In What is Now Belarus

Several years ago there was an exhibition of Russian art at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. It spanned the entire length of Russian history and took up the entire main hall of the museum. I remember they had this one exhibit called "The Man Who Flew Into Space". It told the story of a man who'd built a device and propelled himself into space. The artist, Ilya Kabakov, 'recreated' the man's tiny Russian apartment, its walls covered with Soviet propaganda posters and sketches of space device, an impossibly simple spring-loaded slingshot which you see suspended from the ceiling. Shards of drywall are strewn about the room and there's a hole in the ceiling through which where the man presumably exited on his way to space. I took the whole piece to represent the lengths that this man would go to escape the Soviet Union, outer space being the ultimate free space (ironic that the Soviets pioneered it).

The only reason I mention this is because I noticed that Minskovites have a fascination with spaceflight, 1960s style, and also happen to live in what is often called 'the last dictatorship in Europe'. Coincidence? I won't overplay my hand; I'm basing this entirely off the preponderance of space-themed nightclubs (escape via euro-trash?) and my hotel, the 'Orbita', an escape for any Belorussian woman who managed to pick up a foreigner there (I spent an hour talking to an Australian and his not-quite-mailorder bride). But my point is not that Minskovites love spacetravel more than potatoes (impossible, I think), but that because they have the bare necessities of life, and do not face anything like the Great Terror of the 1930s, Belorussians' perceive their lack of freedom as irksome and boring more than oppressive. The four Belorussians I talked with in any depth freely criticized Lukashenko's regime and the command economy and speculated on the future. My cab driver to the train station complained that his wife would be lucky to make $300/month as a secretary, but between the two of them they would get by. A local museum director couldn't find the words (in Russian or English) to describe how frustrating it was to get through the red tape so that she could add an addition onto her museum. Everybody else seemed to be buckling down, waiting out the Lukashenko regime in the hope of better days. Irked and bored people don't overthrow governments. It will have to get a lot worse before things change.