Unspoilt By The Trappings

Neil Clark has put up the first paragraphs of his New Statesman report from Belarus:

A woman sits bolt upright in the middle of the night. She jumps out of bed and rushes to the bathroom to look in the medicine cabinet. Then, she runs into the kitchen and opens the refrigerator. Finally, she dashes to the window and looks out into the street. Relieved, she returns to the bedroom. Her husband asks, “What's wrong with you?” “I had a terrible nightmare,” she says. “I dreamed we could still afford to buy medicine, that the refrigerator was absolutely full, and that the streets were safe and clean. I also dreamed that you had a job, that we could afford to pay our gas and electricity bills.” “How is that a nightmare?” asks her husband. The woman shakes her head, “I thought the communists were back in power.”

That Bulgarian joke, as told by Maria Todorova in the Guardian and now doing the rounds across eastern Europe, doesn’t work here in Minsk. This is a capital city where the streets are safe and clean, where ordinary people can still afford to buy medicine and basic foodstuffs and where the unemployment rate is less than 1 per cent. It’s the side of Belarus you won’t read much about.

After last month’s presidential elections, in which Alexander Lukashenko was re-elected to serve a fourth term with almost 80% of the vote, the arrest of opposition candidates and hundreds of their supporters led to the reappearance of the old ‘last dictatorship in Europe’ headlines. But shocking as the scenes of police beating protestors were, it’s a mistake to equate Belarus with Burma, or Lukashenko with Joseph Stalin.

Lukashenko’s rule is unquestionably authoritarian, as he has conceded, but his policies, which combine aspects of the old communist system – social security and full employment - with a mixed economy and greater personal freedoms than existed under the old Soviet Union, have proved genuinely popular with the majority of ordinary Belarusians, as his election results testify.

While other former Soviet Republics rushed to embrace capitalism following the fall of the Berlin Wall, privatising their state-owned enterprises and removing subsidies to industry and agriculture, Belarus kept the old collectivist flame alive. My guide book describes it as a country “so unspoilt by the trappings of western materialism that it’s very easy to feel a sense of having slipped into another time and dimension”.

Yet even here – a country where roughly 80 per cent of the economy is nationalised and statues of Lenin still adorn the streets – times are changing. Pressure from the IMF and Russia, and a desire to court the European Union among other reasons have led Belarus to embark on a major privatisation programme of its own, with around 90 per cent of state-owned enterprises earmarked for sale. Does the move mark the de facto end of Europe’s last socialist planned economy?

The Harry's Place thread on this article is hilarious. What a bitter lot. Especially Kamm. Honestly, is he really saying that if what he said were true, then Jason Cowley would still be employing Neil, as Natalie Hanman also does, as Fraser Nelson also does, as Alan Rusbridger also does, and so on?

Including The American Conservative. When was Kamm last published in America? He is reduced to calling TAC "outside the mainstream" because, er, it does not employ him. Oh, and because it turns a profit. Unlike the only outfit with Kamm on the payroll. And when did even that ever have him in the print edition?

He should instead be asking himself why they do not employ him. Neil, you may recall, has never been party to lying this country into war, nor has the NUJ ever been after him for criminally harassing another journalist. And the "left-wing" Harry's Place boys in general should be asking themselves why Neil's contributions, not theirs, are printed in the Guardian and the New Statesman.

Is it just the spectacle of their own past lives in the Brezhnev-era kitsch of the Lukashenko Government? Or in the spotty, unelectable adolescents who comprise the "opposition", admittedly a lot better, since merely harmless, than the neighbouring giant's Stalinists, National Bolsheviks, Islamist terrorists, and anti-urban, anti-industrial, anti-scientific fantasists who are all cheered on simultaneously by the New Cold Warriors?

The Holy See identifies as a bridge between Eastern and Western Christendom the last nation in Europe west of the Russian border to identify entirely in terms other than those of rootless neoliberal stupefaction, promiscuity, usury and warmongering. Was the Papacy notable for its close relationship with the Soviet regime, such that it would wish to maintain such ties with that regime's last vestige in Europe?