Common Sense and Whiskey

Don't Go to Belarus

Besides the monuments, the Communist Square, the Independence Square, the Freedom Square and so on, and Lee Harvey Oswald's former residence, the most obvious thing to see in Minsk (on a visit in August 2011) was the preparations for the 2014 ice hockey world championships.

There was a new stadium. A whole vast athlete's complex was sprouting on the edge of town.

Today the headlines read Former Leader Supports Moving Hockey Championships From Belarus. Sure, the former leader, Stanislav Shushkevich, has an agenda, having been barred from leaving the country last week.

But I can't say I blame him. Citizens of Belarus are veteran victims of fraudulent elections. It's kind of a thuggish, gangsta land, and you wouldn't mind seeing the leadership embarrassed.

Here's a photo of a tabletop in a common room in the nicest hotel in the capital, far as I know, the Crowne Plaza. Click it to be able to read it. Pretty much tells you all you need to know.

Feel bad for the good people of Belarus. It's run by thugs.

More Belarus photos here.

 

Quick Travel Links

Chernobyl, My Primeval, Teeming, Irradiated Eden: Story of a visit to the exclusion zone, in Outside magazine.

The Pizkuny Wall: Story in Der Spiegel about life along the Lithuania/Belarus border, and their own mini-Berlin Wall.

Where is Resolute Bay, site of a 20 August 737 crash in northern Canada? Way up there, it turns out. Several maps. The air carrier was First Air. Here's its route map, from its web site:

 

Thought About Belarus This Week?

 

I don't know, it's just a drug store or something ordinary like that under that ghastly monument to the progress of the worker, or whatever it is. But it shows what the poor people of Belarus have to live with. Same with the massive, dehumanizing architecture in Minsk. Minsk was leveled in World War Two and rebuilt at the heyday of Stalinist architecture, and too bad for Minsk.

It's a bit of a narrow interest, this video clip, but it shouldn't be, really. It's a cliché, but Belarus really is a dictatorship, right there in Europe, and this video shows there really were thousands out to protest the sham elections held there on 19 December. As the person who produced this video writes,

"The lack of media attention and general public knowledge about Belarus truly saddens me. It’s heartbreaking because this is an issue that affects millions of peoples lives daily. I hope that by watching this video you’re going to be inspired to do more, and help pass the word along to a friend, family member, teacher, or co-worker about the injustices that occur everyday in the middle of 21st century Europe."

The person who produced this video is a Canadian teenager named Kamilla Kovaleva, who made this as a drama project for school. Spend a few minutes with it, if you can:

See the Belarus Gallery at EarthPhotos.com for more recent photos.

Scene of the Crime

Independence Square in Minsk, Belarus, where "hundreds had been arrested and hundreds more severely beaten" in elections Sunday.

*****

Following the Belarussian elections, here's a depressing collection of headlines from Belarus Digest:

As Anne Applebaum wrote yesterday,

"By midnight, tens of thousands of people had been chased out of the main square in central Minsk, hundreds had been arrested and hundreds more severely beaten. Young people limped away from demonstrations with broken arms, bloody heads. Seven out of nine Belarusan presidential candidates were in jail."

"Police arrested journalists, too, breaking into offices and shutting down their operations. Later, they also arrested artists and actors at home."

And there's this grim view of the world by the organization Charter 97:

Applebaum argues that "it was a stunning display of the regime's weakness." So does a Guardian editorial, which invites the regime to collapse.

I don't know. Back in August, we were in Minsk for a wholly inadequate time to get the lay of the political land, but what I took away was a sense of widespread and deeply held cynicism, and a rueful joke - that Lukashenko will be President until his (six year old) son Nikolai is old enough to take over.

There are photos from around Minsk in the Belarus Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.

 

 

Weight of the State - Wednesday HDR

This one's from our recent trip to Belarus. It's a monument to the revolution, or the Onward March of the Worker, or something, looming above an ordinary storefront, not far from the Old Town Square in Minsk.

