Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, and Belarus, three personalist dictatorships, took striking and unique paths in fighting the Covid-19 pandemic which largely reflected the leaders’ personalities and types of political regimes.
In his brief, Yury Terekhov argues that no universal approach to the healthcare crisis took place among the post-Soviet authoritarian states. While most used the pandemic as a pretext to silence critical voices and limit public discontent, Russia, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, and Uzbekistan generally followed the preventive measures recommended by the World Health Organization. At the same time, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, and Belarus prioritised the political survival of their leaders above all other considerations. The brief reviews their inconsistent policies and discusses their implications on propaganda-inflated public trust in state authorities.
Read brief research paper “The varied approaches of authoritarian post-Soviet countries to the coronavirus pandemic”
