Belarus Pt 3
It finally ends in this part.
For Part 1 go here, for Part 2, go here. For Part 3, scroll downwards.
In total, we spent 5 days and 4 nights in Minsk before heading towards Poland via Brest. A typical day involved getting a bus or the underground into Central Minsk and walking for several hours. A common theme in Belarus is that buildings serving comparatively mundane but essential functions have been designed to last and to serve a population that never really grew to the scale expected. Just like the trains, boulevards, roads and juice aisles, these buildings are therefore monumental — often with pillars, ornamentation and pride of place. It is as though the city is designed to emphasise the insignificance of the individual (which has been speculated to be among Stalin’s motivations in specifying the architectural style of such cities) and the immovability of the institutions of the state. For instance, we saw:
- The circus, unusually for a European city, has its own permanent building (the performance we saw comprised stoned lions, tragically inept acrobats jumping very close to pointy things, dogs molesting donkeys and other uneasy scenes). Go to see the incredible statues surrounding.
- The Post Office, which looks more like a court house
- The Library, which looks more like an invading spacecraft (more on this later)
A note too on Belarusian roads. If there is a button for a pedestrian crossing, once pressed it takes immediate effect causing traffic to screech to an instant stop in terrifying obedience. This becomes more terrifying still after midnight, as streetlights are turned off in many cities to save money. Where there were no buttons (these appear to be a recent innovation) it was common to see tens of people standing at crossings waiting for traffic lights to change — often despite the total absence of any cars whatsoever; here, pedestrians are completely and utterly subservient to the whims of the green cross code.
Anastasia
Our most resilient guide and fast friend was a student called Anastasia, who was a cultural insider having grown up in Belarus, but maintained an uncommonly liberal, open attitude. Unlike other Belarusians, Anastasia did not wear what is known as “the mask” — a phenomenon of facial indifference to strangers that prevails and disheartens foreigners who do not realise it is only an outward display, rather than characterising actual attitudes (in fact, whenever we asked for help people generally went much further to help us than was generally necessary — often translating for us, accompanying us when directions were not clear or advocating to officials on our behalf).
The Belarusian contraction of Anastasia is pronounced “Nice-to”, a charming nickname that is unfortunately most frequently written in English as “Nasty”. Anastasia, being fluent in English therefore preferred to go by the full name. She grew up outside of Minsk, moving there to study languages, and went to school in a building that was originally a monastery, then the headquarters of the gestapo. The first night we met her, she took us for dinner and wine at a restaurant that signified an optimistic future for young people in Belarus — it had been opened by a student who had managed to secure a loan to do so, and enjoyed sufficient success to open a second venue.
The second time we met her, we came to see her at the language /linguistics University where she was studying. It was apparent from just a few minutes in the foyer that it was attended almost entirely by women — with a spattering of small squads of startled-looking boys in suits. These squads, we were informed, were largely composed of Turkmeni students. Turkmenistan, also being a dictatorship, seems to have a close relationship with Belarus, with a highly subscribed student exchange between the two countries. There are clear cultural differences between the countries including, in the case of Turkmenistan, a more conservative Central Asian / Islamic attitude toward women. The result (anecdotally) is to drive the visiting students into a state of ecstatic stalking — approaching women in a way that is censured in their own country.
Anastasia was our main window of insight into Belarus. People are generally nervous to criticise the state. Our more precocious hosts and tour guides would get slightly weird looks from their companions if ever they said something against the state. However, one theme that came up repeatedly is the idea of “stability”, a term often used as a thinly veiled euphemism for the lack of progress by Belarus as a country and the widely shared opinion that it is being overtaken by the rest of the world: a gargantuan, concretised fossil, too weighty and solid to move forward rapidly.
The sense of stasis is reinforced by the fact that there is virtually no domestic opposition and all serious opposition lives abroad. Any association with the opposition is known to make it (even more) difficult to get a job here as most jobs are government jobs. Going beyond support (attending opposition meetings, for instance) could mean fines, jail terms or, at its most sinister, a stint in a mental asylum. You would be quite literally crazy to support the opposition. We also heard a story of a man being arrested for clapping. This was during a time when protestors would gather to applaud the country’s dictator sarcastically. Many people were arrested for clapping at this time, but the gentleman we were told about was remarkable for being arrested despite only having one hand.
The ambivalence towards the state does not seem to be a result of mere fear. Rather, the state creates and owns everything and is therefore both to blame and to thank for everything. One of the slightly more surprisingly revelations for me was that the vast majority of housing is state-owned and state controlled. I was therefore shocked to hear that in many places, monthly salary was equal to monthly rent — something quite obviously avoidable if you both control salaries and rents. This forces families to live together to save. They also take centralisation so seriously that central heating in apartment blocks is controlled centrally, beyond meddling from residents (and it’s always on — in every place we stayed they had the windows open to deal with this).
Beyond this, we were told again and again that you really don’t notice the absence of political freedom on a daily basis. It is true that it is difficult to see things that stay very, very still.
