"Á Belarus"
Jan. 25th, 2003 10:23 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldThe below is a story that I wrote last year on the AHTG mailing list, set on my world of Tripartite Alliance Earth. Mikael Bergstrom, a Danish filmmaker, who was venturing to Belarus to do some documentation film work. In Tripartite Alliance Earth's setting, Belarus is a country devastated by the Third World War, declaring independence following the breakdown of the post-War Russian confederacy, left with a yawning void at the core of its national identity despite some degree of hope for the future.
(The original posts are available here, here, here, and here.)
Anyway, here it is, collected for the first time.
I bid my leave of Leila, at the Metropolitan train station as the cool sea breeze blew from the north, on the evening of the 18th. My trunks were well-packed with my assorted supplies, I carried my Euro-compatible laptop and hand-held camera with me along with assorted toiletries onto the sleek chrome train, and I left, looking back at the station as we retreated from Sjaelland with increasing speed.
There wasn't much to do on the train ride, not even the luxury of time spent at the Danish-German or German-Brandenburg borders before Confederation getting my passport checked. I read the guides I downloaded from the Euronet to Belarus: "a land area of 198 800 square kilometres," "a population of 600 thousand permanent inhabitants as of 2001 contrasted to a 1981 population of 9.2 million," "struggling efforts at national rebirth centred upon the dying Belarusian language, an East Slavic tongue related to Ukrainian and Russian," "near-universal influence of Poland."
It was night, as the train sped through the flat fields and forests on the south shore of the Baltic. Holstein, from my seat window at twilight, looked quite Scandinavian, or Dutch: immaculately organized and maintained, quietly prosperous, surely the product of a fine social democratic land, of a land with a thriving social collective consciousness. Brandenburg, from the same window at night, looked barren somehow; the fields, seen in passing lit by glow from the train, were disordered, their hedges ragged, and the forests not the clean-lined if sterile lines of the post-War plantations but older.
Denmark didn't have the same heritage, as a Crusader, as Brandenburg. Denmark, in medieval times, did plant its flag on the shores of Estonia--Hiuumaa, Saaremaa, the mainland--and in Curonia, but there was never anything like the push from Brandenburg. Never any drang nach osten (Scania aside), any pushing-aside of the native Slavs and Balts, their assimilation, no need to reclaim vast wasteland (west Jutland aside), certainly nothing which could have created the Kingdom of Prussia. Nothing like the First World War, never mind the Second World War ...
I went back to my reading, looking down at the screen under the light and I squinted. Scandinavia's Jews came from Grodno, and that area of northeastern Poland; the Tsar was a hard man, his minions harder, his mobs vicious, and so they left. As I paged, I saw interesting mentions, of Belarus as a putative homeland--urban, yes, in Minsk, but also in the countryside, a vast and complex Jewish civilization that could have evolved so wonderfully if it was not for Hitler's jackbooted thugs.
Disappeared civilizations: first the Poles, then the Jews, then, finally, the Belarusians, even the last almost as far removed from the contemporary mind as the Tiawanaku of Bolivia, or the Khoisan of South Africa, or the Urdu Muslims of Delhi and Lucknow. (The news updates I received electronically included a special report on how, as north India became less poor, the few Muslims who survived were continuing to emigrate in large numbers, to Bengal and the ADR and Iran and points further afield. The Hindutva was still powerful.)
After I finished reading the reports, the TGV halted at Stettin, at the furthest outpost of Germandom. The Oder--or Odra, depending on where you come from--was fairly slow, here as it ran into the Baltic Sea, and its waters shone darkly under the light reflected from the town and the bridges. I had my camera out, filming the darkness outside, of course; it was oddly beautiful, the people vaguely illuminated moving around and in and out of the train, the shapes of islands vaguely visible in the distance north, across the harbour. And then, the train began again and crossed into Poland.
We Scandinavians, residents of Norden, have a tendency to automatically assume that the Baltic Sea is a Scandinavian lake, peopled by people of Scandinavian heritage (Germanic or Finnic or, now, Baltic in a gesture to Latvia). People usually consider Leningrad, if only as an obstacle separating Estonia from Karelia and as an outpost of Russian Slavic Orthodox culture that has been beaten to the point of being interchangeable with Scandinavia, as soon as things stop being post-apocalyptic.
The Poles, though, I typed in my journal file, we tend to forget them. The Lithuanians as well, but the two cases are closely related. It isn't as if the Poles don't have a presence on the Baltic, haven't had a presence on the Baltic for centuries. Perhaps it was because we simply assumed that the Poles would become Germans, and as for the Lithuanians, who would ever take note of them? Perhaps it was because we missed the Poles' twinned marriages with the sea, at Gdansk, after the first and second world wars, and the Lithuanians' claims, too, to Klaipeda. We miss too much; we really don't know how all of our neighbours on the Baltic manage to live.
The Polish countryside at night looks different from the Danish countryside. Poland is, for all intents and purposes, as rich as Denmark; Poland is a society hardly less accomplished, and--dare I admit it, me a patriotic Dane?--rather more important to the wider world than Denmark. The farmlands that that I could glimpse simply looked less packed, newer, perhaps, as befitting a country of relatively lower population density than the crowded Danish isles, and of rather newer vintage, too (seized from the former natives, repopulated by Poles from central Poland and from lost Belarus). Perhaps Argentina's pampas looked something like Poland's northern Baltic plains.