The thing's so overdone it invited some post-production caricature. So I left the color in the people but desaturated everything else, blurred the sky to make it seem to encroach on the rest of the scene, and darkened and added contrast to the monument itself. It was created from a single RAW photo re-exposed at +2 & -2, the three images recombined in Photomatix, and then finished in Photoshop CS5 with Nik Software's Dfine 2.0. Click it to make it bigger.

There's no Belarus Gallery up yet on EarthPhotos.com, but we're working on it and we'll have a dozen or two photos up soon. It is, however, along with 278 others, in the EarthPhotos.com HDR Gallery.

Riding to Minsk

Just for sheer novelty, waking up one morning and going to Belarus is hard to beat. Here's how it went a couple of weeks ago:

14 August, 2010

I’m excited today. We’re heading into the capital of Europe’s lone holdout authoritarian state, Minsk, Belarus, still all decked out in mint-condition Communist architecture. This ought to be fun.

So: We decided to do this the local way. Yesterday at a terrace bar down across from the big Vilnius Cathedral they convinced us that the train we meant to take would spend an eternity at the border, and that the entire trip would be far faster by bus. We'll take the bus.

*****

My back’s up against the wall of the bus station in Vilnius, surveying where the buses arrive and depart. Our tickets say we’re leaving from slip #34 at 12:50 for a roughly four hour ride on Tolimojo Keleivinio Transporto Kompanija UAB, seats 29 and 30 from Vilnius to Minskas. It’s a Lithuanian company. Somehow its acronym is TOKS, with a sporty slash down the middle of the logo.

A mustardy yellow bus creeps toward slip 34 and I’m sure it’s ours, broken and limping as it is. But it crawls on past 34 to 37. Its sign reads destination: Sakiai.

People smoke. All the buses look air-conditioned and that’s good because it’s hotter than in memory this summer in the Baltics, today’s high 92 (33.33C).

Pigeons. People talking on cell phones. Guys wearing T-shirts that read “Top Security.” Doesn’t feel much like there’s petty crime here in the blazing sunlight.

We’re in the bus. Six or eight minutes with no air and it’s hot, then the A/C is on and all’s well. Twelve rows of four and a back bench, this bus is full except for a few. No idea what anybody else is saying, no idea what we’ll do at the border. There’s the fun. Driver comes down the aisle with arrival cards – “Number passport, number visa.”

And now we clatter around the cobbled streets of Vilnius. One man aboard is wearing his Roman Catholic clerical garb, one woman is wearing a headscarf, and there are no seat belts in the bus, a Setra, a subsidiary of Daimler AG.

In fifteen minutes, no more, we’re out in the countryside. Lithuania’s only hills seem to be around Vilnius. The landscape’s flat now as far as the eye can see. Suburbs, second houses, farmhouses and falling-in former farmhouses.

We came from Finland, and the forest had looked all stoic and Baltic and northern, kind of greenish-monochrome, all the way across Finland and Estonia and Latvia, but now we’re farther south in Lithuania and new trees and especially weeds creep into the mix.

The hay was already baled in Finland. Combines still worked the fields between Riga and Vilnius. And right now it feels pretty much like our farm in Georgia, USA would on 14 August.

*****

A brisk 33-kilometer hop down to the Belarusian border. We stop at this particular end-of-the-EU outpost at 1:15 for a very serious, very young soldier, who boards the bus and takes all but the EU passports, best I can tell.

We all climb off and there’s shade and people smoke and find the toilet and change money and then the driver fires up the bus (which means air-conditioning) so we all climb back on and the serious young Lithuanian soldier redistributes our papers.

25 minutes into the border process we maneuver around an hours-long car queue, driving in the no man’s land’s oncoming lane. At the front there’s some shouting and some jukin’ back into our lane and we come to the gates of Belarus.

Lee Harvey Oswald in Minsk

I'm told that Lee Harvey Oswald lived here, across the Svisloch River from Janki Kupaly Park in downtown Minsk, Belarus. The person I spoke with indicated Oswald's apartment was on the top right in this shot. There's another photo elsewhere that indicates it was around on the other side.

