Politics & Power Quote by Svetlana Tikhanovskaya

Tikhanovskaya’s line is engineered to reroute anger away from an external enemy and back toward the basic terms of domestic life. “Not against Russia, not against any nation” is less naïveté than defensive judo: in a region where regimes justify repression by pointing to foreign plots, she refuses to hand Lukashenko (and the Kremlin) the convenient story of a Western-backed insurgency. The repetition works like a courtroom objection sustained twice. No, not that. Not that either.

Then she lands on the deceptively soft target: “a normal country.” It’s a phrase that sounds almost apolitical, which is precisely the point. “Normal” is the anti-ideology: fair elections, courts that aren’t theater, police who don’t function as a private army, a passport that doesn’t feel like a trap. By choosing normalcy over nationalism, she expands the coalition. You don’t have to be a romantic revolutionary to want a life without fear; you just have to be tired.

The subtext is also strategic humility. She’s not promising a utopia, a grand civilizational mission, or revenge. She’s promising a baseline. That keeps the moral high ground while acknowledging the Belarusian protest movement’s core reality: it was sparked by electoral theft and brutalization, not by a desire to pick a geopolitical side.

Context sharpens the urgency. After 2020’s contested election and crackdown, Belarus became a warning label for what “stability” can cost. Tikhanovskaya’s framing turns politics into a question of human permission: the right “to live,” not merely to vote. That’s hard to smear, and even harder to ignore.