A SUCCESSFUL DICTATORSHIP

Better known as The Western World's Black Hole, "The Ghost Country" or "Europe's North Korea", Belarus appears to be quietly stuck in its Soviet past and, as a matter of fact, it is. Harsh despotism it is, but not that harsh after all.Journalists and activists are censored, expelled from the country, kicked out of universities, fired from their jobs, arrested and beaten up, but everything seems to be in perfect order. Belarus is a dictatorship that works well.

The colors of a black-and-white country

At first sight Belarus might look like something in between Poland and Russia 15 years ago; the truth is that the country didn't move forward from the so called 1920s Soviet Futurism. The metro stations are modeled after sketches of Fritz Lang's Metropolis and the rest of the urban planning is nothing but a concrete copy of Le Corbusier. The harsh weather offers nothing more than a handful of clear days a year and makes this country looks like the set of a black-and-white movie. The capital Minsk is impressive. Its grandeur reminds of something imagined in the early 20th century, except deprived by its magnificently progressive fate. Next to 8-lane boulevards and huge buildings the residents look tiny and lost. What you see is something that is majestic and funereal at the same time, as it is suggested by the granite facades of many buildings and the carnations on display in the flower shops populating Minsk underground passages.The concept of street cleaning here is brought to a whole new level: in Belarus it is quite rare to come across beggars or homeless people. Deformity, poverty and disability appear to have been defeated, or most simply made illegal. It's as if the regime wanted to clean the cities in order to clean their conscience, and to put up a good show for the tourists.

Rather than the land of utopia, "Dranikiland" (as defined by Vladimir Tsesler) Belarus is the land of no entropy, where everything remains the same over the decades. Statues of Dzerzhinsky (one of the worst criminals in history) can be found in parks and the secret service has kept its Soviet-era acronym KGB.In the same way that the Japanese soldiers left behind in the islands kept holding out 30 years after the end of the war, Belarusians have remained loyal to the line, despite the new direction taken by History and the resignation of their own general.

Belarus is a dictatorship founded on kitsch. Like its president's comb-over hairstyle, it is a clumsy attempt to show what one is not, what one does not have. From leopard-print windbreakers to artificial flowers like the ones advertised on billboard and found on the tables of every restaurant, it is as if in the past 20 years the aesthetics of the country has been in the hands of only one man (someone old, provincial and with the taste of the director of a state farm).Sergey Pukst says that the Soviet Union dissolved because they lacked good designers; in the case of Belarus it seems to be the opposite. Here "artistic engineering", what they call design, seems to be enjoying a full-on revival.The aesthetics of the regime is simply a provincial version of Sovietic taste that does nothing but emphasizing even more the finest gems coming from independent culture.One of the places where the Belarusian rainbow is formed is Y Gallery, the unmoved mover and beating heart of Minsk's cultural life. It is the base for artists like Artur Klinov, Sergey Shabokin and the best writers in Belarusian language, who populate

as well the next-door Logvinov publishing house and bookstore. Every day in these rooms between the offices and the café you can spot directors, critics, philosophers, musicians and every shade of grey of intellectuals, from independent thinkers to young hipsters. Y Gallery is like those literary cafés where in the 19th and 20th centuries the intelligentsia gathered to drink absynthe and plan revolutions.The name of the only independent art magazine is also an ideological manifesto: pARTisan.As cultural guerrillas, independent artists act in the darkness, shadowed by the official media, and are ready to operate with no means of support and no gratification. In Belarus very few people consider art as social avant-garde, and there are even fewer who consider cultural battle as an outpost of political battle.Contemporary art is provocative by definition, but in Belarus it seems to cause trouble even when it is not trying to.Michail Gulin was stopped by the police and consequently lost his job because he made a temporary installation with 6 colorful blocks in different public places. No hidden meaning, no polemical hint, only what it is: 6 colorful blocks.In 2013 Belarus, geometry seems to be a crime.Alaksandr Zimenko knows the dynamics of the Ministry of Culture by the inside, and explains to us that the government is afraid of contemporary art because they don't understand it. Not grasping supposed metaphors against their power, they prefer to throw out the baby with the bath water.Any criticism of the president here is not considered freedom of expression but an offense to the nation, and will be severely punished. Those who want to keep living in the country understand that they have to deal with it. Other than that, the biggest hurdle that independent artists have to face are financial issues; paying audiences are not that large, and private sponsors are very few because 80% of the economy is in the hands of the state, which choose carefully who to support. Independent artists are not forbidden to organize concerts and events, but they are not allowed either. In Belarus the ancient liberal saying is reversed: here everything which is not expressly allowed is forbidden. Unless you give repeated public endorsements of the regime, it is impossible to be in the magic circle of the ministry, thus to overcome financial and bureaucratic hurdles.When it comes to theatre the situation manages to be even worse. Choosing to decide what to perform means giving up not only state support, but also private sponsors. This is referring to independent theatre, mainly plastic theatre and dance. Underground theatre is a totally different story.The founders of Belarus Free Theatre have been exiled to London, and are forced to direct their actors back in Belarus via Skype.Their plays take place in an old private home in the extreme suburbs of Minsk, and are constantly watched by the police, who monitor and keep tabs also on spectators.Someone who doesn't fear Belarusian authorities, on the other hand, is the director of Grodno State Theatre, former colonel of the KGB. He responds to my comment on the peculiarity of his CV without batting an eye, saying that his commitment to theatre is only another form of devotion to the state.Here is an example of cultural experimentation, even if on a proudly reactionary level.According to writer Pavel Kostiukevich the condition of ideological chaos of the country is stimulating for artists of all kinds: derussification, post-colonialism and the opening to global capitalism are providing so much interesting subject matter to poets and novelists, that today they are becoming some of the most interesting authors in Europe.But beware of falling into the trap of the romantic concept of authoritarianism. Theatre director Vladimir Shcherban clarifies that the country's cultural production is undoubtedly penalized by the current political condition.Artists are not ethereal romantic heroes, but real people with families and children, and do not get a kick out of financial and social difficulties.