The train was, after Stettin, direct to Grodno. I napped when the train rounded south of Gdansk, and stirred only after the train passed Bialystok. I turned the laptop on again, and began typing:
This area of northeastern Poland is the last remnant of the kresy,Poland's eastern frontier. It was once vast: before the War of Ukrainian Independence, it included the better part of Belarus, the whole western third of Ukraine, and Lithuania. (Ah, Lithuania, never an area with set frontiers: Once, most of it used to be Belarusian. And even now, there are still more than a few people inside Lithuania for whom Vilnius is Wilno. And in Poland ...) Grodno, Bialystok, Brzesc--once they were full of so many different peoples, so the National Jewish Archives say back in Copenhagen. And now, almost monoethnic. Poles, some Polonized Belarusians--some natives, others immigrants after the Soviet Civil War left Belarus trapped an autonomous republic in illiberal Russia--
I stopped typing that fragment, and went on to another (who knew whether it would ever be inside my narration, I needed to think this way):
Belarus is a ruined land. There were the Belarusians themselves, the Jews and Poles who lived alongside them, and the Russians who came to ruled them. The Jews have been slaughtered, the Poles chased out, and the War killed the Russians and the Belarusians. All that is left is a patchwork of half-remembered traditions that are part myth, part reality. Is this enough? I suppose that to be Belarusian is to be able to choose one's identity, even
to allow that identity to change over time. Only from time to time, usually in the gaps between rulers or in the odd moments of anarchy, has being Belarusian proved advantageous to anyone at all.
I was tired when I got off the TGV at the station in the early morning. Grodno is an old city, but well-kept, hard by the Niemen River. I know neither Polish nor Belarusian, but I could see, across the river and past the park, just barely, the wooden Church of SS Boris & Hilb, and more distantly the spires of Farny Cathedral. Orthodox and Catholic, together on
the fringes of Europe, in the mist of the early morning in northeast Poland. I'd arranged for my baggage to be dropped off at the car-rental agency, so I walked down the street. Grodno survived the Second World War, like Bialystok (unlike Brzesc which got razed, repeatedly); and I walked down the street, immersing myself in the restored brick-faced buildings, the stonework, the greenery (planted, no doubt, as part of the post-Third World War makework programs.)
I set to driving, and I crossed the Polish frontier within an hour. As the sun rose, I noticed that the countryside was different; glancing around, I realized that it was different because there was hardly anyone there. Belarus was once completely covered in forest, and though most of it was cleared by the 16th century for farming, but great plots had regrown since then. And after the Third World War, there was no one to keep the
forest--confiers, oak, beech, birch, growing and thriving in the swampy soil just as in Jutland--from completing the task. Even the wildlife exterminated in places by the gas was recovering--there was no one to predate upon them. There weren't any of the barley or flax fields, when I entered Belarus, that the pre-War travel guides promised. As I was driving to Minsk, I kept thinking--for some odd reason that only became apparent to me later--of Berlin. Not that I minded; the car stereo was only playing mindless Europop remixes, you know the type, all with the inane simple lyics in French and 180 beats per minute. And Berlin is a fascinating city. I say this in all serious, not as any legacy of a ridiculous faddish longing for Weimar Berlin, or an excessive appreciation for how it was and how it is otherwheres.
German is, in Danish schools, an obligatory foreign language like French. Instruction in French, though, begins in fourth form; instruction in German begins in fifth form. We've always had an interesting relationship with the Germans, more intimate even than what the Swedes had: They had German immigrants to work their mines and people their cities in the Middle Ages, but Danish kings ruled over the Germans of Schleswig and Holstein until 1864; indeed, we nearly lost south Jutland to Prussia. Our southern neighbours, as of late, have been powerful, almost too powerful; we can understand how the Canadians or Mexicans must have felt. And then, the Second World War, the 1943 invasion--We've our own particular perspective on Germany. And Germany's capital was Berlin. We know the Germans; we know Berlin.
Berlin: Chicago of Europe. (Buenos Aires was too cultured; Chicago, at least in the imagination of the wider world, stands in as the stereotypical city on the vast plain. A city absorbing vast flows of immigrants--Germans from the sand heaths of Brandenburg and Mckelenburg, Silesian peasants of any of a dozen ethnoreligious backgrounds, Poles from Prussian and Russian Poland, Jews, of course--cramming them together in filthy working-class apartment complexes, making irreverent Berliners in a city not known for its
traditions in a country dominated by militarism. And then:
Berlin: Sodom of Europe. Decadence under the Weimar Republic--sex and cabaret, street-fighting and economic collapse too late halted. A city out of control in a continent out of control in a world tilting out of control, heading breakneck for catastrophe. Never mind that everyone knew this was unsustainable, no one particularly cared. The old world had failed, the new world fast approaching would be hard, and we may as well do whatever the
hell we want. And then:
Berlin: The centre of the world's evil, under Nazi Greater Germany and during the Second World War. Wannsee's mansions are where the Holocaust was planned; the old Reichstag was where Hitler made his announcements of so many planned atrocities; the Brandenburg Gate under which so many soldiers marched in strict formation between the knife-wielding sacrifices to Wotan. And then:
Berlin: The shattered centre of the Nazi Reich, an erstwhile imperial capital brought to its knees by its leaders' spectacular insanity and the assembled forces of the world. Streets in ruin, people starving, a fate uncertain. Shall it be a Soviet zone of occupation? No. Shall it be a länd of the Bundesrepublik Deutschlands? No. Shall it be independent? In the lack fo any alternative ...
