MINSK -- The flight from Moscow to Minsk is numbered 1983, which seems entirely fitting. The Tupolev-134 that flies the route every day may as well be a time machine taking travellers back to that year, when both cities were still part of a Soviet Union that experienced neither glasnost nor perestroika.

The flag that flies over the parliament building in Minsk, the capital of the former Soviet republic of Belarus, is the same red-and-green banner as in the days of the USSR, minus only a hammer and sickle. In front stands a statue of Lenin.

The restoration of such symbols, and the banishing of the white-red-white flag associated with Belarussian independence since medieval times, were just the first steps taken toward recreating the old USSR by Belarus's President, Alexander Lukashenko. A decade after he came to power, the country seems like a living museum, a place where the Cold War never ended and the Soviet Union never fell.

Belarussian culture has been all but quashed under Mr. Lukashenko's rule, with Russian once more promoted as the country's first language and the country engaged in a slow reunification process with its huge neighbour to the east. Belarus may even adopt the Russian ruble as its official currency next year.

And as if signalling an end to Belarus's brief democratic era, Mr. Lukashenko changed the name of Independence Square in central Minsk, the site of enormous rallies calling for his resignation in 1996, back to what it was called in Soviet times: Lenin Square.

But it's the latest step back into the past many see as the most chilling. Mr. Lukashenko has decreed that a new state ideology is essential to preserve stability and called for the reintroduction of ideology courses at schools and workplaces.
“We should reach every individual citizen. We should communicate to the people what we want and the people should think this over,” he told parliament last year. “The current stage of development of our society and the events in the near and far abroad force us to step up ideological work in our country.”

Though he did not explicitly say what that ideology should be, everyone knew what he meant. Textbooks used in schools are now based on the speeches and writings of the President.
The media have been swept up in the ideology push as well. All television and radio stations are back under state control, and the few independent newspapers that dare criticize the regime are, one by one, being forced underground.

The popular Belorusskaya Delovaya Gazeta was shut for three months last year after running articles deemed offensive to the President; it is now denied access to both printing houses and state-run newspaper kiosks. It is now printed in Smolensk, Russia, and the print run is smuggled back into Belarus. When Mr. Lukashenko gave a Castroesque, hours-long monologue in parliament this week (during which he effectively announced his intention to try to change the constitution so he can remain in office past the two-term limit) it was repeated, in its entirety, on state-controlled TV and radio throughout the night and the next day.
“They are simply restoring what existed in the Soviet Union, making people into zombies,” said Svetlana Kalinkina, editor-in-chief of Belorusskaya Delovaya Gazeta.

“They're telling people that everything is good in Belarus, and that everything is going bad in Poland, bad in the Baltics, and that it's only good in Belarus because we have Lukashenko. It's becoming the same as in Soviet times, when people honestly believed there was no better country than the Soviet Union.”
Mr. Lukashenko could argue that he has delivered what the population wanted. A former collective-farm boss and an admirer of Joseph Stalin, he was elected in 1994 by citizens fed up with the chaos that followed the breakup of the Soviet Union three years earlier.

He has since built a miniature replica of the old Soviet economic system, with a slight nod here and there to the passage of time. Some former state companies have been privatized, but most of the agricultural production still comes from old-style collective farms, phased out long ago in other former Soviet republics. While there are several McDonald's restaurants in Minsk, the wide boulevards are otherwise dominated by Communist iconography, with only a smattering of Western-style advertising.

All this has come in alongside a rekindling of the more sinister side of the Soviet Union. Like the media, independent trade unions and civil rights groups have come under severe state pressure. Few now dare to protest against a government that keeps tight control on all spheres of life.
“We've got a guy with the mentality of a collective farmer running the country. He takes advice from nobody because he thinks the country is his property,” said Yaroslav Romanchuk, deputy director of the United Civil Party, one of the main opposition groups in the country.

“The result is that we're a country frozen in the past.”

The Globe and Mail; 20 April 2004