Lenin Street McDonald's

Despite Belarus being in 154th place (out of 177 countries) in the 2013 Index of Economic Freedom, if you start an innovative project here you are most likely to (paradoxically) be successful as the only one on the market and because the country is growing at a rate the Eurozone only dreams of.Young Belarusians are in fact much more relaxed than their fellow Europeans. They know that the employment rate in their country is 99,4%, even despite the trade restrictions imposed by the EU-US.The branch of information technology is particularly developed. The low cost of engineers has brought international clients like Google, Citigroup, Siemens, Mercedes-Benz, Bosch, Philips and Samsung to choose Belarusian developers. Applications like Viber and games like World of Thanks are the flagship made-in-BY products.Nowadays one of the biggest obstacles is the fear of stakeholders. Breaking the status quo with heterodox projects and ideas can be dangerous, and create doubts and concerns among investors.George Zaborski tells me about his personal experience with Me100, the most interesting co-working space in Minsk. The studio takes up 300 square meters in a building of unrecovered industrial archeology.The owner of the building is an investment banker that is not at all enthusiastic about the high rent and the requalification cost of the whole complex, and complains about the "suspicious" activities taking place in the studio. In our last phone talk George tells us that the director was furious about "those naked women and those videocameras" (it was the vernissage of a photo exhibition).

In Belarus the economy grows at ease with contradictions. Who knows what Lenin would have thought of the huge McDonald's that opened on the street bearing his name. And who knows if there is a third alternative between the current state monopoly and the dreaded selloff of the national industrial capital to Russian oligarchs.The freedom granted by the regime in the past two years has objectively increased. Nowadays there are (almost) no political prisoners; the blacklisted musicians can play again and the death squads are not breaking the legs of documentarists; even speaking Belarusian language (and not Russian) is becoming an accepted behaviour.As Yury Khashchevatskiy explains us, the regime does not oppress anymore because it does not need to; Lukashenko based his power on a machine that, for better and for worse, we must admit it works. This newly granted freedom makes young people say that the real battle is not a political one but an inner one, that the censorship to fight is the self-imposed one, and the time to complain has come to a stop.But more than a newly found optimism for the new course of the regime, it's about the disillusion that is surfacing.The tiredness that has been wearing out Belarusians is not due to two decades of Lukashenko, but it results from 500 years of the most tormented history between Europe and Asia. Belarus holds indeed the riches and the sufferings of two entire continents.Artur Klinau says that Dostoevskij must have hung out with Belarusians in Saint Petersburg, because no one described better than him the personality, the discretion, the cynicism and the disillusionment that is what is needed to survive in a stubbornly anachronistic regime; and that makes today's Belarusians the possible avant-garde of this new millennium deprived of ideologies.

Strolling down the streets of Minsk, Klinau points out that the solemnly monumental capital was built on the communist utopia of the City of the Sun, but today it looks more like the dull set of Theatre-of-the-Absurd style pastoral drama. Not a type of

drama for Belarusians, Russians, Polish or Germans, but a universal drama about the dreams of mankind and the impossibility to realize them.Rephrasing Pier Paolo Pasolini, our only regret would be if with the dictatorship disappeared also the fireflies. That is to say the anthropology, the values, and the ancestral kindness of the villages that is passed on to today's youth across the centuries. But we have understood that Belarus is a country beyond good and evil, beyond value judgement. And with Klinau, we wonder if it was better to have another mitteleuropean city instead of this bizarre conglomerate, symbol of the disappearance of a utopia and the quixotic courage of still believing in it.

Luigi Milardi