Minsk

I stand in humble awe of Maria Kolesnikova, a Belarusian opposition leader and the heart sign in the “peace-power-love” triumvirate. According to legend she tore her passport into shreds when abducted and taken to the Ukrainian border, and is now in prison. That a flute teacher and art gallery manager has such courage against the balaclava-bearing mercenaries who kidnapped her makes her all the more remarkable.

And so I went to see this last bastion of the Soviet era, only to be startled at its complete lack of Sovietness. Bad borscht and boorish behavior are completely lacking in the surprisingly elegant Minsk, with its northern-leaning cuisine and impeccably stylish youth. It’s all set against a contradictory backdrop, with spectacular mosaics wielding their blunt and heaving majesty. Crudely rendered brutalism both repulses and attracts, the lurid architecture of those who spent too little on too much.

Here you can visit Lukashenko’s pet library project and breathe in the intoxicating paper scent of weathered card catalogues. Oktyabrskaya beckons with its street art bathing the façades of former factories and warehouses, facing each other mournfully across an abandoned tram track. Everything is connected by a metro system that surpasses even that of Kiev, with each station having its own décor and highly stylized fonts.

Threatened with destruction, the dilapidated Asmalouka neighborhood recalls the stuff of dreams, beckoning with its humble communal dwellings rife with wild gardens. The same holds true for the residential quarter of the Tractor Plant, where white-red-white symbolism betrays a liberalism surprising of the working class. There I met a young photographer who shoots in film with a Nikon camera from the eighties. He insisted on giving me two of his framed black-and-whites that perfectly capture Minsk from its heyday more than a century ago, reassuring me that future generations won’t forget the past that is still – at least for now – their own very remarkable present.

Here’s my photo essay on Minsk.