“Fair elections. A tribunal. Freedom for political prisoners” reads this banner during protests in Minsk, Belarus, August 16, 2020. Photo CC-BY-SA-3.0: Homoatrox / Wikimedia Commons. Some rights reserved. Belarus today is a state in turmoil. Courageous protestors face off against a brutalising security apparatus that has sided with the country’s longstanding leader, Alyaksandr Lukashenka. This crackdown comes after mass protests which have bought hundreds of thousands to the streets, enraged at plausible accounts of fraud in the presidential elections of August 9. To some, Belarus is now under “occupation” by a dictatorial regime that has no popular support. To others, Belarus is being undermined by plots from the United States. Beyond these charged claims is a more complex reality of a country divided on many levels even before recent events. A sense of these divisions is evident from a nationally representative survey we conducted in Belarus at the outset of this turbulent year. Our survey in January 2020 was part of a large project that examines the geopolitical orientations of people in the countries and de facto territories on the borders of Russia. It is motivated by the evidence that different trajectories are reshaping post-Soviet space – with strong support for more integration with the Western institutions in Ukraine and Georgia but continued close ties to Russia in the other polities. Belarus is especially interesting because its close economic and political-military ties to Russia have weakened in the past 10 years. But Belarus has also posed a headache to researchers due to the difficulty of garnering reliable data about domestic politics, especially about the actual level of support for President Lukashenka. Regional experts, including at the Russian International Affairs Council (RIAC), have offered estimates. In our national survey, we calculated Lukashenka’s approval at 26 percent in a list experiment that collects reliable responses, a figure that is close to other estimates. Our representative national survey of 1,209 responses was conducted by an established and reputable survey company in Belarus, under our supervision and with the consultation and computer support of external survey experts for sampling design and tablet programming. We are not identifying the polling agency here out of caution given the current repressive situation in Belarus. Our procedures followed the best survey practices in random sampling of the population for face-to-face interviews. The results that we show here are the answers weighted to take into account the slight differences between the most recent population data and the numbers in our survey across regional and demographic groups. Given the regime restrictions on face-to-face polling, we believe that these data are the best available and importantly, they show the societal divisions that underlie the recent protests against the Lukashenka presidency. Foremost among these divides is a huge generational rift between those who became adults during the Soviet period and those born after 1990. The highly improbable scenario of Lukashenka winning 80 percent in the August election is undermined by our survey data. The events of summer 2020 probably reduced his support even more than the low rate that we already saw in January. As he continued his almost 30 year presidency of static policy, his society was changing irrevocably without him. His supporters in the older age categories (over 60) declined over time so that by the 2009 Belarusian census they were outnumbered (3.5 million to 2 million) by those under 45. As the graphs below reveal, younger Belarusians (45 or younger) differ dramatically in political outlook from their elders. A significant divide concerns views about the Soviet system (Graph 1). Young voters (those aged 30 or younger) are three times more likely to approve of the collapse of the Soviet Union that those aged over 60. While the Soviet system was deeply flawed and repressive, for many it provided social stability and a certain minimum of social welfare provision that older voters now recall with nostalgia. We have seen this demographic pattern in dozens of surveys that we have conducted over the past 25 years across the post-Soviet space, but the gaps across the generations in Belarus in 2020 are among the largest. Although Belarus has not seen the scale of dislocation of jobs and material prospects evident elsewhere, the stagnation of the past three decades has nonetheless produced a sense among younger generations that they have been left behind. Graph 1 A simple but powerful question asks about “the general direction of the country” and respondents are offered a stark choice – in the right or wrong direction.