I Long before the protests that shook Belarus in the summer and fall of 2020, I was sitting in a restaurant of a Minsk hotel. It was a late afternoon after a day of intense meetings, and I had nothing more planned for the evening. Suddenly a singer came on stage and started a rather touching rendition of John Lennon’s “Imagine.” I noticed that I was the only person in the room. She was singing just for me! (The poor thing probably had it in her contract that if only a single customer appears, she must begin her act.) I was suddenly overcome by a strange emotion that almost made me tear up. I felt momentarily dislocated both in space and time. Where was I and, more impor tantly, when was I? Vertiginously I felt that I had been here before. Was this Belarus in the second decade of the twenty-first century, or was it Poland in the 1970s? Or Poland in an alternative timeline, in which communism survived and transformed itself into a brutal non-ideological dictatorship with a paper-thin façade of democracy? I felt, again, the bipolar mood swings of my youth: irony, swagger, excitement (“All this is too ridiculous to last!”) and bouts of depression (“Nothing will change here during our lifetimes!”) It was strange and familiar, disturbing and deeply moving. I had gone to Belarus with low hopes. I envisioned grayness, monotony, repression, and stasis. A Soviet Jurassic Park, with a handful of brave dissidents fighting the noble battle against the totalitarian monster. This is the image that has dominated press reports, and also quite a bit of the Western scholarship about the country. Alexander Lukashenko, it is commonly said, is the last Soviet ruler, and Belarus is “the last dictatorship in Europe.” In attempting to understand Belarus, everybody has subsisted on a heavy diet of easy analogies. What about the history of Belarus itself? It presumably didn’t have any. Literature? Name a single Belarusian author. National language? Barely surviving in the predominantly Russophone population. The people in Belarus were supposed to be lacking in national identity and thoroughly Sovietized. Are they Europeans like the Poles, or even the Ukrainians? The country made news almost exclusively in the geostrategic context, as an aspect of the larger problem of Russian expansionism. Its well-known violations of human rights were also noted and regularly condemned, but they were accepted as a matter of fact. It was its near-total dependence on Russia — punctuated by occasional quarrels over Russian oil supplies and the speed of the political and economic integration of the two states (Lukashenko’s initiative during Yeltsin’s rule that came to haunt him under Putin) — that made Belarus of some interest to Western politicians. Even a modicum of Belarusian sovereignty had to be protected because it created a fragile buffer between Russia and NATO’s eastern flank, and it introduced an element of unpredictability into Putin’s designs. Everything else about the place was fuzzy at best, and not particularly relevant or interesting. Nobody in the West marched for Minsk. But now I was here, and everything looked somewhat different and quite a bit disorienting. The Soviet symbols were everywhere. Statues of Lenin still adorned city squares, likely the only place in the world where they can still be found in their old honorific locations. So were the red stars on the top of government buildings and gargantuan monuments. The good old KGB was there, proudly keeping its old name. There was the dreary communist-style official television, mostly in Russian, and a tingling sensation of being constantly under surveillance. Visually, Minsk is probably the most Soviet city in the world. Destroyed during the war, it was rebuilt from the rubble according to the best and most glorious Stalinist concepts, with miles upon miles of absurdly wide avenues lined with neoclassical colonnades. (At one point UNESCO wanted to declare it a world heritage site but found it too “contaminated” with Khrushchev’s drab apartment buildings and high-rise architecture of the later periods.) A gigantic upscale apartment building known as “the Chizh House,” from the name of its now disgraced oligarch-developer, looked like something out of a “city of the future” in a sci-fi movie of the 1950s. For someone driving from the airport after a sleepless flight, it all felt like a dummy city, a life-size movie set. At a closer look, however, the scenery acquired an unexpected depth. It was a palimpsest, a compilation of half-erased outlines, shapes, and histories. Not everything here had been flattened by the Soviet steamroller, and the zeal with which the steamrolling was being done attested to the fact that so much in this land was totally non-Soviet. There is a memory living here, and one can sense energy and expectation. A growing elan was clear during my meetings and conversations with committed dissidents, and people hoping that their work (intellectual, artistic, technological) can speed up the changes, and people who just wanted to survive without selling out or doing something ugly. (Where was the line beyond which one should never step?) An independent literary life was flourishing, thanks to a handful of daring publishers ready to displease the regime (some of them have had to relocate abroad), surreptitious art galleries, music concerts, and theater shows. How did they survive in the minuscule market, against constant administrative and financial obstacles thrown at them by the government? There was also a lot of grassroots activity, or simply people huddling together in informal groups: a whole ecology of pulsing life trying to survive in the cracks of the seeming monolith — trying, failing, and trying again. 
A partial explanation of the tendency among foreign observers to wrap Belarus in lazy clichés may lie in its tangled non-linear history. “Before 1991, Belarus was never a country,” I recently heard on CNN from an expert on Eastern Europe who should know better. In fact, Belarus has as much, or more, backstory than any European country. It is certainly true that
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