All quiet on the Eastern Front

[Lenin McCarthy]

Subtitle: Fear and lots of unjustified paranoia in Belarus - a bunch of impressions from a short stay in Lukachenkoland,

(Quickly scribbled down a few months after the actual trip.)

Other than the sounds of the profoundly weird Latvian language, the flight from Oslo to Riga was quite normal, like any regular European international flight really. The continuing flight from Riga to Minsk less so. The language switched to Russian, the aircraft was much smaller. We flew, shakily, over the misty woodlands of the former Soviet Union. There were us, two Swedes and about fifty others, fifty filthy Russian-speaking others.

We landed at what looked like the lair of a 70s James Bond villain. Some of the passengers got their luggage practically straight out of the aircraft, but we had already entered the shuttle bus to the arrival hall when we noticed our bags. Panic. We're in Belarus, and I think we just lost our luggage.
We walked up one anonymous, nearly unmarked stair to the right, bought the mandatory state health insurance, filed our visa applications and after a short wait, they gave us our visas and we could continue out of the airport. To our great relief we found the bags at the luggage belt.
Minsk-2 airport was gloomy and unfriendly, but in an indifferent sort of way. And unlike at JFK, there are no queues or cops everywhere with guns in their belts.
Few questions were asked and nobody ever got confrontational toward us.
We were relieved and slightly discomforted when we finally got out.

The two Swedish men on the plane seemed to be diplomats, but they bought health insurance and went through a similar visa procedure to us. Why? Well, in July a Swedish PR firm dropped a bunch of parachuted teddy bears carrying pro-democracy flyers from a plane over Belarus. Soon after, President Lukachenko fired a bunch of leading government officials for not bombing the hell out of those bears, and cut off all diplomatic relations with Sweden. The embassies on both sides are still closed.

Coming out of customs, we were met by a man who held a sign with my name on it. That's probably them, we thought, and got into his car. Then I got a text saying "Where are you guys? We're still waiting for you at the airport!". Panic #2. Where the fuck were we going now? To a secret KGB detention facility? Brother Leader Lukachenko's GULAG camps?
The hotel, apparently. The people in The Organization back in Norway had booked a hotel with an airport transfer voucher included, but failed to notify The Belarusians, who had to wait at the airport for no reason at all.

Minsk is a Stalinist masterpiece dotted with adverts for Lays Chips and McDonalds. The outskirts of the city are grim, grey and misty, with endless rows of identical numbered apartment blocks, in one of which Lee Harvey Oswald once lived. The city center is stunning. The parks are beautiful. The Palace of the Republic and the KGB HQ simply screams "WE ARE THE STATE. DON'T DARE FUCK WITH US." There's armed police and soldiers everywhere, so avoiding taking pictures seemed like a good idea to us.
The hotel was supposedly a high quality hotel back in the early 90s when there was still hope that Belarus would open up to the world, but was quite mediocre now. At the breakfast buffet "mixed vegetables" meant cucumber and tomato and "fruit" meant oranges. The import beer seemed watered out. The hotel room may or may not have been wiretapped, we decided to assume it was.
Belarus put us on the defensive, made us search for familiarity. We found a coffee bar that had some nice coffee and English language magazines in it. That helped. We also found several McDonaldses. Nobody spoke English there, but even with everything written in Cyrillic script it isn't that hard to order a Big Mac with Coke and kartoffelfry-something.

Our first morning in this new exciting country, we were picked up by the Opposition Activists. They were a bunch of friendly and trendy people (all in their 20s probably) who drove us to a small town an hour and a half drive away from Minsk. We listened to the Opposition Activists speak in Russian to a bunch of high schoolers who had come chasing rumors of a free lunch. Some of the speeches were translated for us, the essence seemed to be: "Hey, you can actually do something! You can make great culture an start an innovative new business! You have to get out of the old Soviet mentality of expecting free stuff for nothing." I noticed a slide with an angry, red smiley face accompanied by Marx and Lenin quotes, and then another slide with a green, happy smiley face and Ayn Rand and Von Mises quotes. UGH. LIBERTARIANS!?! How sad. I felt my enthusiasm about this project decrease a bit. Later I found out that they were not all libertards, luckily, but a broad coalition of "liberal" people, from center-left to hard minarchist. There are probably Ayn Rand quotes who are useful if you want to promote individualism in a society that sorely needs it, anyway. The kids who asked the "best questions" won a free lunch with the cool and trendy Opposition Activists.

Tom Friedman would have loved what happened next. The Opposition Activists spoke English with varying degress of success. Of the local kids, only one spoke English. Andrey had just spent the last 7 years or so in Greece. Because of his rusty Russian he didn't win the free lunch, but they let him sit with us during the lunch so we could talk. It was a fascinating conversation.
He preferred Greece to Belarus thousandfold. Andrey wanted to return there to study after graduating from high school. He was oblivious about Golden Dawn and said the protests there were just by lazy unemployed people. To him, Belarus was a vastly greater shithole. "Everybody hates the President, everybody's just drinking and drinking and drinking, and they have no hope at all for the future." He looked forward to returning to Greece, to somewhere where the world was flatter.

I don't know exactly how I feel about providing support to politically toothless libertarians, even in a grim dictatorship. At least the fact that they're politically toothless made it easier to get in and out, and enables them to be friendly, welcoming people. The other, vaguely left-or-center-or-something-liberal group The Organization cooperates with is insanely paranoid, full of infighting and secret police informants. But in this case, it seems my paranoia was completely unjustified, mostly because I went to Belarus to meet harmless people who do harmless, rather unproductive things. Belarus is still the worst dictatorship in Europe, but they don't arrest useless foreign political tourists for nothing. To conclude: This was fun and interesting for me, but it also seems pretty pointless in the broader struggle to bring Democracy^TM and Freedom^TM to Belarus.