At the end of 2005, when I opted to come here to Minsk to run a course, little did I know that similar assignments in Zurich, Paris, Palma and Palermo would end up being given to colleagues. I felt I’d drawn the short straw. As I was being driven into the city under an overcast sky, I saw nothing in the endless concrete blocks to change my mind. The Director of the school here told me that the architecture was “Stalin-style” and that people loved the city despite the lack of historic buildings – it was completely flattened at the end of WW2, which is known here as the Great Patriotic War, a period in which every fourth citizen died. I struggled for something cheerful to say about the look of the place, and failed.
I stepped out of the car into a clearing in the forest of tower blocks, like in a scene from Eraserhead. They have patchwork surfaces with damp stains. Between them is untended, overgrown grass and dandelions, criss-crossed by broken paths. My heart sank, and a rook squawked as if to mock my discomfort. I was determined not to show any sign of well-heeled squeamishness at the chipped walls, smelly lift and dark old-fashioned decoration of the flat I was ushered into. But all these things rolled together into one thought: Belarus is grim. Then it rained for three days straight.
This is the land the USSR never left – well, except for a 4-year sniff of freedom in the early ‘90s. Travelling round the city, I feel as if in I’m in a looking-glass alternative reality. This is the world I left a few days ago, but everything is a bit different. Women are sweeping the streets spotlessly clean. There’s a distinct lack of bars, and advertising. Billboards have patriotic propaganda posters. There is no graffiti, except “Eminem” scrawled tentatively in a lift. Service in state-run shops is reluctant at best. And every fourth man – surely it can’t be true – is a policeman. The cops, bastard-looking in those huge circular Soviet caps, are everywhere. They throw their weight around, for example by stopping their cars by jaywalkers and yelling four-(Cyrillic)-letter words at them through loudspeakers.
As a foreigner, you feel that people will suspect you of something, though they turn out to be – mostly – very friendly, apart from one instance where I got abuse from a drunk guy on a tram. (My Russian didn’t allow me to interpret his exact words, thankfully.)
I never mention politics, then discover to my surprise that people do it quite freely. Just like at home in “my” world, everyone hates the President. Here, it’s a crime. Yet people are not completely unhappy with the status quo – they certainly prefer this to being overrun by Russian gangsters. My friend asks me what is the difference, anyway, between Mr Lukashenko wielding his might in this restricted sphere, and Bush & Blair doing it globally. You can watch Euro News and access the internet freely (although there are rumours that the government has approached China about buying technology that would prevent this). In the parliament canteen, apparently, members sit round drinking gallons of vodka before going to provide their rubber stamps. And below the main building are nine subterranean levels…
If there was no sex in the USSR, it’s unstoppable in this remnant of the old Empire. Or maybe it was just me, in the heatwave that began a few days later, feeling all charged up with the sun high, high in June. I just couldn’t help noticing that this city is full of great looking women – everywhere. And I couldn’t help looking at them, squeezed together on the trams, hanging out by the fountains in the park during the long summer evenings, waiting in the marble halls of the metro, click-clacking up and down corridors in their thin high heels – which are de rigeur here. Typically, thery’re dyed blondes in tight white trousers that show everything, or tight denim skirts. I guess it’s enjoyable, and makes a clear break with the past, because the regime hasn’t banned this kind of self-expression. All these women are unavailable, though; it’s in the culture here to get married at 17 or 18, certainly before 25. I was told the women make themselves look stunning so that they can keep their men.
“Why do you eat so many vegetables?” asked one of the pretty adminsirators at the language school as she pored over my salad. “Because they’re good.” Probably getting rid of free radicals and all that. On second thoughts, these ones probably won’t! Since my arrival, I’ve learned that Belarus was the worst affected country following Chernobyl, 20 years ago. A whole area of the southern part is off-limits as far as agricultural produce is concerned, and there are villages where after forced evacuation, only the very old have returned to live out their last years. Tragically, young people who grew up in the affected area develop not-so-mysterious cancers; there are thousands of deaths every year, still. Vegetable stalls can be visited by radiation inspectors, and you normally take your Geiger counter with you if you go to pick mushrooms in the forest. I was told I should cut tomatoes and mushrooms in a special way to remove potentially radioactive bits, and not eat the insides of carrots.
Waking up on another sunny morning, I watched a woman cutting the edges of the green areas in front of my block – she is attentive and keeps at it. She doesn’t look ashamed or impatient. I get the feeling – just sentimental, perhaps - that this kind of work is still valued here, by everyone. Money has not (yet) become the sole arbiter of value, except among the young.
There’s no copyright law. So you can pick up MP3 disks with hundreds of songs for $3 each. One stall-owner found it hard to believe that it would be an offence in the West to sell them, and that the police have the power to get information from ISPs and arrest people for downloading music. “And it’s supposed to be a democracy!” he laughed.
There are more obvious good things about a planned society– everyone has a flat or, at least, each family has access to one or two, which doesn’t amount to the same thing. Maybe people don’t take the same pride in them, but this has its benefits: People do not find endless fascination in talking about property prices and doing up property. There are no makeover shows! There is no homelessness at all, although young couples very often have to live with their parents. Everyone, it seems, has a little dacha in the country that they go to every weekend – rather than going shopping – to dig the allotment and swim in a lake. Babushkas return to the city with bundles of spring onions and other produce to sell on the streets.
Last weekend, I went into the country with a few of my trainees. We visited a rural life museum, which was once a real village, with pre-industrial wooden houses and barns full of old butter churns, sleighs, and handlooms. I’m told things are still like this in some places. I would like to say that I plunged into the lake nearby, but it was actually much more tentative because of the muddy bottom and alien podded underwater reeds to negotiate. Lots of young people were out doing the same thing – and I noticed there were a lot of nice cars parked nearby, and some very expensive-looking dachas being built too. (Formerly, there had been a size-limit.) It won’t be too long before aspirations to conspicuous wealth get the upper hand here, as everywhere else. Meanwhile, it’s been a privilege to have a glimpse of a different way of life.