Berlin: A city devoid of its old hinterland, much too big for the Brandenburg countryside, much too unpopular to be entrusted with anything outside of Germany. (Shall the Poles want Berlin to be their capital, shall the Scandinavians, shall the Czechslovaks? Perhaps we can defrost the Wends and see if they'd have it.) So, the Berliners dust off the ruins and rebuild, and recruit. Shall we host a million Poles refugees from Communism? Why not; best not to make them angry again. Perhaps some Russian Jews would like to settle? Certainly; after all, there never were any Nazis here. Can we collect some Czechs, some Romanians, some Ukrainians, some Russian gentiles, some Algerians? Perhaps undergo to take in some Bohemian types? Let's; perhaps we can get ourselves a nice collection, fill the void.
Berlin, in a way, is like Leningrad. Leningrad was Russia's capital, in the last two decades of the Soviet Union, as it was the capital of the entire empire before 1917; Leningrad was the intellectual heart if not the spiritual soul of Rossiya. And then, in 1982, Leningrad was severed from its roots. Not that the Germans outside of Berlin were exterminated, but the Russians outside of Leningrad were. Leningrad's good for shopping, if you're Nordic and don't mind items ghoulishly acquired at second-hand, and the cost of living is low enough to attract immigrants from across Europe, across Europe's hinterland. But what use is it for, now? Leningrad was built as a capital like Berlin, but unlike Berlin Leningrad can't adapt. What is its hinterland but empty cities and the endless northern forest? And would the Ests and Finns, never mind the Swedes and Lithuanians, really want to be Leningrad's hinterland.
And then, there's Minsk. If Berlin's bad, Leningrad's worse; and if Leningrad's quite bad, then Minsk is apocalyptic. Berlin lost Germany, but it had alternatives; Leningrad lost Russia, and it had nothing. What can you do for a country when its capital city has lost itself?
Lida was interesting. Lida, as a town, is non-descript. It looks like Grodno, only a more decayed version. Driving into the town, I saw the forest, the omnipresent forest. It was a dense forest, from what I could see along the road, partly conifers planted in the mid-1980's by Ukrainians in their staggering country's makework programs, more hardwoods--birch especially--indigenous to Belarus. The main interruptions were of marshes, straggly trees pointing up from the moist ground and shallow pools of water. A pre-War tour book I'd bought in a used bookstore in Copenhagen suggested that the traveller should look for the tilled fields of black earth and the neat wooden villages. The fields had been taken over by the forest, just like almost all of the villages I'd passed were. Trees growing through windows, birds perched on streaked old concrete buildings, fallen electrical poles lying away from the road. The death of the vast mass of Belarusians didn't seem to have damaged the forest in the slightest. Perhaps there would be more remnants of the Soviet civilization further east, closer to the heart of the Union, Belarus had been one of the most industrialized areas of the Soviet Union, and perhaps in the east outside of the great forests there would be more visible signs of Soviet civilization. But from what I could see from the road, Soviet rule, Soviet mismanagement, Soviet pollution didn't seem to leave an enduring impression.
I was reminded of Gaia. James Lovelock was a British scientist, working for the European space agency in the 1960's, who devised a simple test to see if a world had an extensive biosphere: Was its atmosphere, like Earth's, in a state of chemical disequilibrium, or was its atmosphere, like Mars' or Venus', chemically stable? If dynamic, life existed. In Lovelock's vision, Gaia is not a single entity, Gaia is not intelligent. Gaia is an emergent property, rather, product of the innumerable reactions between water and rock, plant and animal, a product of feedbacks that in turn maintains the stability of the Earth, at some level or another. Even the Chixculub asteroid impact which destroyed the dinosaurs was only a momentary event, something to push Gaia on to new forms of organization. The Communautaire biologists say that Gaia should last another hundred million years or so, until the gradual expansion of the sun will turn the Earth's water into vapour and our clement atmosphere into something resembling Venus'. (Unless we do something about it, of course.) Gaia is fundamentally stable; Gaia couldn't be destroyed by anything short of a world-ending cataclysm; Gaia thrives in the aftermath of the Soviet Empire.
I arrived in Lida in the late after noon. The gazetteer reveals that Lida lies at 53° 59' 45" North latitude and 26° 4' East longitude, a hundred kilometres from Vilnius on what used to be the highway running to Grodno. It began as a Lithuanian town, early in the first millennium of the Common Era: The gazetteer says its name is similar to the Lithuanian "Lydda", meaning forest clearing, or it could also be derived from "lyditti" referring to the bog-iron deposits and ironworking in the Lida plain. There was a castle
built by the Lithuania Gedminas in 1323, to mark the frontier between the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the East Slavic states. And there was so much history, all painfully irrelevant now that the people shaped by this history for centuries are moldering in their graves.
(The Grand Duchy, incidentally, is interesting. Like us Nordics, Lithuanians were among the last people in Europe to convert to Christianity, and in the 14th century they ended up accepting Roman Catholicism from Poland. Yet for the vast majority of its existence, the Grand Duchy's population was largely made up of Orthodox Christian Slavs rather more closely related to the Ukrainians than to the Poles, never mind the Lithuanians. Not that ethnic boundaries weren't porous, but they didn't seem to interfere too often in the day-to-day functioning of the Grand Duchy. Even now, remnants of this tolerance exist: In Lithuania's capital of Vilnius, almost a quarter-million Poles live alongside their Lithuanian neighbours, and trace their ancestry to Belarusians who were both Catholicized and Polonized.)
Modern Lida is a small town. The concrete suburbs built in the Soviet era are dissolving into the growing forest, and Lida's population--estimated, I was told by the town mayor Zemon Spanik over the phone before I left Denmark, at 15 thousand people--is concentrated in the featureless town centre. Lida used to be, I was also told by Spanik, a charming town until the Second World War came and Lida was razed several times, the coup de grace being a Nazi nerve-gassing of the town and its Soviet liberators only a few months before that conflict ended. Lida's inhabitants before the Third World War were peasants and children of peasants who'd migrated into Lida from
the devastated countryside, and the town had grown to a lovely hundred thousand people. before the Third World War, which murdered the townpeople along with the peasants outside Lida who normally would have repopulated the town.
