BELARUS NEWS AND ANALYSIS

DATE:

Saturday October 1, 2005

Accidental tyranny

Belarus is one of the most repressive and bizarre regimes in Europe. But Tom Stoppard, on a recent trip to the capital, Minsk, found a thriving opposition and a hunger for art that challenges the 'national psychosis'

The Guardian

In a no-frills bar in an industrial quarter of Minsk, Sarah Kane's play 4.48 Psychosis is performed in Russian by two women moonlighting from the Belarusian National Theatre. The bar is a narrow room on the ground floor of a rundown office building next to an agricultural machinery plant. The playing area is so small, and the place is so packed, that when one of the actors lunges at the boundary my left shoulder takes the impact.

In the audience of 70 people, two or three cameras clack and flash, even when, finally, the actors are stripped to black thongs. There is no stage, no set. The play ends in candlelight.

watch me vanish
watch me

vanish

watch me

watch

It is myself I have never met, whose face is pasted on the underside of my mind

please open the curtains

The actors blow out their candles. The performance is over, and the lights beam on to the national psychosis that is the present condition of Belarus, a country with more policemen per capita than anywhere else in the world and a feeling that no one knows where it is.

The feeling is not completely fanciful. At a theatre conference in Belgrade this year, a young Belarusian playwright, Andrei Kureichik, was astonished to find that "very few of the Europeans I met even knew exactly where Belarus was situated, never mind [could make] any comment about Belarusian theatre".

Someone else I talked to, Andrei Sannikov, a former deputy foreign minister, who is now an active member of the dissident scene, said with a trace of bitterness, "We're not sexy."

Ukraine is sexy. Poland is sexy. Lithuania is sexy. Even Latvia is quite sexy. Belarus, landlocked between all of them and Russia, is not sexy. The Lonely Planet guidebook is brutal: "With no history whatsoever as a politically or economically independent entity, Belarus was one of the oddest products of the disintegration of the USSR."

This is a rubber-stamp "democratic republic", with the last collective farms, the last KGB, the last dissidents in the pre-1990 sense of the word, and - in President Alexander Lukashenko - the last dictator in Europe.

Belarus was already ill-starred. In 1986, the Chernobyl disaster next door in Ukraine contaminated the south of the country. A generation earlier, there was almost nothing left standing by the time the Soviet and Nazi armies had finished fighting over it. The war, the camps and Stalin's purges killed some five million Belarusians. Kureichik adds: "Of over two thousand writers, only a few dozen survived."

Psychosis is no doubt an overstatement of the confusion suggested by the received wisdom of four days in Minsk. But a love-hate fixation on Russia is in the mix. Lukashenko has spent years inconclusively bargaining Belarusian sovereignty with his eastern neighbour President Putin, who could extinguish Belarus like one of those candles in the theatre simply by turning off the oil and gas, or even by charging market rates for them. But Putin - so the wisdom goes - is happy to have an overt dictatorship taking the heat from the EU, especially now that he has "lost" Georgia and the Ukraine to pro-Europeans; politically, Belarus makes Russia look good.

Is this plausible? The argument goes round like a Mobius strip. Privatisation on the back of foreign investment would ease Lukashenko's dependence on Russian trade, but opening the place to entrepreneurs would undermine his control over the country, which is total.

The government-controlled media names Russia and the US, logically enough, as the main enemies of Belarus, but there is no doubt where Lukashenko's heart lies: one of the president's first acts was to bring back the Soviet version of the national flag and to demote the Belarusian language, which had been restored briefly as the official language of the new republic. So a closer union with Russia is pursued against a background of belligerent rhetoric and condescension. An actual merger between the two countries, with Lukashenko's vision of himself as a major player near the top of the pile, foundered on Putin's counter-vision of Lukashenko as a provincial governor.

