Open Mic Night in Moscow

by Audrey Murray

  “Of course,” she reassures me. “They probably don’t have jobs in Ukraine, and they want to sneak into Belarus.”

  Great. Now I’ve unwittingly participated in a cross-border smuggling operation. Which reminds me that I still have that Xanax in my suitcase, and that Belarus has harsh drug sentencing laws.

  “Open your suitcase,” the guard at the Belarusian border orders.

  “Sorry, I don’t speak Russian,” I respond, in English.

  Surprisingly, this works. He shrugs and gestures for me to get back on the bus, suitcase uninspected.

  I look at the landscape ahead of us. Those green fields are Belarus! Those trees are Belarusian!

  As we continue driving through the forest, we start to hear a strange sound that seems to be coming from under the bus. It’s faint, but it sounds almost like a child crying. Are we now smuggling a baby into Belarus?

  The noise grows louder and louder, and people start to shift uncomfortably. Finally, the driver pulls over and opens the hatch. A kitten darts out and sprints into the underbrush. The whole bus laughs with relief. A stowaway kitten!

  I wonder if everything in Belarus that seems terrifying will turn out to be equally innocuous.

  When we get to Brest, a tiny old woman tries to give the bus driver money. When he refuses, she becomes more forceful. There’s a back-and-forth banter that reminds me of fights that would break out in restaurants in China over who got to pay the bill. I’m beginning to worry that someone needs to step in and save this bus driver from being beaten up by a tiny old lady, but eventually she laughs and concedes defeat. She puts the money back in her purse.

  Next, the woman who’s been feeding me from behind insists that I let her husband give me a ride to my hotel.

  While we’re waiting for her husband, she volunteers that some of the countries I’ve visited have had many presidents. “In Belarus,” she says dryly, “we’ve only had one.”

  I’m surprised to hear her say this so openly. Even in more open countries, like Kyrgyzstan, people haven’t really talked politics much. I’d gone into Turkmenistan without an official tour guide so that I could get the real scoop on dissent, only to find that that wasn’t at the forefront of most people’s minds. Januzak had had nothing but good things to say about the President of Tajikistan, a man who seems to think one man’s human wrong is another man’s human right. For the most part, it seemed less like people were turning a blind eye, and more like a symptom of lack of information (courtesy of state-run media) and, in many places, a focus on making ends meet that didn’t leave time for luxuries like political debate.

  But still, is it safe to speak so openly about Lukashenko in Belarus?

  “Belarus is much cleaner than Ukraine,” she continues.

  I’ve picked up on a mild rivalry between the two neighboring countries. When Oleg tells his parents that I have a new Belarusian boyfriend, they laugh. “Belarus—our hat!” I tell Anton, who does not find it funny. “Well, you can just say Ukraine is . . . Belarus’ sock,” I suggest. I ask my bus buddy how Ukraine is dirty.

  “There are leaves all over the streets!” she exclaims. She seems astonished that I didn’t notice.

  The hotel I’m staying in is nicer than what I normally book. At $40 U.S. a night, it’s the most expensive lodging I’ve used so far, but I need to stay in an official hotel so that I can be “registered” with the authorities.

  That $40 comes with a Belarusian nod toward top-of-the-line service. In the bathroom, I find proof that my room was cleaned. It’s like when an American hotel wraps a toilet in a strip of paper that breaks when you lift the seat. Except here, it’s just a card they’ve placed on the sink and toilet that says, “Cleaned.”

  Brest used to be called Brest-on-the-Bug, because the city isn’t far from the Bug River. The river has also lent its name to some unfortunately christened businesses, my favorite of which is the Bug Hotel.

  Brest also used to be part of Poland, then Russia, then Poland again, then a Nazi-occupied territory, then the Soviet Union, and, most recently, Belarus. You don’t feel it in the city, but in the countryside, people say, you hear it in the dialects that vary from village to village. Each is a different mixture of Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, and Russian.