This time, the people who repopulated Lida came from outside. This isn't unusual: In Soviet times, Belarus was a highly industrialized state (by Soviet standards) with a high standard of living second only to Ukraine. Unlike the Ukrainian Associated Soviet Socialist Republic, the Byelorussian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic did not have any border controls to keep out immigrants; the periodical literature isn't precise on the number of immigrants, but there certainly were quite a few Russians interested in this non-quite-Russian autonomous republic. Belarus is a vacuum: An
impoverished vacuum, but it's surrounded by more than a hundred million people, including five million or so of fairly recent Belarusian ancestry. (Or at least, ancestry in Belarus; deported Lida Poles and second-generation Litvak Jews in Bukovina were never considered to be Belarusians by the Berianists who set the ByASSR's borders.) There are quite a few people who, given a chance to live without panzer divisions or death squads or silent machines wheeling in from over the horizon with their lethal bomblets, would be willing to go to this devastated land once their homeland. Spanik himself is an example.
It's odd, I reflected as I set up the camera outside the Lida city hall as Spanik stood, how common the body type of ectomorph has become. The famine is behind us, the food shortages gone thanks to the new GM food imports from Communauté globale, but even people who might be naturally given towards fat and roundness like Spanik tend to be thin. Spanik wasn't born in Lida, practically no one here in Lida now was. He was, he'd told me earlier, born to Belarusian gastarbeitar in Prague, Belarusians from the eastern just across the Russian frontier from Smolensk. He'd lived most of his live in Prague and was still a Czechoslovak citizen, but since last August he'd been a citizen of independent Belarus.
"The census material," he said, his skin drawn tight over his weak jaw, "is quite clear. People who hold only Belarusian citizenship--people who survived the War," Spanik emphasized in his Slavic-accented French, "are in a small minority here in Lida. People who've recently acquired Belarusian citizenshhip form the large majority."
"What countries do they come from?" I ask.
"Poland and Ukraine are the main sources, 40 and 30 percent each of the new immigrants, but people from Czechoslovakia like myself make up another 25%. And people from further afield--they're not interested in Lida," he shrugged. "They prefer Mensk, or Minsk--anyway, they prefer the capital. Lida, now, Lida's just a simple provincial town, and we like it that way. There's a lot of people who like vacationing here, people who like the nature. And it isn't a long commute to Europe."
We talk for another hour, as the wind blows and the people pass curiously. After my interview with Spanik is over, I pack up my equipment and go back to my hostel. Lida is a characterless city, a city of immigrants built in successive layers of ruins. The city hall was built after the Second World War, opposite the medieval (14th century) castle which had been rebuilt in the 1960's to attract tourists, and there were plenty of trees lining the streets (the chemical depopulants were infinitely selective), but it was dead. It was characterless. I typed into the night on my portable, and I wondered what Novogrodek--or Nowogrodek to the Poles, or Navahrudak to the Belarusians--would be like tomorrow.
Novogrodek is an interesting town. As I said earlier, it was capital of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania--capital, I suppose, from at least the 16th century right up to the final partitions of Poland--and it has been at the same time a major centre for the Slavs of Lithuania, the Belarusians. Polish influence grew, naturally, though; Lithuania and Belarusian were languages of the peasantry, Polish was the language of state, and well after the partitions--at least until the 1860's and the Tsar's successful attempts to detach the Poles from their former fellow citizens to their east--Polish was the language of this city. Indeed, Poland's national poet Adam Mickiewicz was born in this city--or just outside, the biographies were unclear about that. After the Nazi-Soviet partition of Poland, though, Nowogrodek became Soviet Byelorussian Novogrodek, the Jews were slaughtered by the Nazis, the Poles deported to Poland, and the Belarusians who'd had the city all to themselves for forty years were slaughtered by the Americans.
I spent my first while touring Novogrodek. The signs are mostly in Polish, as befits this most Polonized area of Belarus. I went and saw the castle ruins; I went and saw the stone-built Farny Catholic Church, built in 1723 on the site of a church founded in 1395 during the reign of the Lithuanian Prince Vitaut. And, I went outside Novogrodek to see the countryside: the Nalibockaja Pusca, an ancient woodland, and the Sviciaz' lake, one of the most beautiful lakes in Belarus. The whole area was supposed to be important in Polish and Belarusian literature, and I wandered with my camera, filming. I stopped short when I heard a couple talking in English.
"Hello," I said to them in English. The man smiled and introduced himself: "Hi, I'm Andrius Karalaskas, and this is my wife Lana." She waved to me and spoke, in a perfect unaccented English: "Good day, and you?"
"I'm Mikael Bergstrom, I'm from Denmark, I'm doing a film on this country." Her accent was odd, in English, it was unexpected yet familiar. "Are you British?" I asked. "Scottish, Irish, English ..." My voice trailed off as Lana looked at me. "Australian?"
"No, American," she smiled tiredly, "from Deccan Traps Earth. Everyone's surprised when they find out, you're not the first."
"Really?" I smile and shrug. "Well, my wife is Syrian-American, from Estates-General." To be specific, Leila is a Druze; yes, but the Kingdom of America is unique: It combines medieval porosity of sovereignty and ethnicity with a truly post-modern acceptance of the other. The term "Lithuanian-American" couldn't mean anything to our world's Americans, more's the pity. But on Deccan Traps Earth, where the United States seems to have been
quite a pleasant to live in, the term did mean something. More's the pity that our world's United States wasn't a tenth as liberal as that world's, or as any of the civilized countries on our world. A trade could have been good for us.