For the two Belarusian playwrights who invited me here, Nikolai Khalezin and Natalia Koliada - husband and wife - a merger with Russia would be the worst thing that could happen, but it's the Russian theatre that has opened its doors to them, and to others like Kureichik, who in 2002 was the first Belarusian to win Russia's major play competition. He came back to Minsk and reported that Moscow was "like breathing fresh air". Within two years he had 17 Russian productions of his plays.

Nikolai's play I've Arrived also won prizes in Russia and has been optioned by the Moscow Art Theatre. He used much of the money to set up a "Free Theatre" event, of which 4.48 Psychosis is the first fruit. The main business is a series of master classes and a play-writing competition, which began in March and has attracted 231 plays by 123 writers from nine countries, including 30 Belarusian playwrights. The awards will be announced in three weeks.

The idea was born on the train back from Moscow. Natalia says, "We realised that Belarusian new writing was in a phenomenal period, and there was no hope for it at home."

As things are, there is certainly no hope for her new play, which is about six women, four of whom "lost their husbands", a tacit reference to the four "disappeared" whose fate has - more than anything else - made Lukashenko's regime a pariah. The four are often grouped together in news reports as "the journalist, the politicians and the businessman".

The journalist Dmitriy Zavadskiy was a young man who worked for the Belarusian affiliate of ORT, Russian public television. In July 2000, Zavadskiy was supposed to meet a colleague arriving at the airport. His car was found parked there. He hasn't been seen since.

The reason for his "disappearance", I was told, is that Zavadskiy was working on a story about the Belarusian special forces' presence in Chechnya on both sides. I had a friend with me, Arkady Ostrovsky, who reports for the Financial Times from Moscow and has pretty much covered the waterfront on Russian affairs. I saw Arkady blink and stare, and perhaps bite his tongue.

Zavadskiy was the latest of "the four" to disappear. General Yuri Zaharenko was abducted in May 1999. He had been dismissed as Minister of Internal Affairs when he fell out with Lukashenko. At that time, another senior politician, Victor Gonchar, launched a presidential election campaign. In July, Gonchar, who chaired the electoral commission, called time on the president in protest against Lukashenko's way with elections and referendums. In September, Gonchar was abducted and - unquestionably - murdered, along with his friend, the businessman Anatoly Krasovsky, who had been marked down for helping to finance the opposition to Lukashenko.

I met Krasovsky's wife Irina at a dinner party. It was exactly like being at a cheerful chatty dinner party in London where politics is the main topic, except that on this occasion Irina was explaining to me how she and her children lost a husband and a father.

Last year Irina, now remarried to an American, made a statement before the US House Committee on International Relations. She told me the story she must have told a hundred times - "Anatoly and Victor drove away in Anatoly's car, to go to the sauna. Anatoly asked me to come, but I decided to stay home. Later, witnesses told investigators what happened. Anatoly and Victor left the sauna and got into our car. Immediately after they turned the corner, a car cut them off. My husband tried to back up but he was cut off by a second car. The doors of our car lock automatically if you hit the brakes. So the people who jumped out of those two cars broke the windows and pulled out Anatoly and Victor. Traces of Victor's blood were found at the scene. They were put into separate cars and driven away. Our car, a Jeep, was later towed away by one of the squad."

Irina says she is certain the two men were killed within a day or two. The cherry-red Jeep was never found. According to "information", it was flattened by an armoured troop carrier and buried.

Natalia's play is not directly about the disappearances. It is about love in a country where lovers may disappear. Will the play ever be seen in Belarus - perhaps in a bar? Natalia says it would be impossible to find six actors willing to take the risk.

The owner of the bar was the only person in town willing to offer 4.48 Psychosis a space. The Belarusian National Theatre at first told the young director of 4.48 Psychosis, Vladimir Scherban, that his contract would not be renewed for next year, but then shied at the prospect of a "scandal". He ended up with a half-year contract, a pay cut and no chance of being given a production.

