Let’s go to Minsk, comrades — a beautiful but complicated city

It’s been far too long since I last updated this blog — life has a way of intervening — and to help blow away some of the dust I’m gonna take us on a trip far, far away.

I just got back from an incredible week in Minsk, the capital of Belarus, a small country in Eastern Europe that was formerly part of the United Soviet Socialist Republic. My mind is reeling from everything I took in there, the wonderful hospitality I experienced from my hosts, the people that I met and, well, I needed a place to put some of the many photographs I snapped, sometimes furtively, with my phone.

I was invited by the Press Club Belarus in my guise as co-host of Daily Detroit to come and deliver a pair of presentations about what they called our “postindustrial city podcast.” The trip was arranged and paid for by the U.S. Embassy-Minsk, making me, in essence, a kind of small-a diplomatic ambassador from the U.S. of A.

The rotunda at the Great Patriotic War museum, which offers a stirring history of WWII from the perspective of Belarus’ tragic role when it was part of the Soviet Union.

Detroit and Minsk, it turns out, have been sister cities since 1979. We had met with a delegation of Belarusian journalists, including the director of the Press Club, Mikalai Anishchanka, and a representative of the U.S. Embassy there, earlier this year when they visited Detroit and arranged to visit with us as part of a tour of local newsrooms. That’s when this whole adventure was first hatched.

What’s Minsk like, you ask?

Well, in many ways it’s like many other old and picturesque European cities. But in other ways, it’s quite different.

Like Russia, its neighbor to the east upon whom it relies heavily for its economic survival, Belarus is not a member of the European Union. The city was mostly destroyed during World War II, which Belarusians refer to as the Great Patriotic War, then rebuilt under Joseph Stalin. It is said to have served as a template for post-war Soviet economic expansion, and it became one of the most “prosperous” territories, relatively speaking, in the Soviet Union. But it was also one of the least democratic Soviet republics.

A woman views high-end watches in a jewelry shop that shares a space with a trendy coffee shop, in the rear.

Today, Belarus has a complicated relationship with Russia. It’s been an independent country now for 25 years, but it’s led by an authoritarian strongman, Alexander Lukashenko, who was first elected president in 1994 and has served as the only president independent Belarus has ever known.

Gorky Park, Minsk.

As a result, much of the economy is under state control, press freedoms are heavily curtailed, elections are widely dismissed as fraudulent and the country has seen violent crackdowns on protest several times in recent years. Belarus has had economic sanctions placed on it from both the U.S. and the E.U., and Russia began trimming subsidies after Belarus refused to recognize its annexation of the Crimea peninsula in neighboring Ukraine. In short, Belarus sits smack dab in a geopolitical hotspot, and it’s had a brutal and difficult history well before WWII.

In the central city, Minsk is lovely, ribboned with beautiful parks and the meandering Svislach River, with old-style mid-rise buildings and broad brick sidewalks filled with people that give it a European flair. Elsewhere, the architecture is decidedly Communist-bloc utilitarian, with fairly grim residential towers and brutalist buildings set off wide avenues roaring with speeding traffic, including the occasional tractor made at one of the state-owned factories. Soviet sculptures and other iconography aren’t hard to find in parks and public squares.

But there’s also an irrepressible undercurrent of new energy and aspiration, particularly among younger Belarusians. There’s a growing technology sector, surprisingly, that remains independent from the government, and is driving up wages, but also the cost of living. Trendy bars and restaurants aren’t hard to find, and there is excellent food to be found, including the native Belarusian cuisine.

Translation: “I Love Minsk.” Strangely, I was unable to find this in T-shirt form. It’s an example of the limits of western-style capitalism in Belarus.

So is it worth visiting Minsk? Absolutely.

We’ll have a special-edition Daily Detroit podcast episode in the coming weeks. I’ll be sure to share it here as well. In the meantime, more photos are below.

Minsk is served by an excellent Metro subway system. I never waited more than 2 minutes for a train.

There are also trolley cars, electric buses and conventional diesel-powered buses.

The headquarters of the KGB in Minsk, on Independence Avenue. I was told to be careful in photographing this building, which is massive, austere and very intimidating.

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