Ghost Unions of Belarus: Civil Resistance in the Shadows

The Resistance Hub

In the authoritarian shadows of Eastern Europe, where public dissent is outlawed and civil society crushed beneath the heel of the state, an invisible form of resistance endures. In Belarus—where mass protests once filled the streets and now silence reigns—resistance movements have shifted not to the hills or forests, but into the very machinery of the state itself: the railways, factories, and plants that keep the regime alive.

These new partisans don’t wear masks or carry signs. They don’t march. They don’t shout. Instead, they work slowly, quietly, and with deliberate inefficiency. They call themselves many things, but to those who observe them from afar, they are something new in the history of modern dissent: ghost unions.

The Broken Hope of 2020

The Belarusian presidential elections of August 2020 triggered the largest wave of public resistance in the country’s post-Soviet history. Massive, peaceful demonstrations surged across Minsk and other cities in response to what was widely seen as a fraudulent re-election of President Alexander Lukashenko. For weeks, citizens of all ages joined a diverse and largely nonviolent protest movement that called for free elections, the release of political prisoners, and the restoration of civil rights.

Workers played a pivotal role. Spontaneous walkouts erupted in key state-run enterprises such as the Minsk Tractor Works and BelAZ, the national truck manufacturer. For a regime that prided itself on centralized industrial control, this was a seismic shock.

But it didn’t last.

Within months, the Lukashenko regime unleashed a methodical crackdown. Riot police, internal security forces, and KGB agents arrested tens of thousands, tortured detainees, and dismantled opposition structures. Independent labor unions—previously allowed to exist on the margins—were labeled “extremist organizations,” their leaders imprisoned or exiled. The last remaining visible infrastructure of organized dissent was forced underground.

And underground it went.

What Is a Ghost Union?

A ghost union is not a formal institution. It has no building, banner, or spokesperson. It cannot call a strike, circulate a petition, or register with the state. In Belarus, all of those things are now crimes.

Instead, a ghost union is a network of individuals—usually coworkers—who coordinate informal resistance within their workplace. The term first emerged in Belarusian exile media following the dismantling of the Belarusian Independent Trade Union (BITU) and the REP Union in 2022. Although stripped of legal status, the movements did not dissolve. They changed shape.

Ghost unions utilize encrypted communication platforms, such as Telegram, Signal, or Wickr, to organize their actions. Members rely on pseudonyms, burner devices, and prearranged signals to avoid detection. Rather than large, disruptive strikes, they emphasize tactics designed to degrade output subtly: deliberate mistakes in paperwork, unhurried repairs, misrouted freight, extended sick leaves, and coordinated underperformance.

The goal isn’t to stop production, but to undermine it just enough to erode state capacity while avoiding retribution.

Tactical Resistance in the Workplace

Unlike political protest, workplace resistance is harder to police. It is difficult to distinguish deliberate sabotage from incompetence or fatigue, especially in aging post-Soviet industrial systems already prone to dysfunction.

Take the Belarusian Railway, one of the key state enterprises that became an early target of coordinated disruption. In late 2021 and early 2022, a covert group of rail workers and sympathetic IT professionals calling themselves the “Cyber Partisans” launched a series of digital and physical sabotage operations. They disabled signal systems, deleted routing data, and slowed troop movements amid reports that Belarusian rail infrastructure was being used to support Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

More quietly, anonymous rail workers began “losing” cargo, rerouting trains, and misapplying maintenance procedures. In March 2022, Lukashenko himself accused “terrorists” of damaging signaling cabinets and warned of “traitors within” the national workforce.

The regime responded with sweeping arrests and new counter-insurgency tools. Facial recognition systems were deployed in railyards. A new class of “economic extremism” was codified into law, criminalizing not only physical sabotage but also poor performance deemed ideologically motivated. Yet the ghost unions persisted.

Because their actions are incremental and decentralized, they are nearly impossible to eliminate. In one Minsk electrical plant, anonymous reports suggested that workers were intentionally overloading circuits and slowing distribution line diagnostics, contributing to recurring local outages. In a state fertilizer plant, timing errors in chemical inputs led to production losses blamed officially on “equipment aging” and “training gaps.”

But those inside know better. They call it тихий саботаж — quiet sabotage.

Lessons from History: From Solidarity to Silence

To understand ghost unions, one must look to their historical ancestors, not in Belarus, but in Poland.

In the early 1980s, Poland’s Solidarity movement operated under intense repression after the imposition of martial law. Its leaders were jailed. Its offices were shuttered. Yet in the shipyards and steel mills, workers continued to sabotage production, distribute underground newspapers, and coordinate walkouts via church networks and trusted peers. It was in this space—between public silence and private defiance—that real resistance lived.

Belarus’s ghost unions embody a similar doctrine: strategic patience, low-profile action, and cultural endurance.