The actors, Olga Shantsina and Yana Rusakevich - the one blonde and svelte, the other dark and gamine with a motor that never idles - have become pals. They seem irrepressively upbeat despite the shadow that has fallen over them. Both have been reduced to the spear-carrying ranks. Rusakevich is the author of a play which she entered anonymously for a competition organised by the state theatre, with a production as the prize. Her play won, to the discomfiture of the administration. She was told a director could not be found for her play, whereupon Scherban said he'd direct it. At the run-through, the suits rejected the play for giving a "false picture" of Belarusian youth (eg drugs). However, the theatre's chief liked it and it played successfully in repertoire until 4.48 Psychosis. Then Rusakevich's play was pulled and the scenery destroyed.

The "Free Theatre" has had to face a ubiquitous fear of involvement. The first project, a master class for local playwrights, led by a distinguished Russian critic, was rescued by the Lithuanians, ie by their local equivalent of the British Council, who provided a room.

In my own case, Nikolai and Natalia decided it was safer to get out of town. My seminar was bussed an hour into the countryside to a repro "traditional village". So, in a setting of olde-worlde farm buildings, a working smithy, a pottery and a museumful of costumes and artefacts, we sat down to talk about making theatre.

I don't think I did too well. I must have said something about "the play of ideas". One of the older participants, a woman who in Soviet times had an "ideological" role, immediately said she didn't like the word idea - the communists had ruined it. Her own debut play, which (I'd been tipped off) was going to win the first-play award, was about how it felt to be "an emigrant in your own country". How things feel and how things are - that was the thing.

A young man put in: "I had 10 friends at school. Now only three are alive. The rest died from overdoses. Should I not write about it?" Later he said: "I am listening to you, and I feel there is a vast gulf between us. My mother is 51. My father is 52. They have never been abroad and probably never will. They live on 100 dollars a month. Everything they earn goes towards food. They don't go to the theatre or cinema. They have worked all their lives only to feed themselves and us children. I wanted to describe their life. When my mother read my play she told me she didn't like it, because she has enough darkness in her life. But I wanted to show her how bad her life was."

My take on this doesn't play well in Belarus: "Theatre is firstly a recreation, it doesn't score points for subject matter, for intention. If you write about your mother, you better be good. Isn't that the point?"

Not really.

Natalia says: "There are so many subjects forbidden, and the only place to talk about them is the underground theatre. It is hard for us to agree that theatre is just a recreation. Our society could die without realising that it was a nation."

I remember what she told me in a letter months before I came to Belarus, that the "Free Theatre" event was inspired by "the problem of self-identification in the era of globalisation". At the time it was a lumpy phrase which passed me by. The meaning is clear enough now - "Who are we?"

My little stock of Minsk vignettes doesn't measure up to the question. But my very first impression is worth remarking. My plane was packed with returning young Belarusians, and when I looked around in the baggage hall I saw that everyone - everyone - was good looking. It was as if I'd flown in on a models' charter. Belarusians are used to the compliment. Belo means white, and they are "White Russians", because - according to one theory anyway - centuries ago, the Mongols who had swept westwards rudely commingling with the locals, were frustrated when they got to the endless forests and swamps of this flat land, and the fair natives remained uncommingled.

Whatever the reason, the result is that when you're sitting with a cappuccino at a pavement table in the London Bar on Independence Prospect, you see more beautiful blondes going by in an hour than in the real London in a month, all of them dressed to crick the neck.

The bar itself is almost worth a detour to Minsk. It's tiny, but boasts a library in which every book is stamped "Milk and Coffee and Aero Kisses". Upstairs is a "living room" with a sofa. Needless to say, you can smoke.

Further along the boulevard outside another cafe-bar, I squeezed in among parents and children under a canopy, courtesy of Coca-Cola, to watch a student puppet show, which wittily used household objects to stand in for puppets. The music was a 78 rpm recording of "Underneath the Arches" by the Bert Ambrose Orchestra. Guillaume Apollinaire, who came from here, would have loved it.