Oswald in Minsk is an episode I don't know the first thing about. Here's some background, though I can't vouch for it's accuracy. Photo from EarthPhotos.com. It'll make its way to the Belarus Gallery at EarthPhotos.com, coming soon.

The Seditious Sausage Caper

Evil totalitarian planners built imposing eight-lane boulevards that run ramrod-straight for miles. They commissioned monumental buildings, too far back from the road. And they did it all to make you know the power of the state, and to remind you that the Soviet government was very big and you are very, very small, little man.

In Minsk every building is a monument, and there are monuments besides. Two are vast Communist spaces – the Soviet Square and the Victory Square (photos to come, here). There’s a government sports complex, a part of town that goes on for miles, topped off down at the end by the new hockey stadium, home to the European hockey finals in 2014.

The GUM department store, at the corner of Lenin and Nezavisimosti streets, is properly big and still broken down into discreet sections, almost individual kiosks, selling various products, just like the GUM in Moscow in 1986. It’s wooden, with big wide staircases and women wearing banners. I don’t know what the banner thing was.

I committed the treasonous act of photographing the deli case in a Gastronom on Nezavisimosti Street. I was caught, and I would have to pay. I thought I could wear down the authorities, but it was hopeless. I was made to delete the two photos on the spot by an insistent pair of young deli employees.

At Hafez Assad’s Baath Party headquarters in Beirut, I played the “I’m just a dumb tourist with a camera” routine long enough that the soldier tired of me and let me keep my photo.

I may have outlasted the Baath Party, but not the deli case duo in Minsk. I am sorry I do not have the two samizdat photos of Belarusian sausages I was hoping to seditiously circulate to the outside world.

*****

Some very nice folks in Minsk, where the pace of life was relaxed even amid the monster edifices. Trouble is, the rationale for the whole town’s design has come and gone, but the city is still there, and they still have to live in it.

Travel Day

More about Belarus (top) as soon as we decide a little better what to think about it. For now, we've just arrived at the Hotel Eiger, Murren, Switzerland. View from the balcony, bottom.

All photos here.

32 or 33 yesterday, 12 now. Besides the temps, these are two pretty different places.

No Comment

Not to skip past Lithuania, except for now, because Vilnius was handsome and hot. But just quoting from the literature here in the Minsk Crowne Plaza about its Next Night Club: "The luxury and colour of the club will allow you to feel truly significant and successful."

Nezavisimosti Street, Here We Come

  

It came. We're in proud receipt of a pass to visit Belarus. Not a free pass, mind you, but a visa just the same. And it cost only $131, plus a €45 "invitation" from our hotel, per person.

If they'd just charged $185 per visa I probably never would have noticed. But they charged $131 and then set up a series of obstacles that involved bureaucracy, "invitations," emails, phone calls and faxes to Minsk, and forms. And that additional €45 fee.

But hey, we're in.

And now that that's done and we're set to go to eastern Europe, Euronews tells us Hundreds drown amid Eastern Europe heatwave:

"Last weekend alone, 52 people drowned in Poland, where temperatures have reached 36 degrees celsius in some regions.

In Russia, whether the worse for drink or not, fun in the sun has also turned to tragedy. Last month, more than 1,200 people drowned nationwide.

Moscow has not been this hot since records began, with temperatures well into the thirties for weeks."

No mention of Belarus.

The Visa Verdict from Belarus

Yesterday I suggested people are acting strangely, and what the world needs now is vacations for all. 

France will shortly be closing for the month of August, the way it does. This year they have a terrific political scandal to obsess on, involving cash-stuffed envelopes, an elderly heiress and French politicians, including one N. Sarkozy. If you haven't taken a few minutes to brief yourself, do, because you'll want to play along at home. Anne Applebaum has a nice primer.

(In the course of its own scandal primer, Sarkozy's Summer of Scandal, the Independent surveys the casualties and writes, as if it's a simple, plain fact that "... former prime minister Dominique de Villepin, has started his own anti-Sarko party but tends to botch his projects." 