One of our first questions was why so many of the young, progressive and bright people we met chose to stay in Belarus. One contributing factor is that whilst University education is free, if you take the state scholarship you are stuck for a 5 year undergraduate degree and cannot leave the country until you have completed 2 years of work. Most graduates therefore do not have the option to leave until they are at least 25 years old, by which time they are relatively settled. Add into consideration restrictive visa rules in the nations surrounding you (even Belgium) and knowledge of the fact that — outside of your country’s ebullient record on tractor production — foreigners will know little about your country’s proud culture: leaving is not the kindest of propositions[1]. On this topic, it’s also worth pointing out that Belarusians do not consider themselves Eastern Europeans — they do not consider themselves European at all. Despite this, we were told repeatedly (as if according to a script) that Minsk is the centre of Europe according to Belarusian scientists.
Anastasia, like others we had met, was excited to take us to go on the roof of the library — something we were also excited to do.
Belarus has its own language — “Belarusian” — which is actually relatively similar to Ukrainian in origin. However, most ordinary Belarusians speak Russian. This is mainly to do with the fact that Lukashenko is a puppet leader controlled by Putin, but it is also partly because it is well known that the (outlawed) opposition all speak Belarusian. All people who speak Belarusian are therefore opposition. All frogs are green, therefore all green things are frogs.
Despite largely adopting Russian, the Belarusians do actually have their own letter, which in turn has its own modern art gallery (pictured below), full size concrete monument, line of men’s and women’s fragrances and feature-length sci-fi epic.
If you ask Belarusians about the main difference between the Russian spoken in Belarus and Russian, they will reply “Why.” You will rephrase the question — “in what way is Belarusian Russian a distinct language from the language spoken in Russia?” They will reply “Why.” All along, they were really saying “Ў”. This letter is the only letter in the Belarusian alphabet that is distinct from Russian, and Belarusian Russian is the only language in the world that uses it. Ў (u nieskladovaje or “Short U” to her close friends and associates) was born in 1870, daughter of P.A. Bessonov, but did not achieve critical acclaim until the mid 1950s, due to technical difficulties, and until that date suffered obscurity and was frequently mistaken for the garden variety “U”. Often remarked upon as the most useful sonorant bilabial fricative consonant, Ў is pronounced as the ‘w’ in the English word “cow” and for this reason has taken on the motto “EU, you heard us”.
Our final day in Minsk was a low point. Exhausted, we did not really leave the flat. We had been sleeping about 5 hours a night and the bulk of each day walking and meeting people. It was freezing cold, rained frequently and we struggled to eat regularly owing the scarcity of restaurants and the fact we only had access to our hosts’ flats in the evenings. So, on the final day we dosed and read, speaking very little. We made one half-hearted sally to the supermarket, almost failing to find our way back in the end.
Our next move was to Brest, a small city in the extreme South West of the country. We caught the train uneventfully, but Fergus took ill and we altered our schedule, staying in a hostel instead of with a host. Whilst Fergus recovered, I met Aleh in a café, before beginning our tour. He took me directly to Brest’s main cultural attraction, a monument to Belarus’ defense against the Nazis, during which they fought to the last man, being picked off individually by snipers as they went for water.
The main element of the memorial is a gargantuan figure of the upper body of a soldier that was infamously ranked by CNN as the ugliest memorial in the world. Whilst any such ranking is clearly ineffably irreverent, the CNN article reminded me of this Kurt Vonnegut quote: “Perhaps, when we remember wars, we should take off our clothes and paint ourselves blue and go on all fours all day long and grunt like pigs. That would surely be more appropriate than noble oratory and shows of flags and well-oiled guns.”
After exploring the ruins surrounding the fort in the pitch black we caught a bus back to Aleh’s place. The bus was a Ford Transit van that was approximately 25% over capacity and entirely filled with over-friendly old ladies: the driver takes and counts payment whilst driving, which is made all the more challenging by the fact that each passenger paid with an enormous wad of bedraggled, grey looking currency, often flinging it towards the feckless geronto-transport captain in a puff of putrid bills.
Aleh introduced me to his friends: we ate together, drank a brick of Chinese tea and talked about a headphone company he had been developing.
For our final leg, we had originally planned to get a train, but ended up getting a bus, which took us some 15 hours. When we finally arrived in Warsaw, we were reminded what it was like to live in the West. The bleak expanses of empty pavement were replaced by Warsaw’s bustle — Christmas lights, fairs, and entertainment thrived across every avenue. We had choices as to where to eat. We had choices as to where to stay. Shop owners smiled back when greeted. Some menus had vegetarian options. There were shopping centres. People spoke English to us. There were no tractors and we no longer felt as though we were being followed. The greatest revelation was how quickly we had normalised to Mink’s desolation. A sombreness we hadn’t noticed lifted and we felt like exploring — like talking to other humans. The spirit of Neo-Liberalism is alive in Warsaw, and humanity is happier there.
[1] Having said that, the fluid border between Belarus and Russia does open up opportunities in that direction. Moreover, we met quite a few Belarusians who had made the trip across into Germany.
