A SUCCESSFUL DICTATORSHIP

Better known as The Western World's Black Hole, "The Ghost Country" or "Europe's
North Korea", Belarus appears to be quietly stuck in its Soviet past and, as a matter
of fact, it is. Harsh despotism it is, but not that harsh after all.
Journalists and activists are censored, expelled from the country, kicked out of
universities, fired from their jobs, arrested and beaten up, but everything seems to be
in perfect order. Belarus is a dictatorship that works well.

The colors of a black-and-white country

At first sight Belarus might look like something in between Poland and Russia 15
years ago; the truth is that the country didn't move forward from the so called 1920s
Soviet Futurism. The metro stations are modeled after sketches of Fritz Lang's
Metropolis and the rest of the urban planning is nothing but a concrete copy of Le
Corbusier. The harsh weather offers nothing more than a handful of clear days a
year and makes this country looks like the set of a black-and-white movie.
The capital Minsk is impressive. Its grandeur reminds of something imagined in the
early 20th century, except deprived by its magnif icently progressive fate.
Next to 8-lane boulevards and huge buildings the residents look tiny and lost. What
you see is something that is majestic and funereal at the same time, as it is
suggested by the granite facades of many buildings and the carnations on display in
the flower shops populating Minsk underground passages.
The concept of street cleaning here is brought to a whole new level: in Belarus it is
quite rare to come across beggars or homeless people. Deformity, poverty and
disability appear to have been defeated, or most simply made illegal. It's as if the
regime wanted to clean the cities in order to clean their conscience, and to put up a
good show for the tourists.
Rather than the land of utopia, "Dranikiland" (as defined by Vladimir Tsesler) Belarus
is the land of no entropy, where everything remains the same over the decades.
Statues of Dzerzhinsky (one of the worst criminals in history) can be found in parks
and the secret service has kept its Soviet-era acronym KGB.
In the same way that the Japanese soldiers left behind in the islands kept holding out
30 years after the end of the war, Belarusians have remained loyal to the line,
despite the new direction taken by History and the resignation of their own general.
Belarus is a dictatorship founded on kitsch. Like its president's comb-over hairstyle, it
is a clumsy attempt to show what one is not, what one does not have. From leopardprint windbreakers to artif icial flowers like the ones advertised on billboard and found
on the tables of every restaurant, it is as if in the past 20 years the aesthetics of the
country has been in the hands of only one man (someone old, provincial and with the
taste of the director of a state farm).
Sergey Pukst says that the Soviet Union dissolved because they lacked good
designers; in the case of Belarus it seems to be the opposite. Here "artistic
engineering", what they call design, seems to be enjoying a full-on revival.
The aesthetics of the regime is simply a provincial version of Sovietic taste that does
nothing but emphasizing even more the finest gems coming from independent
culture.
One of the places where the Belarusian rainbow is formed is Y Gallery, the unmoved
mover and beating heart of Minsk's cultural life. It is the base for artists like Artur
Klinov, Sergey Shabokin and the best writers in Belarusian language, who populate

as well the next-door Logvinov publishing house and bookstore. Every day in these
rooms between the offices and the caf you can spot directors, critics, philosophers,
musicians and every shade of grey of intellectuals, from independent thinkers to
young hipsters. Y Gallery is like those literary cafs where in the 19th and 20th
centuries the intelligentsia gathered to drink absynthe and plan revolutions.
The name of the only independent art magazine is also an ideological manifesto:
pARTisan.
As cultural guerrillas, independent artists act in the darkness, shadowed by the
official media, and are ready to operate with no means of support and no
gratif ication. In Belarus very few people consider art as social avant-garde, and there
are even fewer who consider cultural battle as an outpost of political battle.
Contemporary art is provocative by definition, but in Belarus it seems to cause
trouble even when it is not trying to.
Michail Gulin was stopped by the police and consequently lost his job because he
made a temporary installation with 6 colorful blocks in different public places. No
hidden meaning, no polemical hint, only what it is: 6 colorful blocks.
In 2013 Belarus, geometry seems to be a crime.
Alaksandr Zimenko knows the dynamics of the Ministry of Culture by the inside, and
explains to us that the government is afraid of contemporary art because they don't
understand it. Not grasping supposed metaphors against their power, they prefer to
throw out the baby with the bath water.
Any criticism of the president here is not considered freedom of expression but an
offense to the nation, and will be severely punished. Those who want to keep living
in the country understand that they have to deal with it. Other than that, the biggest
hurdle that independent artists have to face are financial issues; paying audiences
are not that large, and private sponsors are very few because 80% of the economy is
in the hands of the state, which choose carefully who to support.
Independent artists are not forbidden to organize concerts and events, but they are
not allowed either. In Belarus the ancient liberal saying is reversed: here everything
which is not expressly allowed is forbidden. Unless you give repeated public
endorsements of the regime, it is impossible to be in the magic circle of the ministry,
thus to overcome financial and bureaucratic hurdles.
When it comes to theatre the situation manages to be even worse. Choosing to
decide what to perform means giving up not only state support, but also private
sponsors. This is referring to independent theatre, mainly plastic theatre and dance.
Underground theatre is a totally different story.
The founders of Belarus Free Theatre have been exiled to London, and are forced to
direct their actors back in Belarus via Skype.
Their plays take place in an old private home in the extreme suburbs of Minsk, and
are constantly watched by the police, who monitor and keep tabs also on spectators.
Someone who doesn't fear Belarusian authorities, on the other hand, is the director
of Grodno State Theatre, former colonel of the KGB. He responds to my comment on
the peculiarity of his CV without batting an eye, saying that his commitment to
theatre is only another form of devotion to the state.
Here is an example of cultural experimentation, even if on a proudly reactionary
level.
According to writer Pavel Kostiukevich the condition of ideological chaos of the
country is stimulating for artists of all kinds: derussif ication, post-colonialism and the
opening to global capitalism are providing so much interesting subject matter to
poets and novelists, that today they are becoming some of the most interesting
authors in Europe.
But beware of falling into the trap of the romantic concept of authoritarianism.
Theatre director Vladimir Shcherban clarif ies that the country's cultural production is
undoubtedly penalized by the current political condition.
Artists are not ethereal romantic heroes, but real people with families and children,
and do not get a kick out of financial and social difficulties.

