The last resort

Volume Five of the Warren Commission hearings into the assassination of President Kennedy by Lee Harvey Oswald contains the following exchange between the commission's representatives and Mr Snyder, the US ambassador to Moscow who handled the process of Oswald's defection to the Soviet Union, four years before the killing:

Volume Five of the Warren Commission hearings into the assassination of President Kennedy by Lee Harvey Oswald contains the following exchange between the commission's representatives and Mr Snyder, the US ambassador to Moscow who handled the process of Oswald's defection to the Soviet Union, four years before the killing:

Representative Ford: "If you had known that the Soviets would send Lee Harvey Oswald to live in Minsk, what would your reaction have been?"

Mr Snyder: "Serves him right."

Representative Ford: "Why do you say that?"

Mr Snyder: "Sir, you have never been to Minsk."

You don't have to spend long in the Belarus capital to see what Richard Snyder was getting at. One look at its dismal skyline confirms that Minsk was one of the few places where Stalin had carte blanche to pursue his vision of urban planning. Today, Belarus is home to the last Soviet-style dictatorship left in Europe, its current administration simply the latest in the country's long history of brutality and misfortune. The effects of the Chernobyl disaster were at their most horrific not in the immediate area of the Ukraine but here, because the wind was blowing in a disastrously unfavourable direction for the people of Belarus. It often is.

Undeterred, Minsk is currently striving to reinvent itself as a centre for tourism, through a number of internet sites offering special deals for western visitors. When you log on to the tourist office's main page, the first thing you see is a large advertisement that reads: "Your Friends Live In Belarus – Do You Want To Congratulate Them?" For those with any knowledge of the country, the answer has to be: on the whole, probably not. Belarus is governed by Alexander Lukashenko, a neo-Stalinist and ice-hockey enthusiast often described as resembling the comedian John Cleese. Less amusingly, Lukashenko, who openly mourns the lost age of Soviet domination, has recently dismantled what democratic structures his country had managed to establish since gaining independence from Moscow in 1990. Though he seems to enjoy little popularity with his own people, Lukashenko, whose opponents have a curious tendency to vanish, fared well at the last presidential poll in 2001, attracting over 75 per cent of votes, a landslide achieved by means of his natural charisma, and what an independent observation co-ordinator described as "massive election fraud". He has faced little in the way of serious opposition since his main political adversary went to the Minsk steam baths two years ago, and never came back.

Memories of far happier excursions dominate the Belarusian tourist website. It includes warm testimonials from visitors such as "Miss Wendy Brown of Nottingham". Miss Brown (full address not supplied) seems to have remained in a state of suspended euphoria following her holiday in Minsk, and is fanatically complimentary about her accommodation, at the city's Hotel Belarus. "It was a good idea," she writes, "to have women on each floor of the hotel to care for our needs – especially getting rid of the bugs that I let into my room at night."

Quite why – given the boundless variety of human companionship that she claims is available in Minsk – Miss Brown repeatedly decided to lure parties of biting insects into her room after nightfall, is never explained. Out shopping on her own, she says, she was able to find her way home "with the help of broken English". (Like other British fans of Belarus who have e-mailed the site, Wendy's command of her own language appears remarkably shaky for a native speaker.) Other correspondents, such as "Gary", seem less eager to recall their own experiences than they are to share the fax numbers, e-mails and tourist rates of the few companies who can arrange a trip to Belarus. "Patrick Rich" has written with his thoughts on the national airline, Belavia, which flies to Minsk from London. "Great value!" he writes. "Simply great!"

Sunday 14.00

Sitting in one of their planes at Gatwick, I'm still not sure quite what bonded Mr Rich so firmly to Belavia. It could be that – like the rock star Sting, who sometimes talks about the perverse excitement of perceived danger at altitude – he might find it strangely exhilarating to board a dilapidated 30-year-old plane. As we take off, I can't help staring at the inside rim of the window next to me, which seems to have been repaired with...

"You're right," says the man sitting next to me, following my gaze. "It is Polyfilla."

He turns out to be a pilot from a western airline.

"Your planes," I tell him, "are a bit different from this."

"Yes," he says. "Our planes are more... they're more sort of..."

New?

"Yes," he says.

And this?

"This is more like a... (he searches diplomatically for a simile from the world of aviation, but doesn't find one) ...like somebody's musty old caravan."

