Belarus: Between Lenin and a Happy Meal
By Jan Stürmann

Salt-Sprinkled Slug

In 1941 my German grandfather helped invade this sad, flat country. In three years the Nazis killed a quarter of the Belarusian population. Stalin purged another ten percent. Go there today, as I do with my Belarusian sister-in-law and her new husband, and 19th century peasant life butts up against 21st century brand-name consumer jag. In between, the 20th century’s failed Leninist experiment writhes like a salt-sprinkled slug.

US Secretary of State Rice calls Belarus, cradled between Poland, Russia, and Ukraine, “the last dictatorship in the center of Europe.” In the post-Soviet vacuum Alexander Lukashenka, a former collective farm manager with a bad comb-over, won a rigged election in 1994. He has tightened his control ever since, turning this country into a living communist museum.

Smuggler’s Train

The Polish border station of Kuznica smells of coal smoke, piss, and sweat-steeped perfume. For twenty hours we sat on the bus from Munich to Bialystok, Poland, then caught a train here. Now, travel glazed, we await the border train to Grodno, Belarus, my sister-in-law’s hometown.

Around us traders repack bolts of cloth and bags of washing powder, to be less conspicuous to custom inspectors on the Belarusian side. Each day these smugglers take the train from Grodno to Kuznica and trade cheap cigarettes and booze for whatever they can sell in Belarus.

After the train arrives, we board and sit and shiver on hard plastic benches. The train walls are bent and missing screws where, for years, smugglers have hidden their contraband.

My sister-in-law tells me, “If by chance the university authorities had not clamped down on admission bribes the one year I applied to get in, I’d probably be one of these traders too.” She subsequently won a scholarship to the US, enabling a life so different from one of exchanging Russian-made Winstons for Polish-produced washing powder.

In the dim of Grodno station we shuffle towards the customs officials. They give the smugglers’ bundles token pokes. But a couple of foreigners are a novelty, and officials ask if I’m carrying any video recorders or laptops. Knowing that Belarus is not journalist-friendly, I’d stripped my luggage of all business cards, computers, and cell phones. “Just a tourist,” I say, and they stamp my passport.

Wolves In Winter

A stapled note next to my Belarusian visa instructs foreigners to register at the Ministry of Internal Affairs within three days of arriving. So for the first two days in Grodno we stand in lines, fill out forms, and pay obscure fees to young women wearing lipstick that perfectly matches the Red Star insignia on their military jacket lapels.

The next day, to purge our bureaucratic funk, my sister-in-law’s father takes us wild mushroom hunting in the birch forests where he, as a child, ran free. This former headmaster with a PhD. in biology must now sell building materials to keep up with inflation. At home he carries resentment like a cement sack on his back. But here, in his element, he walks with primal confidence and describes hearing wolves howl in winter.

Sixty years ago the Partisan resistance fought the invading German army here, my grandfather amongst them. Recently I found a box of photographs he sent back from the Eastern front. They showed trucks stuck axle-deep in mud, death-bloated horses, and skinny soldiers shaving.

Now I hear stories of the other side, like the Partisan great-grandfather captured by the Nazis and sent to a POW camp. He escaped and snuck back to fight again. But Stalin’s paranoid logic deduced that only traitors were allowed to escape, and he was sentenced to eighteen years in Siberia.

Uninvited Guest
 
The next day we travel to the village where my sister-in-law spent childhood with her grandparents. They planned a feast to celebrate her civil marriage to my brother a year ago in San Francisco.

We enter the rough-hewn farmhouse in a flurry of handshakes, hugs and bristly kisses. The extended family is here, and in the living room we gather around a twenty-foot long table, heaped high with food and drink. The honored couple sit at the head, the grandparents – Babushka and Dedushka – sit at the other end. An uncle fills shot glasses with vodka; father proposes a welcome toast, and the feast begins. 

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