  Brest reminds me of suburbs in China. Historic buildings still stand sentry in the center—improbably, given how many times the city has been forced to host occupying armies—but farther out, new LEGO-block apartment buildings painted muted salmon and olive green sprout from the tops of commercial complexes. One features a spacious, American-style gym, a store selling Columbia sportswear, and a restaurant called Pizza Smile.

  I find out the hard way that there are no black markets in Belarus, after I casually ask a waitress where to find one. She looks horrified and promptly tells me not to take any pictures in the restaurant.

  Belarus has its own currency quirk: there aren’t any coins. Even the smallest denominations are printed notes. The stack of bills that quickly fills my wallet reminds me of Uzbekistan’s garbage bags full of cash. I wonder if Belarus requires its own styles of wallet, ones without pockets for change.

  I ask the receptionist at my hotel what there is to do in Brest, and she tells me there’s a beautiful forested national park just outside of town. “But actually,” she reconsiders, “it’s probably hard for foreigners to get there.”

  The next morning, I’m up early to head to the national park, exclusively to prove that it’s easy for this foreigner to get there. I’ve learned that the forest is where children believe Belarusian Santa lives, and that it is Europe’s last primeval forest.

  I have not, however, learned what a primeval forest is, or how to get to this one. This turns out not to be a huge problem, because Belarus is apparently full of helpful strangers. People keep coming up to me on the street, asking if I’m lost, and offering to help. They explain the bus schedule and walk me to the proper stop. When the bus comes, they tell the driver where I need to get off. And on and on. I think of the woman who kept feeding me on the bus to Belarus and how she and her husband insisted on driving me to my hotel, and I’m not sure what to make of any of this, because this is all so at odds with everything I’d heard from Anton.

  On the way to Belarusian Santa’s woodland workshop, the bus passes a church made out of old train cars, and then wooden dachas, simple country homes where people in the former Soviet Union keep vegetable gardens and spend summers. The dachas in Belarus seem more rustic than the others I’ve seen. Many look like they were built using leftover lumber and whatever materials people could find.

  But the countryside is again stunning. For a better description, flip open any Russian novel, and look for a really long passage with no dialogue.

  By the end of my ride, the handful of remaining passengers have all become invested in my journey, and at my stop, they point out the park entrance and where I can catch the bus back.

  It almost feels like the whole country is happy to have me here, which is kind of the opposite of what I expected.

  The park is so big that I have to rent a bicycle to get around. The kindly woman running the log cabin bike shop is in the middle of a heated argument with a cat. She delivers long tirades to him in Russian while copying the information from my passport, hotel registration, and visa, which seems like a lot of personal details to keep on file as collateral. If I don’t return this bicycle, is she allowed to steal my identity?

  I follow a bike trail that runs in a loop back to the bike-rental cabin. The park is mostly empty, and the trail cuts a path through towering firs and patchworks of colored leaves blotting at a clear blue sky. Sunlight seems to drift down and land on autumn-hued leaves; white swans float on the glass surface of a still pond. It’s so beautiful that I understand why this part of the world believes in magic. It’s also why I’m not at all expecting to stumble upon an outdoor exhibit called Fascists in the Forest.

  Unfortunately, only the title has been translated into English, so I
can’t understand anything beyond the fact that Nazis once lurked in this forest, which is not great, but also not surprising, given that Germany invaded the Soviet Union through Brest.

  When I get back to my hotel, I learn that Brest, like many Belarusian cities, had been home to a sizable Jewish population before the Second World War. In 1941, about 40 percent of Brest residents were Jewish, and Jewish people comprised 40 percent of the population of Belarus as a whole. When the Nazis invaded, they forced Belarusian Jews into ghettos and sent many to extermination camps. By the end of the war, a staggering two-thirds of the Jewish population in Belarus had been murdered. In Brest, almost all of the twenty thousand Jews who’d been living there in 1941 were killed. The few who managed to escape sought refuge in the forest.