I may be giving the impression that downtown Minsk is a bit like the Left Bank. It is not. Independence Prospect is as wide as a football pitch and flanked by monumental Stalinist architecture. There is no advertising in sight unless you count the golden arches of an opulent McDonald's. There is little traffic. The shops don't look like shops. At night in the floodlights, Independence Prospect looks like a deserted film set, dominated on one side by the vast yellow columned facade of the KGB. Until a few months ago, the street was named for Belarus's greatest son - not Kirk Douglas, who was born here, but the Renaissance scholar and printer Francis Skaryny. Lukashenko changed the name to Independence Prospect, which - alas - suits it better. It's a street built for victory parades.

There is no litter. None. One morning, waiting to be collected, I stood outside my hotel smoking a cigarette and watching the street cleaners with the kind of fascination a tourist would normally bestow on the leaning tower of Pisa. There were four of them within a hundred yards. They wore bright orange overalls. Each had a Cinderella broom and a long-handled dustpan. They patrolled their patch, eagle-eyed for - what? There didn't seem to be a toffee-paper the length and breadth of Independence Prospect. To all intents, they were dusting.

Then two middle-aged women in smart colourful overall coats came out of the hotel. Their hair was beautiful. One had blonde highlights, the other shone like the plumage of some deep red tropical bird. They looked as if they'd emerged from a beauty parlour, except that they were carrying a battered step-ladder, which they set up against the wall, chatting the while. Then they took turns to climb up and wipe the high sills of the windows. Job done, they went back in, the cleaning ladies of the Hotel Minsk.

I stepped on my cigarette-butt and put it in my pocket.

One of the sights I missed was the speeding convoy which several times a week crosses Independence Prospect on Lenin Street, taking the president to his ice hockey game at the Sports Palace. Unfortunately, the progress is not advertised.

Lukashenko is mad about hockey. When he wants a scratch game it's a three-line whip. Players - some pros, some businessmen, some guards - have been known to get up from sickbeds. The president wears a number "1" shirt. He has his own bench and no-one is allowed to talk to him. His team always wins, its victories uncelebrated in the closed arena.

It's a movie. Is it true? I'm assured the sources are reliable. Lukashenko stories abound, often accompanied by an amused shrug because the president, with his sad comedian's moustache, is perceived as a dangerous buffoon. (His previous job was manager of a collective farm, a kolkhoz, hence his put-down nickname kolkhoznik, roughly Farmer Giles.)

The moustache is everywhere in a fun-poking documentary film by Khashchavetskiy which travelled around Belarus like an underground fire. It is said that 140,000 VHS copies were made. Khashchavetskiy, a cheerful, rumpled personality too large for his crowded and cluttered workspace, showed me his film, which is not all fun. The documentary, An Ordinary President, was shown on television in Germany and France in December 1997. Two days later, Khashchavetskiy answered his doorbell and saw "two grey figures", who jumped him and beat him up. "When I came round, there was nobody in the flat. I was on the floor. My face was bleeding, my head was hurting, my leg was hurting. It turned out they broke my leg."

"When you were making the film you must have known you were sticking your head above the parapet ...?"

"I was just very interested in making it. It was an artistic itch. It was too good a story."

I have been here before, in Moscow, Leningrad and Prague, the visiting English writer on a dissident tour, nodding sympathetically while his patient host - another writer or film-maker - provides the coffee and obliges yet again with his story of injury, imprisonment, banning and the rest of it. However dressed down, I always feel overdressed.

And yet, it's not the same. Lukashenko's Belarus is not like Husak's Czechoslovakia, with which it is routinely bracketed by the dissidents. In some ways it is worse. Husak didn't resort to kidnapping his opponents in broad daylight and disposing of them like a Chicago gangster. He didn't have to; which is the point.

The communist state machinery worked in broad daylight, too, but that was because, in its own terms, it had nothing to hide. There were laws against "anti-state activity", with appropriate prison sentences. Small fry and minor irritants might find themselves unable to get a job. Not having a job meant you were a "parasite", and there was a law against that, too. In its cynically formalistic way, the whole communist tyranny was above board, contextualised in a historical supra-legalism. Rocking the boat was a defiance of "the leading role of the Party", so it was anti-state activity, QED. And the prison terms were long. A year or two was quite normal for parasites. Major irritants go much more.