Andrius Karalaskas speaks excitedly into the camera, the American Lana holding his hand: "It's wonderful to see Nawahrudak, the place where the Grand Duchy of Lithuania--my country--was born. Even with all that's happened to it," he adds regretfully.
I nod, and quietly ask him, "What do you think about the Belarusians, their relationship to the Grand Duchy?"
He squints at me, and his mop of brown hair falls over his forehead. "How so? You mean, Belarus being a colonial territory?"
"No, I mean that the original capital of Lithuania was Navaharodak, in the heart of Belarus, that Lithuania's official language in that "Lithuanian" state was Belarusian and that the Grand Duke and the duke`s court, like most of the population, spoke Belarusian?"
Andrius frowns and looks at me sternly. "I won't hear anything of that. Ethnicity didn't matter, anyway. What's important is that the Grand Duchy was Lithuania; if the Belarusians want to join in, well, I can't blame them, poor devils."
And the Belarusians might indeed want to join Lithuania. The Grand Duchy is the only thing close to a nation-state that the Belarusians can claim, and certainly the Lithuanians were far more benign overlords than the Tsars, much less the Soviets. The Belarusians remained themselves in the Grand Duchy, never Balticized as they were Russified. Perhaps a federation? The suggestion has been made, repeatedly, but I fear the Lithuanians will never take up the offer.
In 1981 (the old guidebooks remind me), greater Minsk was home to some 1 780 000 people, with another 486 thousand living in communities within a twenty-kilometre radius of Minsk's borders. This made greater Minsk home to a quarter of the Byelorussian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic's population, and the fourth-largest city in the entire Russian Soviet
Federative Socialist Republic, behind only Moscow, Leningrad, and Gorky.
How things change.
Driving into Minsk from the west, you see the bedroom communities that have been abandoned. The buildings have been weathered, some breaking down, others crumbling at the edges with shattered windows and doors hanging on hinges (or by hinges): Soviet construction methods were never good to begin with, and two decades without maintenance did nothing to avert this
post-apocalyptic landscape.
Perhaps if the Second World War hadn't intervened and Belarus had stayed Polish, at least after a fashion; perhaps if the Belarusians had been as strong in their nationality after the Second World War as the Ukrainians were in theirs; perhaps if Chang had showed some pity in the end; perhaps, possibilities, all closed off by our history, and made irrelevant by a nation's death.
And how could I chronicle its rebirth, I wondered, as I entered the heart of the city, if they're not sure there was a nation in the first place?
So, comments?
(The original posts are available here, here, here, and here.)
Anyway, here it is, collected for the first time.
I bid my leave of Leila, at the Metropolitan train station as the cool sea breeze blew from the north, on the evening of the 18th. My trunks were well-packed with my assorted supplies, I carried my Euro-compatible laptop and hand-held camera with me along with assorted toiletries onto the sleek chrome train, and I left, looking back at the station as we retreated from Sjaelland with increasing speed.
There wasn't much to do on the train ride, not even the luxury of time spent at the Danish-German or German-Brandenburg borders before Confederation getting my passport checked. I read the guides I downloaded from the Euronet to Belarus: "a land area of 198 800 square kilometres," "a population of 600 thousand permanent inhabitants as of 2001 contrasted to a 1981 population of 9.2 million," "struggling efforts at national rebirth centred upon the dying Belarusian language, an East Slavic tongue related to Ukrainian and Russian," "near-universal influence of Poland."
It was night, as the train sped through the flat fields and forests on the south shore of the Baltic. Holstein, from my seat window at twilight, looked quite Scandinavian, or Dutch: immaculately organized and maintained, quietly prosperous, surely the product of a fine social democratic land, of a land with a thriving social collective consciousness. Brandenburg, from the same window at night, looked barren somehow; the fields, seen in passing lit by glow from the train, were disordered, their hedges ragged, and the forests not the clean-lined if sterile lines of the post-War plantations but older.
Denmark didn't have the same heritage, as a Crusader, as Brandenburg. Denmark, in medieval times, did plant its flag on the shores of Estonia--Hiuumaa, Saaremaa, the mainland--and in Curonia, but there was never anything like the push from Brandenburg. Never any drang nach osten (Scania aside), any pushing-aside of the native Slavs and Balts, their assimilation, no need to reclaim vast wasteland (west Jutland aside), certainly nothing which could have created the Kingdom of Prussia. Nothing like the First World War, never mind the Second World War ...
I went back to my reading, looking down at the screen under the light and I squinted. Scandinavia's Jews came from Grodno, and that area of northeastern Poland; the Tsar was a hard man, his minions harder, his mobs vicious, and so they left. As I paged, I saw interesting mentions, of Belarus as a putative homeland--urban, yes, in Minsk, but also in the countryside, a vast and complex Jewish civilization that could have evolved so wonderfully if it was not for Hitler's jackbooted thugs.
Disappeared civilizations: first the Poles, then the Jews, then, finally, the Belarusians, even the last almost as far removed from the contemporary mind as the Tiawanaku of Bolivia, or the Khoisan of South Africa, or the Urdu Muslims of Delhi and Lucknow. (The news updates I received electronically included a special report on how, as north India became less poor, the few Muslims who survived were continuing to emigrate in large numbers, to Bengal and the ADR and Iran and points further afield. The Hindutva was still powerful.)
