Where East really meets West - and you can stay in the Hotel Bug
'…Travel a few hundred miles further east, though, passing through the latest version of Poland, and you come to the curious, accidental country of Belarus, which might have been invented for educational purposes.
Such a place never existed before and probably will not for much longer. It is independent of Russia only as an unintended side-effect of the break-up of the USSR at the end of the Gorbachev era. They broke it off and forgot to stick it back on again.
Its independence from Moscow lacks conviction. There is in reality no proper border with Russia, whose citizens can slip in and out at will. But there is certainly still a border with ‘The West’, a phrase that still means something here.
But there is certainly still a border with “The West,” a phrase that still means something here.
And what a border it is. After nearly a thousand miles of passport-free travel, from the English Channel to Warsaw, the voyager is abruptly required to produce his documents, visa and all, properly stamped, just as in the old days. Trains cannot even cross without having their wheels removed, for long ago the Russian empire adopted a wider gauge to prevent a rail-borne invasion.
Here at Brest on the River Bug—travellers who wish to rest overnight may stay in the Hotel Bug—stands the final frontier of the European Union, an abrupt and total stop to that strange, postmodern empire of deliberately forgotten history, bureaucracy, and subsidy. The EU may dream of one day incorporating Ukraine and even Turkey. But Belarus? I don’t think so. The place is too troublesome and unpredictable. An inhabitant of Brest—provided he was on nobody’s death list and was generally lucky—might have lived in five different countries in one century without so much as moving house.
In this disputed city, just by the Polish frontier, are the ruins of the mighty fortress of Brest Litovsk, built by the Tsars, acquired by Pilsudski’s Poland in 1921, taken back by Stalin in his pact with Hitler in 1939, conquered by Hitler in 1941, retaken by Stalin in 1944, the property of an independent Belarus since 1991, and who knows what next?
Brest provided the backdrop to a nightmare joint victory parade by the Red Army and Hitler’s Wehrmacht in the autumn of 1940. Pictures still exist of this queasy event, but there is no sign of any cheering crowd.
Within the smashed walls of its citadel lies the shell of the old White Palace, scene of the “forgotten peace” of Brest Litovsk, the very spot where a petulant Leon Trotsky stormed away from the table as Bolshevik-ruled Russia was humiliated and dismembered by the Kaiser’s ungrateful Germany. An almost identical humiliation, driving Russia back to eerily similar borders, was imposed on Moscow by an equally ungrateful Washington after Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin ended the Cold War.
As for Belarus itself, a flat and defenceless territory on the main invasion route between Paris and Moscow, its fertile soil is watered with blood and full of bones—Russian, Polish, French, German, and, of course, Jewish. No wonder its people are keen on all the tranquillity they can get. Currently, they get quite a lot.
This is thanks to the extraordinary Alexander Lukashenko, an inexcusable and increasingly unbalanced tyrant whose enemies often disappear mysteriously, if they are not beaten up by his police or flung into his prisons after travesties of trials…’
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