But the Belarusian dictatorship has no monolithic party behind it to legitimise it. Lukashenko is a dictator without an ideology, only a business plan. (Sannikov calls it "an accidental dictatorship". The president, he says, hires and fires down to factory manager level, and imprisons at state company director level wherever he suspects conspiracy against his unchallenged rule.)

The effect is a form of dictatorship which I found - still find - puzzling. Who investigated the "disappearances"? None other than the KGB and the Prosecutor's Office, and the report, which leaked out, was no cover-up. Allegedly, it was the reason why four of the investigators died mysteriously. Two others sought political asylum in America.

So, on the one hand, there is "Lukashenko's death squad", a phrase one hears everywhere. On the other, there's the T-shirt with the faces of the four "disappeared" which Nikolai was wearing to meet me at the airport. There are other "dissident T-shirts", too, openly worn. A woman told me how she had been embraced by a stranger while wearing a T-shirt which said, "Lukashenko-free Zone". Belarus is different.

There is a Charter 97 organisation modelled on the Czech Charter 77, but the Belarus version has an office, a website and a press officer. The office of another organisation, Zubr (it means bison), is at a secret location but it has an e-mail address, a logo and a well-produced colour brochure in English. This is dissidence raised to another level, and there are several such groups whose remit is laid out in another colour-printed booklet. Irina Krasov-skaya's group is called "We Remember", with an office in Washington DC.

There is no doubting the bravery of the thousands of (mostly young) people who day after day publicly dissent from the one-man rule of Lukashenko. Almost everyone I met knows what it is to be arrested, detained and often roughed up, Nikolai and Natalia among them.

A good number, including Nikolai and Andrei Sannikov, have been recognised as prisoners of conscience by Amnesty International. Another is Dmitry Bondarenko, one of the Charter 97 founders, though no one is quite like this genial bear of a man, who has been through the police mill on occasions too numerous to detail. Zubr, with its stated principles of "non violence, solidarity and personal courage", has notched up over a hundred beatings and a couple of thousand detentions.

The brake on Lukashenko is applied in Strasbourg, where human-rights violations in Belarus are monitored and robustly condemned. EU visa bans have been imposed on Lukashenko and on named cronies implicated in skullduggery. As I read it, the resulting balance is that political opponents, like Mikhail Marinich - ex-minister, ex- ambassador, now another T-shirt - go to jail, while "ordinary dissidents" are subjected to frequent arrests, short detentions, possibly beatings, and constant surveillance.

Not that the detentions are a picnic. After one demo, Nikolai was held first in a prisoner-transport known as "cells on wheels" where he shared a two- metre steel module with Bondarenko, Khashchavetskiy and half-a-dozen "Zubr guys". His progress to court took three days by way of the concrete "monkey house" at the militia station, another spell in the transport and a one-metre-square cell. His got 15 days loss of liberty without being allowed a lawyer, so lay on the floor in court and was carried off to prison. Such might be the penalty for distributing underground literature or taking part in "street actions".

Khashchavetskiy's film shows several of these street actions, including a famous one with demonstrators in Lukashenko masks. There is a shot of Zavadskiy at work, reporting on a demo. It is shocking to realise how young he was. He looks only a boy.

I do my bit to Khashchavetskiy about how uncomfortable it feels to be a privileged visitor watching his film with him, knowing that soon I'll be on a plane home, where I can publicly call the prime minister a liar and a criminal if I want to.

He lights up another Belarusian Kent and says, "The fact that you can call your prime minister a liar and a criminal is not his virtue, it is your virtue, the virtue of your people. I hope you can come back to Minsk and we'll be able to watch the film together in a huge cinema hall, even if it's just the two of us."

Source:

http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,1581238,00.html