  A random passerby in the train station helps me book my ticket to Minsk, the next stop on my journey. It’s an open sleeping compartment, though I’ll only be on it for a few hours in the afternoon. I’m not sure what the protocol is in this situation—should I pretend to sleep, just to be polite? The woman across the aisle from me pulls a plastic bag full of clean bedding out from under her berth and makes up her bed, then gets on top of it and reads a comic book with a magnifying glass.

  The train passes through birch forests topped with buttery leaves and crosses over water with surfaces that reflect the clear blue sky. I’m starting to understand why the woman from the bus considered leaves to be litter.

  So far Belarus has been stunningly beautiful, and the people have been almost comically helpful. Why had Anton warned me that visiting would be unpleasant?

  The answer, of course, is obvious. The real question is: why has it been so important to me to believe that I was the only one who was heartbroken?

  As we near Minsk, we pass a giant industrial development with a smokestack on which the year it opened is proudly displayed: 1990. Looking at it in 2015, I can only see the year that will follow, and the future that the people who built that smokestack might not have seen coming. Because, of course, the Soviet Union operated the factory for one year, and then had to hand the reins over to newly minted Belarus.

  Minsk is enormous.

  The city unfurls along wide boulevards stacked with imposing Stalinist buildings whose façades seem to say, Keep moving.

  It is therefore strange to find that McDonald’s is a major landmark.

  “Oh, perfect,” Ilya says when I tell him where I’m staying. “You’re near the McDonald’s.”

  I assume he means a McDonald’s, or the McDonald’s on Lenin Street (an address so incongruous it almost feels like corporate America extending a middle finger to communism), but no, he means the McDonald’s.

  The city now has three places to buy Big Macs, but the original location is still enough of a novelty that it’s an ideal landmark for directions and meeting locations.

  “This neighborhood seems kind of quiet at night,” I tell Ilya cautiously, over lunch at a Belarusian restaurant across from the McDonald’s.

  Ilya is Anton’s childhood friend; we met when Ilya and his wife came to China to visit Anton. I hesitated before reaching out to Ilya when I arrived in Belarus: it felt like getting too close to something I wasn’t sure I could handle. But in the end, curiosity won out.

  Like all of Anton’s friends from school, Ilya speaks English, a skill that helped him land a good job with an airline in its nearby offices. He’s surprised that I think this part of town is quiet.

  “This is probably the top neighborhood in Minsk,” he tells me.

  It does have a few notable residents. The next block houses the headquarters for the Belarusian KGB, famous for being the only post-Soviet security agency not to stop calling itself the KGB. (The Russian successor, for example, is called the FSB.) Across the river, you can visit Minsk’s only historic neighborhood left after the city was flattened in World War II. All the big companies in Minsk have offices nearby, and it’s within walking distance of the circus. (Circuses apparently being something Soviets saw as basic human rights, and every Soviet city has one.)

  “So people work here, and then they go out in the neighborhoods they live in?” I ask.

  Ilya considers. “Well, we don’t really go out to restaurants.”

  At the time of my visit, the Belarusian economy is going through a particularly rough patch. Like other post-Soviet states tied to the Russian economy, Belarus has seen its currency plummet as its northern neighbor struggles with declining oil prices. People have stopped thinking in Belarusian rubles, Ilya says. “If you’re buying a TV, a car, anything, you have to think in U.S. dollars.” Which makes sense from a math perspective, because 1 U.S. dollar is currently worth 20,000 Belarusian rubles.

  Young, educated people like Ilya are frustrated. Domestically, Lukashenko likes to brand his policies as playing Russia and the EU against each other, but the reality is that he’s alienating all potential trading partners. Integration with the European market would give Belarusian companies a much-needed expanded customer base, but the EU won’t accept Lukashenko’s habits of doing things like rigging elections and grooming his eleven-year-old son to be his successor.

  Right now, Belarus is helping Russia skirt harsh EU sanctions that prevent European products from being exported to Russia. But there’s nothing stopping companies from exporting to Belarus, repacking their products, and reexporting to Russia with a Belarusian label, which is why Russian consumers can now dine on “mussels from Belarus,” a country that does not touch the ocean.

