Minsk

Minsk is a dangerous advertisement for authoritarianism. I can’t think of another European capital that feels quite so clean or quite so safe. For a city rebuilt from rubble, it is remarkably historic and tasteful. It’s easy to see how a visitor might leave a little more sympathetic to the strongman model than when they arrived. I’d gently suggest they read the small print.

Belarus has long played a careful game between East and West. Under Alexander Lukashenko, who has run the country since 1994 and earned it the moniker “Europe’s last dictatorship”, that balancing act was largely abandoned after the 2020 protests and the war in Ukraine, for which Belarus served as a launchpad. Culturally, it feels thoroughly European. Politically, however, it faces firmly east. The clocks are set to Moscow time and Independence Avenue, the city’s grand spine, points straight at the Kremlin some 700 kilometres away.

But Moscow isn’t the only patron in town. Arriving at the airport, I was struck by how much of the signage was in Chinese and by the number of Chinese business delegations shuffling through arrivals. China has become Belarus’ second-largest trading partner and it shows. On the drive into town, I sat in a shiny new Geely, one of the Chinese models assembled locally at the BelGee plant, with Russian pop blaring from the stereo. Chinese hardware, Russian software – a fitting metaphor for where Belarus’ economic and cultural loyalties now lie.

The West trails a distant third, though not without hope. The familiar brands still lining Minsk’s high streets hint, perhaps optimistically, at our latent soft power. More concretely, Washington has begun to recover some political ground, lifting sanctions on the national airline and on potash exports in late 2025 in exchange for the release of political prisoners. Lukashenko’s dilemma is plain enough. Since 2020 he has depended on Russian power to stay in office – and has seen what happens to neighbours who push Moscow too far – yet he is keen to preserve a measure of sovereignty. So he is quietly reviving the old balancing act. The difference is that the new equilibrium will settle somewhere further east than before.

As in Baku, the city is best understood by walking through it chronologically.

The oldest part of Minsk is the Upper Town, perched above the Svislach River, where the city spent several centuries as a trading town of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and later the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. It is charming, compact and largely a reconstruction. The baroque Holy Spirit Cathedral, originally built for Bernardine nuns, survived the war. The neoclassical Town Hall, however, was demolished on the orders of Nicholas I in 1857 and only rebuilt in 2004. The Tsar evidently took a dim view of the civic self-government it represented.

The war swept nearly all of this away. When the Red Army retook Minsk in July 1944, around 80% of the city lay in ruins and Belarus as a whole had lost roughly a quarter of its people. Rather than restore the old merchant town, Soviet planners cleared what remained and laid out a city of broad boulevards and monumental squares in the Stalinist Empire style. The intent was unmistakable: this was to be a socialist capital worthy of a victorious people, and of the man who led them.

Who would have thought that a city levelled by the Nazis and rebuilt by Stalin could be so elegant? Yet it genuinely is. Independence Avenue, which once bore Stalin’s name, is one of the finest pieces of Soviet urban planning anywhere. Its pastel facades, columned porticoes and rooftop statuary have a human scale and an eye for ornament that the identikit blocks of later decades never managed. Where the avenue crosses the Svislach, parkland opens out along the riverbanks and the long walk is a genuine pleasure. At the avenue’s southern end, Lenin still stands guard outside Government House. Belarus is one of the few places in the former Soviet Union where the statues never came down.

Nor has the war ever really ended here. I visited in the run-up to Victory Day on 9 May. The avenue was strung with banners and immaculately turned-out soldiers marched along the pavements on their way to rehearsals. Even the national calendar tells you how central the war is. Belarus’ Independence Day doesn’t mark its break from the Soviet Union in 1991. It falls on 3 July, the day Minsk was liberated in 1944. Independence, in the official telling, is something the Red Army delivered.

The dates of the war itself are just as loaded. In Belarus, as in Russia, this is the Great Patriotic War. It begins on 22 June 1941, neatly sidestepping the two years in which Moscow was Hitler’s partner and helped itself to eastern Poland, including much of what is now western Belarus. It ends on 9 May rather than 8 May, because the German surrender took effect after midnight Moscow time. The start date is a story for my upcoming post on Brest.

