The Soviet Legacy of Social Mobility and Control in Belarus: Engineered Dependence as a Durable Authoritarian Resource

ABSTRACT This article reconceptualizes Soviet‐era modernization in Belarus as a system of “engineered dependence”: a state‐directed process in which industrialization, urbanization, and welfare provision were deliberately structured to bind individuals' life chances to political conformity. Drawing on Hirschman's exit‐voice‐loyalty framework and Bourdieu's concept of habitus, it demonstrates how mechanisms, such as industrial “total institutions,” managed housing scarcity, and linguistic Russification, eliminated exit options and internalized state paternalism across generations. The collapse of the USSR was an ideological rupture not an institutional one. Alexander Lukashenko's regime became custodian of this inherited apparatus, modernizing its tools through a pervasive short‐term contract system that renders public sector workers permanently insecure. The article integrates survey data and the author's original interviews with Belarusian teachers and post‐2020 migrants to illuminate how Belarusians navigate, accommodate and resist this dependency system. Although the 2020 protests revealed emergent fissures: generational change and the regime's deepening economic reliance on Russia, the case of Belarus offers a critical corrective to linear modernization theory, demonstrating how education, urbanization, and welfare can become pillars of authoritarian durability.