After I finished reading the reports, the TGV halted at Stettin, at the furthest outpost of Germandom. The Oder--or Odra, depending on where you come from--was fairly slow, here as it ran into the Baltic Sea, and its waters shone darkly under the light reflected from the town and the bridges. I had my camera out, filming the darkness outside, of course; it was oddly beautiful, the people vaguely illuminated moving around and in and out of the train, the shapes of islands vaguely visible in the distance north, across the harbour. And then, the train began again and crossed into Poland.
We Scandinavians, residents of Norden, have a tendency to automatically assume that the Baltic Sea is a Scandinavian lake, peopled by people of Scandinavian heritage (Germanic or Finnic or, now, Baltic in a gesture to Latvia). People usually consider Leningrad, if only as an obstacle separating Estonia from Karelia and as an outpost of Russian Slavic Orthodox culture that has been beaten to the point of being interchangeable with Scandinavia, as soon as things stop being post-apocalyptic.
The Poles, though, I typed in my journal file, we tend to forget them. The Lithuanians as well, but the two cases are closely related. It isn't as if the Poles don't have a presence on the Baltic, haven't had a presence on the Baltic for centuries. Perhaps it was because we simply assumed that the Poles would become Germans, and as for the Lithuanians, who would ever take note of them? Perhaps it was because we missed the Poles' twinned marriages with the sea, at Gdansk, after the first and second world wars, and the Lithuanians' claims, too, to Klaipeda. We miss too much; we really don't know how all of our neighbours on the Baltic manage to live.
The Polish countryside at night looks different from the Danish countryside. Poland is, for all intents and purposes, as rich as Denmark; Poland is a society hardly less accomplished, and--dare I admit it, me a patriotic Dane?--rather more important to the wider world than Denmark. The farmlands that that I could glimpse simply looked less packed, newer, perhaps, as befitting a country of relatively lower population density than the crowded Danish isles, and of rather newer vintage, too (seized from the former natives, repopulated by Poles from central Poland and from lost Belarus). Perhaps Argentina's pampas looked something like Poland's northern Baltic plains.
The train was, after Stettin, direct to Grodno. I napped when the train rounded south of Gdansk, and stirred only after the train passed Bialystok. I turned the laptop on again, and began typing:
This area of northeastern Poland is the last remnant of the kresy,Poland's eastern frontier. It was once vast: before the War of Ukrainian Independence, it included the better part of Belarus, the whole western third of Ukraine, and Lithuania. (Ah, Lithuania, never an area with set frontiers: Once, most of it used to be Belarusian. And even now, there are still more than a few people inside Lithuania for whom Vilnius is Wilno. And in Poland ...) Grodno, Bialystok, Brzesc--once they were full of so many different peoples, so the National Jewish Archives say back in Copenhagen. And now, almost monoethnic. Poles, some Polonized Belarusians--some natives, others immigrants after the Soviet Civil War left Belarus trapped an autonomous republic in illiberal Russia--
I stopped typing that fragment, and went on to another (who knew whether it would ever be inside my narration, I needed to think this way):
Belarus is a ruined land. There were the Belarusians themselves, the Jews and Poles who lived alongside them, and the Russians who came to ruled them. The Jews have been slaughtered, the Poles chased out, and the War killed the Russians and the Belarusians. All that is left is a patchwork of half-remembered traditions that are part myth, part reality. Is this enough? I suppose that to be Belarusian is to be able to choose one's identity, even
to allow that identity to change over time. Only from time to time, usually in the gaps between rulers or in the odd moments of anarchy, has being Belarusian proved advantageous to anyone at all.
I was tired when I got off the TGV at the station in the early morning. Grodno is an old city, but well-kept, hard by the Niemen River. I know neither Polish nor Belarusian, but I could see, across the river and past the park, just barely, the wooden Church of SS Boris & Hilb, and more distantly the spires of Farny Cathedral. Orthodox and Catholic, together on
the fringes of Europe, in the mist of the early morning in northeast Poland. I'd arranged for my baggage to be dropped off at the car-rental agency, so I walked down the street. Grodno survived the Second World War, like Bialystok (unlike Brzesc which got razed, repeatedly); and I walked down the street, immersing myself in the restored brick-faced buildings, the stonework, the greenery (planted, no doubt, as part of the post-Third World War makework programs.)
I set to driving, and I crossed the Polish frontier within an hour. As the sun rose, I noticed that the countryside was different; glancing around, I realized that it was different because there was hardly anyone there. Belarus was once completely covered in forest, and though most of it was cleared by the 16th century for farming, but great plots had regrown since then. And after the Third World War, there was no one to keep the
forest--confiers, oak, beech, birch, growing and thriving in the swampy soil just as in Jutland--from completing the task. Even the wildlife exterminated in places by the gas was recovering--there was no one to predate upon them. There weren't any of the barley or flax fields, when I entered Belarus, that the pre-War travel guides promised. As I was driving to Minsk, I kept thinking--for some odd reason that only became apparent to me later--of Berlin. Not that I minded; the car stereo was only playing mindless Europop remixes, you know the type, all with the inane simple lyics in French and 180 beats per minute. And Berlin is a fascinating city. I say this in all serious, not as any legacy of a ridiculous faddish longing for Weimar Berlin, or an excessive appreciation for how it was and how it is otherwheres.
