; and availability of that information is taken for granted too. It does not mean though, that this availability will remain there for long. As can be seen with what happened to TUT.BY on 18 May 2021 when the website was blocked, the office attacked, and employees were detained. The loss of this news organization is detrimental to the quality of information that one can get about Belarus (TUT.BY had 2 – 3 mln unique local visitors daily in a country of 9.4 mln). While international interest towards Belarus has grown considerably since summer 2020, the availability and reliability of empirical data about Belarusian life has drastically decreased. If fake data – or its absence – becomes the regime’s tool of gaslighting the population, then resistance could mean that everyone has to become a sociologist; interviewing and surveying. Deduction skills might be a basic expertise needed by local communities amidst epistemological blockade.