  Still, I press Ilya about what he means by “going out.”

  “I got in last night at eight p.m.,” I say, “and there was nothing open. Like, not even a shop to buy water.” I don’t say this, but as I paced the streets looking for water, I also noticed that there wasn’t much that could have been closed, either. Minsk has fewer stores than any capital city I’ve seen. The street levels are neat lines of uncommercialized ground floors. I think about another joke Anton used to tell. “When I was a kid, I opened a lemonade stand. I’m just kidding: private enterprise is illegal in Belarus.”

  Not only does there seem to be a dearth of businesses, Minsk also has almost no billboards. I try to recall another capital city with a lack of outdoor advertisements. I guess Ashgabat.

  Belarus was the only country to emerge from the Soviet Union without a strong ethnic identity. Like Brest, Belarus as a whole had always shifted between surrounding regional powers. The borders of present-day Belarus have no historical precedent, and the Belarusian ethnicity was murky prior to 1991. Language is an important component of ethnic identity, but by the twentieth century, Russian had largely replaced Belarusian as the language spoken at home.

  The Belarusian government is often seen as promoting the Belarusian identity in order to strengthen its own legitimacy. At the time Belarus declared independence in 1991, most of its citizens spoke Russian and would have identified more strongly as Soviet or with their language than as Belarusian. This can create challenges for nation-building, as Ukraine would prove three decades later.

  While countries like Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan could remind themselves that they were gaining independence and self-determination while they weathered the transition to nationhood, on the whole Belarusians didn’t have the same unifying desire for a homeland.

  Ilya very much supports the movement to build a stronger sense of national identity, which at first surprises me, because he’s so liberal. “I hate the government,” he proclaims whenever he has the chance.

  But the point of many who support a stronger sense of national identity is that people “feeling” Belarusian is essential to the country’s longevity. Russia is bigger, militarily more powerful, and just across the border. As in eastern Ukraine, Belarusians look, speak, and behave much like their Russian neighbors. If Belarusians don’t feel particularly different from Russians, they might not be opposed to erasing that border and becoming part of Russia, especially if they thought it would bring better standards of living.

&nb
sp; Belarus has been one of the slowest post-Soviet states to privatize its economy, which has prevented growth.

  In other former republics in the 1990s, the sudden removal of price controls generally caused staggering inflation, and unemployment rose as newly privatized companies cut staff that had been bloated under state ownership. The Belarusian government sought to prevent these hardships with much more gradual reforms. Large enterprises remained in state hands and continued to staff and produce as they had under the Soviet system, while the government preserved the USSR’s generous but costly social safety net. But without Soviet state-mandated demand, which had ensured that Lithuania and Uzbekistan would purchase the tractors Belarus produced, by the late 1990s the economy was in crisis.

  Little has changed since then. Lukashenko continues to be popular among large segments of the population that might otherwise lose their jobs or pensions. Its economy continues to carry a lot of dead weight.

  So it surprises me, given how much Ilya loathes economic propaganda, that he supports its nationalist iteration.

  When the Germans invaded the Soviet Union in the Second World War, they came in through Belarus. It’s estimated that between one-quarter and one-third of the population of Belarus was killed. In Minsk, 85 percent of all structures are said to have been destroyed.

  Modern-day Minsk is thus an architectural Stalinist dreamland. The city was rebuilt right after the war, at a time when Stalin was experiencing a shift in aesthetic taste. He wanted everything to be big, the buildings a bold declaration of the Soviet’s victory in war. I get the impression that the instructions he gave to the Minsk city planners were something along the lines of, “Let’s still do those beautiful neoclassical buildings, but let’s make them a little terrifying.”

  Structures dating back to before the 1940s are rare, so when I catch a glimpse of one that afternoon, I head for a closer inspection. But when I get to the street, I realize it’s the Belarusian equivalent of a maximum security prison. It’s the only prison in Europe to carry out the death penalty.