They are not seeking the rapid collapse of the regime. They seek to drain its capacity to function. In authoritarian systems reliant on centralized production, even minor disruptions carry exponential consequences. A miscalibrated machine or a delayed shipment can ripple through the chain of control, forcing costly inspections and drawing resources into internal security rather than state development.

It is a war of attrition, not ideology.

The State Strikes Back

Lukashenko’s regime has responded with innovations of its own. Internal workplace informants—sometimes incentivized with bonuses or pardons—have become common. Workers are required to sign loyalty statements. New surveillance tools have been deployed, including keyboard tracking software and proximity monitors. Factories are routinely visited by OMON officers posing as safety inspectors.

The state also benefits from deep support from Russia. FSB advisors reportedly assist in counterintelligence operations, while economic aid allows Minsk to replace resistant workers with short-term contractors. In 2023, Lukashenko publicly stated that “subversive activity by the West through our labor collectives has failed”—a sign, perhaps, of how deeply he fears it.

Yet repression cannot fully extinguish economic resistance. In many cases, the more aggressive the state becomes, the more quietly determined its workers grow.

The Role of the Diaspora

With so many union leaders in exile, the Belarusian diaspora plays a critical role in sustaining ghost unions. From Lithuania, Poland, and beyond, former activists coordinate media campaigns, transmit encrypted updates, and gather testimony from inside Belarus.

Organizations like BYSOL (Belarus Solidarity Foundation) and the Coordination Council for the Belarusian Opposition fund families of repressed workers, maintain secure communication channels, and issue international reports documenting labor-based resistance.

In 2024, an exiled rail worker published a digital manual titled “Sabotage Without Sound,” circulated via encrypted links and QR codes. It outlined over 30 tactics for degrading production without leaving evidence, ranging from software delays to documentation confusion, all cloaked in plausible deniability.

International unions and watchdogs, such as the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) and Human Rights Watch, have issued multiple condemnations of Belarus’s crackdown on organized labor, although with little effect on state behavior.

Still, visibility matters. The more the world recognizes ghost unions as legitimate actors of civil resistance, not just internal dissidents or “malcontents,” the more they can leverage external moral and material support.

The Strategic Value of Invisible Resistance

For analysts and practitioners of irregular warfare and resistance doctrine, Belarus’s ghost unions offer an important case study in strategic invisibility.

Their actions:

• Avoid frontal confrontation
• Deny legitimacy without escalation
• Sustain networks without mass mobilization
• Degrade regime capacity with minimal footprint

This model is particularly valuable in repressive regimes with high surveillance capabilities. Where marches are suicidal and strikes are suicidal, ghost unions offer a third path: constant, undetectable friction.

They also illustrate the utility of economic sabotage as a form of resistance. When done with care, such tactics can wear down an authoritarian system’s legitimacy and operational capacity without triggering violent reprisals or international condemnation.

As future resistance movements emerge in post-Soviet or similarly repressive environments, the Belarusian model may well become a foundational reference.

Conclusion: The Revolution That Stayed to Work

Not all resistance waves end in victory—or in visible martyrdom. Some are forced underground, not into dormancy, but into evolution.

In Belarus, the revolutionaries didn’t disappear. They returned to work.

But they brought resistance with them—into the steel presses, the switchboards, the circuit rooms, and the HR offices. Into the time clocks and the supply orders. Into the routines that keep the regime alive.

The ghost unions of Belarus may never appear in the headlines. But they are there. Working less. Working slower. Refusing, in silence.

And sometimes, that’s all it takes to keep the flame alive.

References

• Belarus Solidarity Foundation (BYSOL). (2023). Support mechanisms for Belarusian civil resistance. Retrieved from https://bysol.org
• Belsat TV. (2022, October 14). Interview with Cyber Partisans: Disruption tactics and encrypted coordination [Video]. Belsat News. https://belsat.eu
• Belarusian Independent Trade Union. (2022). Final public statement before liquidation [Archived press release]. Retrieved from https://archive.bntu.org
• BYPOL. (2022–2024). Telegram communications and operational updates on Belarusian sabotage incidents [Telegram channel]. https://t.me/bypol
• Human Rights Watch. (2022, July 18). Belarus: Crackdown on labor unions. Retrieved from https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/07/18/belarus-crackdown-labor-unions
• International Trade Union Confederation. (2023). Survey of violations of trade union rights – Belarus. Brussels, Belgium: ITUC Publications. Retrieved from https://www.ituc-csi.org
• Sabotage Without Sound. (2024). An anonymous manual for economic resistance under authoritarian regimes [PDF manuscript, distributed via secure channel]. Archived by author.
• Viasna Human Rights Centre. (2023). Annual report on political repression in Belarus. Retrieved from https://spring96.org/en/news