I take out the only modern handbook I've been able to find: The Lonely Planet Guide to Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. It weighs in at an impressive one and a half pounds. During the two and a half hour flight, I tear away the sections that don't refer specifically to Belarus, reducing it to a slightly more manageable one and a quarter ounces. The slender pamphlet I'm left with is hardly a love letter to Minsk. "Barely charming... impressive only for its flatness... little to do... there is no high or low season: in Belarus it's always low." Dining, it says, "is a challenge".

Belarus, sometimes known as White Russia, which has a population of 10.5 million, lies between Poland – a couple of hundred miles to the west of Minsk – and Russia, to the east. Lukashenko's country, which covers an area roughly the size of the UK, also shares borders with the Ukraine in the south, and Lithuania in the north. His capital is the most heavily policed city in the world. Of Minsk's two million citizens, one in 50 is a policeman. Even after the challenging process of acquiring a tourist visa (you must have an invitation from a Belarus citizen, or a voucher from a hotel), immigration has a daunting thoroughness that recalls practices in the former Soviet Union. Coming in as a tourist, your problems are exacerbated; looking into the eyes of officials, when you tell them you've come here on vacation, feels a bit like landing in Miami and explaining you've come for the snowboarding.

Belarusian traffic police are famously fond of supplementing their meagre income with random freelance fines, and I've only been in the cab from the airport about 15 minutes before we're pulled over, and my driver is led away to pay the customary $10.

The approach to most of the world's large cities, when you're on the main road in from the airport, has a gruelling sameness about it – industrial depots, traffic fumes, and anonymous, functional business units. The thing about Minsk is that, as you near the city centre, it just doesn't get any better. In popular destinations with a newsworthy human-rights record, the landscape is generally of the kind that soothes and distracts the foreign holidaymaker. When you're scuba-diving in Eilat, for instance, it's not that easy to keep in mind the shooting and tear-gassing of Palestinian children; nor is the view from the Andes likely to remind you of extra-judicial executions in Peru. But Belarus isn't like that. Minsk was flattened in 1944, with hardly a building left standing. One of the dubious distinctions of the city, rebuilt from scratch by Stalin, is that it remains the world's finest example of pure Soviet architecture.

As with many of life's catastrophes, you can just about see what he was aiming at: wide boulevards, landscaped parks and artificial boating-lakes. Even so, your overwhelming first impression is the sudden realisation that, when it comes to exploiting the full, soul-sapping potential of cement, even Birmingham is a fumbling novice.

I've booked into Wendy Brown's favourite hotel, the Belarus, a dreary 24-storey tower block, whose better rooms have a feel of bedsits in a hastily erected student campus. At £40 a night (more than the average worker's monthly salary), the Belarus is one of the more affordable options if you're booking – as you must – through an approved London travel agency. The telephone charges at the Belarus are around $5 a minute. Lukashenko is reported to have spent $20m on phone-tapping equipment, and the signs are that he is bent on recouping his investment here – where, apparently, much of it is in use.

Just as Wendy Brown promised, there is a clutch of Les Dawsonesque women guarding the main landing, beside the lift. "Boy," one of them growls at Nikolai, my interpreter (who is 31), as we set off for the bar. "How long will you be gone?"

We retreat to the Hotel Belarus's restaurant and bar – the "Pierre Smirnoff". The piss-elegant sophistication of that French Christian name is the source of some amusement to locals; it's rather as if Britain's most famous fish-and-chip outlet rebranded itself as "Aristide Ramsden".

Nikolai asks the barman if he can have a beer from Belarus. "No," says our host.

"Why not?"

"Because," the bartender explains, without bothering to look up, "beer from Belarus is rubbish."

We walk out to a nearby bar, the Rakovsky Brewer, where they stock a good selection of local beers, like Groshovoe, which is really not bad at all. The food is excellent by any standards, though, if the Rakovsky is ever to attract the fussier western diners, the translations in its English menu may need some revision. Game for a challenge, we ordered "Chicken with Fungus and Black Drains" [mushroom and prunes], a "Pallet of Graphic Cheese" and "Aubergines Stuffed by a Nut".

Monday 10.00

As I'm changing some dollars at the hotel cash office, a large cockroach scoots across the pile of notes on the cashier's desk. This comes as no surprise by now: cockroaches really are everywhere at the Hotel Belarus. Some of them think nothing of strolling down the bar counter in the Pierre Smirnoff, where we guests pretend to see nothing – it's only polite. When I turned on the bathroom light last night, three of the younger ones were having a race around the toilet seat.