German is, in Danish schools, an obligatory foreign language like French. Instruction in French, though, begins in fourth form; instruction in German begins in fifth form. We've always had an interesting relationship with the Germans, more intimate even than what the Swedes had: They had German immigrants to work their mines and people their cities in the Middle Ages, but Danish kings ruled over the Germans of Schleswig and Holstein until 1864; indeed, we nearly lost south Jutland to Prussia. Our southern neighbours, as of late, have been powerful, almost too powerful; we can understand how the Canadians or Mexicans must have felt. And then, the Second World War, the 1943 invasion--We've our own particular perspective on Germany. And Germany's capital was Berlin. We know the Germans; we know Berlin.
Berlin: Chicago of Europe. (Buenos Aires was too cultured; Chicago, at least in the imagination of the wider world, stands in as the stereotypical city on the vast plain. A city absorbing vast flows of immigrants--Germans from the sand heaths of Brandenburg and Mckelenburg, Silesian peasants of any of a dozen ethnoreligious backgrounds, Poles from Prussian and Russian Poland, Jews, of course--cramming them together in filthy working-class apartment complexes, making irreverent Berliners in a city not known for its
traditions in a country dominated by militarism. And then:
Berlin: Sodom of Europe. Decadence under the Weimar Republic--sex and cabaret, street-fighting and economic collapse too late halted. A city out of control in a continent out of control in a world tilting out of control, heading breakneck for catastrophe. Never mind that everyone knew this was unsustainable, no one particularly cared. The old world had failed, the new world fast approaching would be hard, and we may as well do whatever the
hell we want. And then:
Berlin: The centre of the world's evil, under Nazi Greater Germany and during the Second World War. Wannsee's mansions are where the Holocaust was planned; the old Reichstag was where Hitler made his announcements of so many planned atrocities; the Brandenburg Gate under which so many soldiers marched in strict formation between the knife-wielding sacrifices to Wotan. And then:
Berlin: The shattered centre of the Nazi Reich, an erstwhile imperial capital brought to its knees by its leaders' spectacular insanity and the assembled forces of the world. Streets in ruin, people starving, a fate uncertain. Shall it be a Soviet zone of occupation? No. Shall it be a länd of the Bundesrepublik Deutschlands? No. Shall it be independent? In the lack fo any alternative ...
Berlin: A city devoid of its old hinterland, much too big for the Brandenburg countryside, much too unpopular to be entrusted with anything outside of Germany. (Shall the Poles want Berlin to be their capital, shall the Scandinavians, shall the Czechslovaks? Perhaps we can defrost the Wends and see if they'd have it.) So, the Berliners dust off the ruins and rebuild, and recruit. Shall we host a million Poles refugees from Communism? Why not; best not to make them angry again. Perhaps some Russian Jews would like to settle? Certainly; after all, there never were any Nazis here. Can we collect some Czechs, some Romanians, some Ukrainians, some Russian gentiles, some Algerians? Perhaps undergo to take in some Bohemian types? Let's; perhaps we can get ourselves a nice collection, fill the void.
Berlin, in a way, is like Leningrad. Leningrad was Russia's capital, in the last two decades of the Soviet Union, as it was the capital of the entire empire before 1917; Leningrad was the intellectual heart if not the spiritual soul of Rossiya. And then, in 1982, Leningrad was severed from its roots. Not that the Germans outside of Berlin were exterminated, but the Russians outside of Leningrad were. Leningrad's good for shopping, if you're Nordic and don't mind items ghoulishly acquired at second-hand, and the cost of living is low enough to attract immigrants from across Europe, across Europe's hinterland. But what use is it for, now? Leningrad was built as a capital like Berlin, but unlike Berlin Leningrad can't adapt. What is its hinterland but empty cities and the endless northern forest? And would the Ests and Finns, never mind the Swedes and Lithuanians, really want to be Leningrad's hinterland.
And then, there's Minsk. If Berlin's bad, Leningrad's worse; and if Leningrad's quite bad, then Minsk is apocalyptic. Berlin lost Germany, but it had alternatives; Leningrad lost Russia, and it had nothing. What can you do for a country when its capital city has lost itself?
Lida was interesting. Lida, as a town, is non-descript. It looks like Grodno, only a more decayed version. Driving into the town, I saw the forest, the omnipresent forest. It was a dense forest, from what I could see along the road, partly conifers planted in the mid-1980's by Ukrainians in their staggering country's makework programs, more hardwoods--birch especially--indigenous to Belarus. The main interruptions were of marshes, straggly trees pointing up from the moist ground and shallow pools of water. A pre-War tour book I'd bought in a used bookstore in Copenhagen suggested that the traveller should look for the tilled fields of black earth and the neat wooden villages. The fields had been taken over by the forest, just like almost all of the villages I'd passed were. Trees growing through windows, birds perched on streaked old concrete buildings, fallen electrical poles lying away from the road. The death of the vast mass of Belarusians didn't seem to have damaged the forest in the slightest. Perhaps there would be more remnants of the Soviet civilization further east, closer to the heart of the Union, Belarus had been one of the most industrialized areas of the Soviet Union, and perhaps in the east outside of the great forests there would be more visible signs of Soviet civilization. But from what I could see from the road, Soviet rule, Soviet mismanagement, Soviet pollution didn't seem to leave an enduring impression.
I was reminded of Gaia. James Lovelock was a British scientist, working for the European space agency in the 1960's, who devised a simple test to see if a world had an extensive biosphere: Was its atmosphere, like Earth's, in a state of chemical disequilibrium, or was its atmosphere, like Mars' or Venus', chemically stable? If dynamic, life existed. In Lovelock's vision, Gaia is not a single entity, Gaia is not intelligent. Gaia is an emergent property, rather, product of the innumerable reactions between water and rock, plant and animal, a product of feedbacks that in turn maintains the stability of the Earth, at some level or another. Even the Chixculub asteroid impact which destroyed the dinosaurs was only a momentary event, something to push Gaia on to new forms of organization. The Communautaire biologists say that Gaia should last another hundred million years or so, until the gradual expansion of the sun will turn the Earth's water into vapour and our clement atmosphere into something resembling Venus'. (Unless we do something about it, of course.) Gaia is fundamentally stable; Gaia couldn't be destroyed by anything short of a world-ending cataclysm; Gaia thrives in the aftermath of the Soviet Empire.