As Pierre Charon once said, "You can be tall, handsome and arrogant and lose.")

*****

In arguing for vacations for all, I cited the heat.

We're off to Helsinki in a couple of weeks. On Tuesday southern Finland hit highs not seen in 76 years: 34.2 C, or 93-1/2 degrees.There's not a lot of air conditioning in Finland and retailers in the southern part of the country have run out of fans.

We remain sanguine. Our little cabin is about a third of the way up the country outside Varkaus, and just a few yards from the lake. Plus, last time Mirja and I visited in August it was downright chilly - too cold in fact - with rain and highs around 12 (55).

*****

We've built a trip comprising Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Belarus. The first four countries are happy for us to come by and leave a few Euros behind. As for Belarus, though: Not so fast.

In the cold war days you'd typically need an invitation to visit suspicious Communist countries. That's mostly a thing of the past, and the Belarussian Consulate General's web site tells us, that citizens of some countries, including the U.S., don't need an invitation for visits of a month or less. 

Except that they wouldn't approve our visa requests without an invitation.

The Belarussian officials in Washington provided a fax with seven suggested travel agencies that could help us. I emailed all seven. Four emails bounced back as undeliverable. One company never replied. The other two offered to help if I'd cancel our hotel reservation and rebook through them, and pay in full in advance. And pay their fees for handling the paperwork.

I called the hotel, the Crowne Plaza Minsk, and Julia in the tours department has apparently handled everything. I faxed her a photocopy of the front and back of my Visa card and our passport details. She sent the invitations to Washington and faxed a copy to me. They'll put 45 Euros each on our hotel bill.

Our passports, stamped with visas, are due out of the Belarussian embassy today. If this works out, we'll have our passports back next Tuesday. Stay tuned.

Burdensome Belarussian Bureaucracy

The government of Belarus is trying my patience.

One November long ago, my friend Steve and I took the train from Moscow to Warsaw. For the moment, Moscow still reigned over the Soviet Union, which was dissolved the next month, on Christmas day, 1991. Thus our trip didn’t traverse an independent state called Belarus, which was born a month later.

CS&W is related to EarthPhotos.com, where we have photos from some 95 countries around the world. In 1991 (as ever) the Soviet authorities were intimidating about photography, and I was afraid to take any pictures when we stopped at Brest, on the Soviet/Polish border, to change the bogies on the rail cars for our onward travel. I imagine I took slide photos out the train windows while traveling across Belarus, but none survive today.

So I’ve been eager to visit Minsk in its own right, to enjoy that last little existing slice of Soviet-dom, and to add Belarus to the countries with photos on EarthPhotos.com. Next month, on 13 August, we’ll be in Vilnius, Lithuania. It’s a four hour train ride down to Minsk, so we booked a room for two nights at the Minsk Crowne Plaza hotel and a flight out with our old friend Austrian Airlines a couple of days later.

Our visa company, Passports and Visas, Etc. in Atlanta, sent off our passports and visa applications to the Belarussian embassy in Washington. The embassy web site says a letter of invitation is required, but not for US & EU visitors staying less than 30 days. Here is the pertinent passage and here is the web site. Plain as day.

Our friend Rita at Passports and Visas, Etc. (who has successfully gotten us around the world three times in not quite twenty years) called yesterday. Despite what's on the embassy web site, for a visa they would require a letter of invitation. They helpfully provided this faxed document listing approved travel agencies in Minsk.

Never mind that we’re already booked to spend at least 2288000.0 BYR ($760.13) in their country at the Crowne Plaza Minsk, and never mind the instructions on the web site. We’d need to spend something more with one of their approved travel agencies to get our tourist visas.

There are seven listed suggested travel agencies on that fax. I emailed all seven and the hotel for visa support. Four emails bounced back as undeliverable to the email addresses on the embassy fact sheet.

Welcome to Belarus. It appears to be far more of a privilege than I'd realized to visit in 2010.

Updates here as things change.