The cashier presents me with a small mountain of local currency. The Belarus rouble is still affectionately known as "the rabbit". It got its name from a now-withdrawn one-rouble note, which was decorated with a picture of the animal, leaping for joy. Belarus recently knocked three zeros off its currency, reducing the exchange rate to a less rampant 200,000 rabbits to the pound. It still pays to hang on to the apparently worthless one-rouble notes, though: the price of the hotel car park (exact money appreciated) is 563 roubles.

After a breakfast of dranniki – simple potato pancakes (the national dish) – I set off with Nikolai for a fun morning at the Museum of the First Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Workers' Party, which turns out to be a small hut in the centre of town. On one wall there are portraits of the Heroes of World Socialism: Marx, Lenin and (our sole representative) Neil Kinnock.

We make our way back to the main tourist agency where, the Lonely Planet guide assures us, "helpful staff" can assist with arranging transport to Khatyn, Minsk's most popular tourist attraction, 40 miles outside the city. The small town, with all its inhabitants, was burned to the ground by the Nazis in 1943. Khatyn is now the site of a memorial commemorating this, and the 185 other Belarusian villages annihilated by the Germans. On the ground floor of the Belintourist office, I ask for tourist information. The woman looks at me as if I've asked to buy a David Essex CD and a set of wickets. She makes a call. "Upstairs," she says, eventually.

"Can I join any organised tours?" I ask her colleague, up on the first floor. "No," a woman glowers. "Or an excursion to Khatyn?" "No." "Can you help with coach tickets?" "No." "Maps?" "No."

Monday 19.00

Minsk has not had a significant profile in western culture, though the city is

* briefly featured in the Woody Allen film Love and Death, as the venue for the Russian National Convention of Village Idiots. In Oswald's Tale, Norman Mailer's account of the life of Lee Harvey Oswald, it is Minsk, not Dallas, that dominates the narrative, because Mailer was given access to hitherto unseen KGB files – but even here, at the heart of an otherwise captivating story, the capital of Belarus remains strangely anonymous and ill-defined.

Oswald spent two and a half years in the city, as a lathe operator at a radio factory, after he defected to the Soviet Union in 1959. The building that housed his apartment is privately owned and inaccessible; the nearest you can get to recreating his experience in the city is to circle Minsk's central lake, as he used to, on a pedalo, singing "The Song of the Volga Boatmen".

This is – fair play to him – fun for a while, but it's essentially a daytime recreation, and it's undeniable that, even by English standards, Minsk nightlife is not always that gripping. The city's few clubs are beyond the pocket of most Belarusians: most evenings you can find large crowds of people, of all ages, strolling in the park near the town's small funfair, or clustered round trestle tables in a nearby wood, drinking beer or playing chess for rabbits. When we join them, the locals are gentle, very welcoming, and curious, in a tentative sort of a way, which is no doubt born of experience. Confrontation, one chess-player tells me, is not how the Belarusians deal with the world. As a nation, they've grown used to taking things on the chin. The Belarus language, long subservient to Russian, has been relegated to the status of a country dialect. Half the population of Minsk died in the war, including almost all the town's 50,000 Jews.

Monday 23.00

The usual pretence at disinterest in vice – still maintained, however half-heartedly, by the managers of large hotels in most parts of the world, even Russia – has been altogether abandoned at the Belarus. Sitting in the bar at Señor Smirnoff's after dinner, you might as well be – you are – socialising in a brothel.

Five women sit in line on bar stools, their drinks chalked up on the barman's slate. There's a discarded hypodermic in the Gents. The bar shuts at midnight unless, like tonight, the barman judges there's a chance of a girl seducing a rich foreigner, in which case he stays open for as long as necessary. Their main quarry, a drunken American oil executive, has just guaranteed us all an extension by raising his glass to the room and loudly proposing the toast: "I like everybody." Nikolai has told the women that we're homosexuals. "There are no such things as homosexuals," one tells him. "Only poofs."

