As we queued at customs, a young women turned round and said to us “Excuse me, although it’s none of my business, what are you doing in Minsk?” This was a question that we were to be asked by almost everyone we met including our guide Alexandr, senior diplomats at the UN, and the British Ambassador. What we couldn’t tell the young woman, there in immigration, surrounded by police, was that six months ago we’d all read an article entitled ‘Belarus: The Last Dictatorship in Europe’, and thought it sounded like a holiday.
Going to Belarus requires a lot of work. Belarus, in practical terms, is very difficult to get to. Of the people I told I was going to Minsk, six told me they had no idea where that was but asked “didn’t Phoebe's boyfriend in Friends go there?” This is seemingly Britain’s awareness of Belarus. No wonder. The complexity of getting a visa felt like we were planning an invasion. We were told completely the wrong information by both the embassy and our original hotel. We then changed hotels and got help from a professional tourist agency. However when I took my papers to the embassy everything was fine. When the others took theirs, they were told that the official invitation, (which cost 40€) was unnecessary. Every step just felt like another way of squeezing foreign currency out of you. Then when you’ve got your visa, actually travelling there becomes an issue. Our flight plan involved a 14 hour layover in Kiev airport. Our total journey time door-to-door was twenty two and a half hours.
But to us, the difficulty of getting to Belarus only added to the novelty of going to what we expected to be a grim, soviet dictatorship with nothing for tourists. We only began to have doubts about Belarus as a holiday destination, as Alexandr drove us through the centre of Minsk. In our exhausted minds it looked dirty, industrial and boring. Our guide proudly pointed out the sights as we drove by: “That is the factory where they make fridges. That there is our holocaust memorial, over there you can see the factory for making vodka.”
We arrived in the flat we’d be renting. It was entirely salmon pink, with the odd bit of 1950’s white furniture. It was also very small and hot. It felt like being in a very dry womb. Although only two stops out from the centre on the Metro, it felt like we were in the Belarusian equivalent of Tolworth. Our flat was in the middle of a large Soviet-built council estate. A rectangle of dirty, barely growing grass surrounded by squat, mismatching four storey buildings that were gradually wilting into themselves. Before we came we’d been warned that four days would be enough, but I had insisted we needed five. I was now beginning to regret this.
The next day we were taken for our first proper meal in Belarus. Our guide boasted that he could show us somewhere where you could get a whole meal for under a pound! This was not a lie, however the food was genuinely poisonous. Brown, viscous and sinisterly sweet. Beyond just the taste: the look of it and our wide-eyed nervousness of our new home created a plate of food that, to us, seemed actually menacing. We found out afterwards that it was the student canteen and we were actually sitting underneath the Belarusian State University. So maybe we shouldn’t have been surprised. However on the upside, the women running the place asked Alexandr if we were part of the England football team as she could think of no other reason there would be four English teenagers in Minsk.
After this we looked round their brand new World War Two memorial and museum. This seemed to confirm what we were waiting to find in ‘The Last Dictatorship in Europe’. All the text referred to “The triumphant effort of the Belarusian people”, “the heroism of the Belarusian Army” and “the courageous effort made by the People of Belarus’. The exhibition was manipulative and overwrought with nationalist pride, culminating in a large, well lit glass box containing the ashes and bone fragments of some of the one million Belarusian Jews who died in the death camps.
Afterwards we sat in the park that takes up most of the centre of Minsk, and wary of locals we talked quietly. Two of us went for a piss behind a tree with genuine fear of the consequences. At this point the locals seemed every bit as brainwashed as we had expected.
As we walked back, we saw on the marble steps of the 100 foot WW2 memorial that someone had written ‘WEED’ in fat black letters. In supposedly the last bastion of the Soviet Union, an oppressive military dictatorship, where the KGB still ruled the streets, a young person had had the audacious bravery to scrawl the word ‘WEED’ on a national war memorial. Where was this Winston Smith now? Arrested, tortured, executed? We could only guess. The fact that he existed at all baffled us.
