Belarus: Between Lenin and a Happy Meal (cont.)

With bent aluminum forks we skewer herring, pork sausage, mashed potatoes, and stuffed cabbage. An aunt says, “It’s hard to imagine, looking at all this, that we Belarusians are poor.”

We eat and laugh, and with each sip of vodka my Russian improves. More steaming platters of food appear, all cooked on a two-burner gas stove in a rudimentary kitchen.

Shot glasses never stay empty. “To your health… to your wealth… to your children to come… we welcome you now to our family.” And Babushka says, “All I want is a great-grandchild before I die,” then disappears into her bedroom and emerges with vodka she has hoarded for ten years just for this occasion.

And spoken and unspoken, like the uninvited guest, is the fact of history, that sixty years ago I would have shot these people and they would have slit my throat. But now with each toast the past dissolves; and it’s just human-to-human; and history be dammed, all because two people fell in love two years ago at a Massachusetts party.

After the feast a great-uncle shows us the house where he was born. It is cold, and I shiver.  He takes my arm, and we walk the dark streets shoulder-to-shoulder sharing warmth. At the gates of an old house he points to a tree. “My placenta is buried there. I just wanted to show you.”

Sullen Streets

The Minsk city streets run dense with blank-faced people. As a rare foreigner I feel their probing eyes relentlessly watching. But return the glance, and my eyes crash like birds into one-way glass. I ask my sister-in-law why, and she says, “We’re ashamed and suspicious; so in public we hide what we feel.”

Despite a largely state-run economy, President Lukashenka knows that to survive he must attract foreign investment. Some brand-name multinationals have heard the grumble of consumer hunger and hesitantly stepped in. There’s a Gap and Nike store here; and under posters of Woodstock hippies and Geronimo the Apache, a banner flashes, “Nothing is More American than Levis.”

Every city-center street displays monuments to the Partisan victory over the Nazis sixty years ago. “Our Heroes Will Never Be Forgotten,” radiates in neon letters atop two State buildings. But now the Partisans must share public space with the Marlboro Man.

In a coffee shop I ask a student if he’s expecting a color-coded Belarusian revolution, like the Orange one that recently toppled the government of Ukraine. “Not in the foreseeable future,” he says. “Why not?” I ask. “We Belarusians fear change too much. Every day Lukashenka claims more power; yet we just shrug, and say, ‘it could always be worse.’”

Ronald’s Blessing

Brash and flash and hip; McDonald’s is everything communism is not. A hoard at the counter clamor for Happy Meals. Two expressionless waitresses in matching uniforms mop in synch across the gleaming floor. Every table is taken. Mirrors reflect young lovers making out. A pack of teenagers mix MTV ghetto posturing with Russian Mafia swagger. And all of them gulp Big Macs and Cokes, “just lovin’ it.”

But only the rich can afford to partake. I ask the waitress what she earns: About $0.63 per hour or $100 per month. On a napkin I do the math: If a Big Mac here costs 3880 rubles, or about $1.60, this waitress can afford less than two a day. Yet still they come, lines out the door, for Ronald’s blessing.

Belarusian Bling

In the Komarovskiy Food Market in central Minsk, broad-shouldered butchers split whole pigs with large axes. Each bone-crunching blow echoes off the vast concrete ceiling. Severed heads hang from hooks, grinning and grimacing. Women in white smocks lay out the cuts on steel trays, their fingernails red-rimed with blood.

Across the street in boutique clothing stalls, sullen attendants sit like exotic birds in glass cages. Here you can buy $200 boots, Siberian fox fir coats, and ripped designer jeans. The poor come here to window-shop and long. The new rich finger clothes with distracted distain.

Caught between the bread lines of communism and the just-out-of-reach promise of capitalism, the hunger for consumer goods is raw and childlike, and people strut their Belarusian Bling. Women wear make-up masks and helmeted hair and stride boldly in high-healed boots down the potholed streets. Naively I imagine a Stiletto Revolution of ten thousand angry women splitting this dictatorship wide open.

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