MSI Press Blog

  Minsk Minsk in the early 1990s felt like a place suspended between two eras. The Soviet Union had technically dissolved, but the city still looked and functioned like the USSR. Wide, monumental avenues built after the city’s near-total destruction in WWII had little traffic. It would take some time before cars became a “thing.”   Concrete apartment blocks with identical stairwells and the faint smell of boiled cabbage dominated the city landscape. Trolleybuses and trams rattled but ran on time. Kiosks continued to sell cigarettes, newspapers, and necessities, but collapsing supply chains often meant that shelves were empty. People lined up in long queues outside shops, even when no one was sure what was being sold. A sense of order without resources, structure without certainty pervaded. People were polite but cautious; the habits of Soviet public life didn’t vanish overnight. Television was full of debates, new political parties, and the shock of Western advertising. ...

    The Belarus Peace Committee In the waning days of Soviet power in the late mid-1980s, I led a group of US Senators’ wives, who called themselves the Peace Links, to Moscow. They had been invited by the Soviet government’s Women’s Committee, and they had a number of meetings with various women’s groups and government groups as well as a side trip to Uzbekistan (which will be covered in this series when I get to the countries that being with the letter, U). My job was to serve as translator, interpreter, explainer of culture, and to make sure the Soviet government kept its promises to this group, the latter task being much more complicated than the others, especially when the wives decided they wanted to go off-script and needed me to negotiate changes that might not have been the most comfortable for the government representatives. Somehow, I managed, and that story will be in the book of countries that begin with the letter, R. Right now, I am honoring the Belarusian conne...

  Belarus I was bonded to Belarusians in myriad ways. I made the acquaintance of Pyotr Volkovich, Vice President of the Belarus Peace Committee, in Moscow in Soviet days; he became a bright light in my life and, apparently, I in his. Later, I taught and consulted in Belarus—for the K-12 schools and the Ministry of Education. About Belarus In the 1980s, Belarus was one of the more conservative republics of the Soviet Union. Minsk, the capital, was a city of wide boulevards, austere Soviet architecture, and quiet order. It had been almost entirely destroyed during World War II — 80% of the city flattened — and rebuilt in the postwar years with a kind of monumental symmetry. By the 1980s, it was a center of Soviet industry and administration, but not of political reform. The local leadership was cautious, slow to embrace Perestroika, and deeply loyal to Moscow. The country itself was mostly flat, forested, and rural. Villages dotted the landscape, and collective farms (kolkh...