There was good reason for our wariness. Belarus’s headlines are extraordinary. It can seem like as a country it is built on sand that is not only shifting, but collapsing into the sea like a Dover cliff. One fifth of Belarus is still heavily irradiated by the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. In affected areas there are enormously high cancer and birth defect rates. (We were warned not to eat any mushrooms, as they absorb radiation more than any other food.) Belarus is the only country in the world with a growing HIV population. Its also a global heroin hotspot. It also has one of the biggest people smuggling industries in the world. The daily health of its people is wondrous in its decrepitude. Belarus is the number one country for alcohol consumption per capita anywhere in the world. The men drink on average eighty litres of vodka a year. That is according to the official estimates, not taking into account illegal moonshine made in the woods, which is typically 60%alc. On average, Belarusian men die twelve years earlier than women. Their child mortality rate is one of the highest in Europe. There are half a million physically or mentally disabled people in Belarus, a country of just ten million. The disabled rights of Belarusians couldn’t be lower on the people's priority list. There are almost no institutions for the disabled. They are locked up in family apartments; unwanted weaklings in a country desperate to seem strong. They’re kept off the streets, out the public view. Parasites hanging onto the wings of an already dying, drunken bird. While we were in Minsk, we saw three physically disabled people, and no where we went to had any disabled access. Until a year ago even the UN offices didn’t have a disabled toilet.
Their politics is equally grim. The KGB is still active in Belarus; it still bugs apartments, makes secret arrests and tortures people. Belarus is the only country in Europe that still has the death penalty. Holding inmates on death row indefinitely until without any warning, shooting you in the back of the head and burying you in an unmarked grave. President Lukashenko has been in power since 1994. He rigs all the elections. In the last vote he ran against eight opposition. After the election they were all locked up on trumped up, falsified charges of tax evasion and such like. They now constitute all eight of Belarus’s political prisoners.
So it would be easy to generalise Belarus as a dying proto-soviet dictatorship. Contemptuous for the West and NATO, and happy in its partnership with Russia. Europe’s own North Korea-Lite. However Belarus is more than just Europe’s Hermit. There are elements which could almost be considered progressive and modern. Unlike Russia, who sees its natural resources as a big piggy bank to be plundered, Belarus uses theirs more like a savings account. They’re hugely reliant on their timber industry, however their forests have actually increased in size. They’re incredibly careful with conservation efforts.
Despite the fact that it has the second smallest tourist industry in Europe, we never ran out of interesting things to do. We rented a pedalo in the central river in Minsk. This was a considerable achievement as trying to ask ‘How much for half an hour? And can we rent life jackets please? And, how close to the weir can we paddle?’ in nothing but hand gestures is difficult. It was also enormously entertaining. The absurdity of four teenagers in caps, shorts and anoraks renting a pedalo in the centre of Minsk, surrounded on all sides by the most terrify mountainous soviet buildings, was hilarious to us. For that reason alone this stupid, difficult, uncomfortable and even slightly boring holiday was worth it. The lake was basically a pond made by blocking up a very dirty river. Half way across we noticed that the whole river was full of strange fish that swam right at the top of the surface so that almost their entire bodies were out the water. Even when we went very close to them in our pedalo they refused to dive. We wondered about whether they were tourists who had once fallen in, irradiating themselves and turning into three-eyed fish.
After all that pedalling we were hungry for a good burger so we went to Good Burger, the Belarusian Burger King who looks exactly like Burger King but for I’m assuming legal reasons is called Good Burger. We then wondered round the large shopping centre where it was based and found dozens of other shops that looked a lot like brands we recognised but weren’t actually them. We also noticed a surprising number of sushi restaurants, which Alexandr explained is very popular amongst young people. A strange and practically dangerous trend considering that Belarus is entirely landlocked. We also went to an enormous super market which was fantastic fun. We found tins of horse meat which are now paper weights on some of our desks back in England. Huge tanks of live dog sharks and eels. Next to these we found a huge aisle dedicated to pornographic CDs (not DVDs. CDs, as in just audio) with amusingly grim photos on the cover. Instead of Page 3, they have MP3, I thought smugly.