Lenin Street McDonald's

Despite Belarus being in 154th place (out of 177 countries) in the 2013 Index of
Economic Freedom, if you start an innovative project here you are most likely to
(paradoxically) be successful as the only one on the market and because the country
is growing at a rate the Eurozone only dreams of.
Young Belarusians are in fact much more relaxed than their fellow Europeans. They
know that the employment rate in their country is 99,4%, even despite the trade
restrictions imposed by the EU-US.
The branch of information technology is particularly developed. The low cost of
engineers has brought international clients like Google, Citigroup, Siemens,
Mercedes-Benz, Bosch, Philips and Samsung to choose Belarusian developers.
Applications like Viber and games like World of Thanks are the flagship made-in-BY
products.
Nowadays one of the biggest obstacles is the fear of stakeholders. Breaking the
status quo with heterodox projects and ideas can be dangerous, and create doubts
and concerns among investors.
George Zaborski tells me about his personal experience with Me100, the most
interesting co-working space in Minsk. The studio takes up 300 square meters in a
building of unrecovered industrial archeology.
The owner of the building is an investment banker that is not at all enthusiastic about
the high rent and the requalif ication cost of the whole complex, and complains about
the "suspicious" activities taking place in the studio. In our last phone talk George
tells us that the director was furious about "those naked women and those
videocameras" (it was the vernissage of a photo exhibition).
In Belarus the economy grows at ease with contradictions. Who knows what Lenin
would have thought of the huge McDonald's that opened on the street bearing his
name. And who knows if there is a third alternative between the current state
monopoly and the dreaded selloff of the national industrial capital to Russian
oligarchs.
The freedom granted by the regime in the past two years has objectively increased.
Nowadays there are (almost) no political prisoners; the blacklisted musicians can
play again and the death squads are not breaking the legs of documentarists; even
speaking Belarusian language (and not Russian) is becoming an accepted
behaviour.
As Yury Khashchevatskiy explains us, the regime does not oppress anymore
because it does not need to; Lukashenko based his power on a machine that, for
better and for worse, we must admit it works.
This newly granted freedom makes young people say that the real battle is not a
political one but an inner one, that the censorship to fight is the self-imposed one,
and the time to complain has come to a stop.
But more than a newly found optimism for the new course of the regime, it's about
the disillusion that is surfacing.
The tiredness that has been wearing out Belarusians is not due to two decades of
Lukashenko, but it results from 500 years of the most tormented history between
Europe and Asia. Belarus holds indeed the riches and the sufferings of two entire
continents.
Artur Klinau says that Dostoevskij must have hung out with Belarusians in Saint
Petersburg, because no one described better than him the personality, the
discretion, the cynicism and the disillusionment that is what is needed to survive in a
stubbornly anachronistic regime; and that makes today's Belarusians the possible
avant-garde of this new millennium deprived of ideologies.
Strolling down the streets of Minsk, Klinau points out that the solemnly monumental
capital was built on the communist utopia of the City of the Sun, but today it looks
more like the dull set of Theatre-of-the-Absurd style pastoral drama. Not a type of

drama for Belarusians, Russians, Polish or Germans, but a universal drama about
the dreams of mankind and the impossibility to realize them.
Rephrasing Pier Paolo Pasolini, our only regret would be if with the dictatorship
disappeared also the fireflies. That is to say the anthropology, the values, and the
ancestral kindness of the villages that is passed on to today's youth across the
centuries. But we have understood that Belarus is a country beyond good and evil,
beyond value judgement. And with Klinau, we wonder if it was better to have another
mitteleuropean city instead of this bizarre conglomerate, symbol of the
disappearance of a utopia and the quixotic courage of still believing in it.

Luigi Milardi