Tuesday 12.00: Khatyn

Khatyn has no hotel or visitor centre – nothing, except the small plots of land, each commemorating a slaughtered village, and a huge, empty car park. This lack of commercialism undeniably adds to the dignity of the stark, isolated monument to the victims of genocide, but even as we arrive, and our cab is leaving, it's clear that getting back to Minsk is going to be something of a challenge. In the end, we have to walk the three miles from the memorial to the main road. At one point, I skidded on the decomposing corpse of a young snake. There are no buses to the capital, so we wait for an hour and a half by the side of the road. "I'm in a state of mind I never thought I'd experience," Nikolai says. "Homesick for the Hotel Belarus."

A truck carrying labourers stops and gives us a ride. After a few minutes, the driver asks what we're doing here. "You're what?" he says. With a snort of disbelief he slams on the brakes and invites us to leave the vehicle. "Tourists?" Nikolai tries to offer him money, which he refuses. "Is it true?" he asks. "Yes," I tell him. "But didn't you know?" he says. "Didn't anyone tell you – this country is a disaster."

In the evening, we watch the state-controlled television station, which carries an interview with Lukashenko's finance minister, who sounds as if he developed his interview technique by listening to Jimmy Young questioning Thatcher. "Your achievements," the reporter says, "have been amazing – even by your own high standards. Tell us – just how did you manage it?"

Wednesday 17.00

The state radio and television channels may be farcically on-message, yet access to satellite stations is widespread, and dissident publications, most printed in Lithuania, struggle on. This is one of the most curious aspects of Lukashenko's regime: whereas there's no doubt of his appetite for total state control, its implementation has been uneven. Two of his senior security officers recently defected to the US, where they gave detailed briefings concerning his death squads, who have dispatched several politicians and at least one journalist. ("I take precautions," one of Lukashenko's surviving critics explained, on a recent, outstanding edition of Radio 4's Crossing Continents. "What sort of precautions?" the presenter Tim Whewell asked. "I try," his interviewee explained, "not to be alone.")

In a remote café on the outskirts of Minsk, we've come to meet one of Belarus's few remaining independent thinkers. Ludmila – not her real name – is now a resident of one of the Baltic states. "With the problems that Belarus faces," she says, "we need a real man. Not this buffoon. He has commissioned ice-hockey stadiums that have more seats than the population of the towns where they're built." Lukashenko regularly takes part in televised ice-hockey games, where he strides with dictatorial ease past any defender who is familiar with the terms of the Belarusian mental-health act. He has acquired a private fortune, Ludmila explains, literally equivalent to the gross national product, and this fund alone will make him very difficult to dislodge, even by the Russians.

"But then, Lukashenko is loyal to Moscow," she continues, "and so invaluable to them. They see every surrounding country defecting to Nato and the EU. Belarus is their last bastion against the West. They'll ever let it go." Meanwhile, she adds, there is a general understanding that most people who can get out, do. "It's a tragedy," she says. "But the game's up for Belarus."

Thursday 11.00

We wave down a private car – here, as in Russia, a usual form of travel – and the driver agrees, for $50, to drive us out to the greatest historical attraction of Belarus, the 16th-century castle at Mir. "You just have to see it," Ludmila had told us. "It's incredible." The drive to Mir is a round trip of 120 miles across Belarus's flat marshland, and it takes around 90 minutes each way. When we reach the red-brick fortress, we discover that most areas are closed for restoration work. One tower is open. It contains a tiny museum. Its centrepiece, carefully framed in a glass cabinet, may, in some ways, serve as a symbol of the challenge that faces the Belarus tourist board. It is a piece of iron, labelled, in English: "Horseshoe – footwear, for the purpose of".

Friday 14.00

Looking around the departure lounge at Minsk airport, I notice that my 80 or so fellow-passengers are, almost without exception, Belarus nationals. They include a party of schoolchildren heading for the English Midlands. Their high spirits, of the kind you could observe in any such gathering, somehow acquire a tragic dimension in these surroundings. Young as they are, you wonder how many will return content to fulfil their ambitions in Belarus.

On the plane, I open the dissident English-language paper, the Belarus News. It reports how, in the last presidential elections, the votes of patients confined to a mental hospital were deemed to have been cast for Lukashenko. With the help of this, and countless other forms of manipulation in the future, the universal expectation is that the President stands no chance of being replaced. Until he is, the seats on Belavia's Minsk-London flights are likely to be filled much as they are now: not by British tourists, eagerly discussing their first impressions of White Russia, but by Belarus nationals who are determined to spend a few weeks outside of Lukashenko's madhouse, or to seek some other, more satisfactory, sort of asylum.

www.belarustourist.minsk.by

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