Through the Looking Glass

As playwright Tom Stoppard found out on a recent trip to Minsk, there are one or two things about Lukashenka's Belarus that just don't add up:

But the Belarusian dictatorship has no monolithic party behind it to legitimise it. Lukashenko is a dictator without an ideology, only a business plan. (Sannikov calls it "an accidental dictatorship". The president, he says, hires and fires down to factory manager level, and imprisons at state company director level wherever he suspects conspiracy against his unchallenged rule.)

The effect is a form of dictatorship which I found - still find - puzzling. Who investigated the "disappearances"? None other than the KGB and the Prosecutor's Office, and the report, which leaked out, was no cover-up. Allegedly, it was the reason why four of the investigators died mysteriously. Two others sought political asylum in America.

So, on the one hand, there is "Lukashenko's death squad", a phrase one hears everywhere. On the other, there's the T-shirt with the faces of the four "disappeared" which Nikolai was wearing to meet me at the airport. There are other "dissident T-shirts", too, openly worn. A woman told me how she had been embraced by a stranger while wearing a T-shirt which said, "Lukashenko-free Zone". Belarus is different.