Nowhere is this framing clearer than at the Museum of the Great Patriotic War, which sits beneath a towering obelisk just north-west of the city centre. Its predecessor claims to have been the first museum of the war anywhere in the world, opening in 1944 while the fighting was still raging. The current building dates from 2014 and it is excellent. There are dramatic dioramas and an armoury’s worth of tanks, guns and aircraft. To my relief, most of the exhibits came with English that was well written and informative. It conjured up fond memories of days whiled away in China’s many wonderful museums. Nothing struck me as egregiously partisan, but the omissions are glaring, not least the Western Allies, who barely feature at all.

Not all of Belarus’ grief belongs to 1941-1945, though. On a small island in the Svislach sits the lugubriously dubbed Island of Tears, a memorial to the 700-odd Belarusians killed in the Soviet war in Afghanistan. Hooded mothers and widows encircle a small chapel, one with her face buried in her hand. It’s one of the most affecting memorials in the city. So far, Lukashenko has been careful to spare Belarusian mothers the same grief in Ukraine by keeping his troops out of the fighting.

For a more intimate encounter with the Soviet pantheon, head to the memorial workshop of Zair Azgur, a sculptor who spent much of his career turning out Lenins and Stalins for the state. Shelves of busts stare down at you from floor to ceiling, while a gilded Stalin sits enthroned among them, looking rather pleased with himself. It feels less like a museum than a Soviet casting call and is all the more entertaining for it.

Monumentalism didn’t end with the Soviet Union, mind you. The Palace of the Republic, a colonnaded slab completed in 2001, is the Lukashenko era’s contribution to the genre. My preferred kind of monument, however, was a tad more modest and characteristically food-related. Minsk boasts what must surely be the world’s coolest KFC, tucked beneath a vast Soviet relief of stern-faced workers and soldiers. I’m not sure anything has married capitalism and communism quite so beautifully – the Colonel’s warm, beaming smile cutting through a row of dour socialist realist faces. But it was the local McDonald’s that stole the show. When the Golden Arches withdrew in 2022, the franchisee simply carried on under the name Mak.by and the menu has since evolved. Its fries come smothered in mushroom sauce and crispy fried onions, an innovation I’d happily see exported.

So what to make of it all? The mood among the people I met was more buoyant than I’d expected. Frustration with the regime is real, but so is a sense of progress: a country that started from a very low floor and can see what is attainable elsewhere in Europe, even if it still has a long way to go. There is a sort of tenable bargain here of order and modest but material economic improvements in exchange for not asking too many questions. For now, at least. Not to be overly teleological, but I struggle to see Belarus holding out as a dictatorship for much longer. Lukashenko is seventy-one and the succession is far from settled. Ultimately, Belarus will either be carried along by the democratic tide that has swept the rest of the continent or be subsumed by Russia and cease to be part of it altogether. All the more reason to visit Europe’s last dictatorship while you still can.

Postscript: Minsk Tractor Works is a city within a city. Touring it is about as close as I expect to come to a North Korean experience. Founded in 1946 and celebrating its eightieth anniversary this year, it still turns out the cherry-red Belarus tractors that are exported across the former Soviet Union and beyond. The production line felt resolutely old school and the air hung thick with smoke. Our guide literally took us through it all piece by piece; I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many types of screw. Most of the machinery was German, so naturally I asked how they get hold of spare parts these days. Very difficult, came the reply, and increasingly they are coming from China because of sanctions. As if on cue, a Chinese delegation was touring the plant at the same time as us. Elsewhere, Lenin keeps watch over the car park; a giant robot built from tractor parts – a sort of Belarusian Optimus Prime – guards the entrance; and the museum proudly displays a signed letter from Arnold Schwarzenegger wishing the workforce every success. How the Terminator came to endorse a Belarusian state tractor maker, I never did find out.