I arrived in Lida in the late after noon. The gazetteer reveals that Lida lies at 53° 59' 45" North latitude and 26° 4' East longitude, a hundred kilometres from Vilnius on what used to be the highway running to Grodno. It began as a Lithuanian town, early in the first millennium of the Common Era: The gazetteer says its name is similar to the Lithuanian "Lydda", meaning forest clearing, or it could also be derived from "lyditti" referring to the bog-iron deposits and ironworking in the Lida plain. There was a castle
built by the Lithuania Gedminas in 1323, to mark the frontier between the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the East Slavic states. And there was so much history, all painfully irrelevant now that the people shaped by this history for centuries are moldering in their graves.
(The Grand Duchy, incidentally, is interesting. Like us Nordics, Lithuanians were among the last people in Europe to convert to Christianity, and in the 14th century they ended up accepting Roman Catholicism from Poland. Yet for the vast majority of its existence, the Grand Duchy's population was largely made up of Orthodox Christian Slavs rather more closely related to the Ukrainians than to the Poles, never mind the Lithuanians. Not that ethnic boundaries weren't porous, but they didn't seem to interfere too often in the day-to-day functioning of the Grand Duchy. Even now, remnants of this tolerance exist: In Lithuania's capital of Vilnius, almost a quarter-million Poles live alongside their Lithuanian neighbours, and trace their ancestry to Belarusians who were both Catholicized and Polonized.)
Modern Lida is a small town. The concrete suburbs built in the Soviet era are dissolving into the growing forest, and Lida's population--estimated, I was told by the town mayor Zemon Spanik over the phone before I left Denmark, at 15 thousand people--is concentrated in the featureless town centre. Lida used to be, I was also told by Spanik, a charming town until the Second World War came and Lida was razed several times, the coup de grace being a Nazi nerve-gassing of the town and its Soviet liberators only a few months before that conflict ended. Lida's inhabitants before the Third World War were peasants and children of peasants who'd migrated into Lida from
the devastated countryside, and the town had grown to a lovely hundred thousand people. before the Third World War, which murdered the townpeople along with the peasants outside Lida who normally would have repopulated the town.
This time, the people who repopulated Lida came from outside. This isn't unusual: In Soviet times, Belarus was a highly industrialized state (by Soviet standards) with a high standard of living second only to Ukraine. Unlike the Ukrainian Associated Soviet Socialist Republic, the Byelorussian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic did not have any border controls to keep out immigrants; the periodical literature isn't precise on the number of immigrants, but there certainly were quite a few Russians interested in this non-quite-Russian autonomous republic. Belarus is a vacuum: An
impoverished vacuum, but it's surrounded by more than a hundred million people, including five million or so of fairly recent Belarusian ancestry. (Or at least, ancestry in Belarus; deported Lida Poles and second-generation Litvak Jews in Bukovina were never considered to be Belarusians by the Berianists who set the ByASSR's borders.) There are quite a few people who, given a chance to live without panzer divisions or death squads or silent machines wheeling in from over the horizon with their lethal bomblets, would be willing to go to this devastated land once their homeland. Spanik himself is an example.
It's odd, I reflected as I set up the camera outside the Lida city hall as Spanik stood, how common the body type of ectomorph has become. The famine is behind us, the food shortages gone thanks to the new GM food imports from Communauté globale, but even people who might be naturally given towards fat and roundness like Spanik tend to be thin. Spanik wasn't born in Lida, practically no one here in Lida now was. He was, he'd told me earlier, born to Belarusian gastarbeitar in Prague, Belarusians from the eastern just across the Russian frontier from Smolensk. He'd lived most of his live in Prague and was still a Czechoslovak citizen, but since last August he'd been a citizen of independent Belarus.
"The census material," he said, his skin drawn tight over his weak jaw, "is quite clear. People who hold only Belarusian citizenship--people who survived the War," Spanik emphasized in his Slavic-accented French, "are in a small minority here in Lida. People who've recently acquired Belarusian citizenshhip form the large majority."
"What countries do they come from?" I ask.
"Poland and Ukraine are the main sources, 40 and 30 percent each of the new immigrants, but people from Czechoslovakia like myself make up another 25%. And people from further afield--they're not interested in Lida," he shrugged. "They prefer Mensk, or Minsk--anyway, they prefer the capital. Lida, now, Lida's just a simple provincial town, and we like it that way. There's a lot of people who like vacationing here, people who like the nature. And it isn't a long commute to Europe."
We talk for another hour, as the wind blows and the people pass curiously. After my interview with Spanik is over, I pack up my equipment and go back to my hostel. Lida is a characterless city, a city of immigrants built in successive layers of ruins. The city hall was built after the Second World War, opposite the medieval (14th century) castle which had been rebuilt in the 1960's to attract tourists, and there were plenty of trees lining the streets (the chemical depopulants were infinitely selective), but it was dead. It was characterless. I typed into the night on my portable, and I wondered what Novogrodek--or Nowogrodek to the Poles, or Navahrudak to the Belarusians--would be like tomorrow.
Novogrodek is an interesting town. As I said earlier, it was capital of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania--capital, I suppose, from at least the 16th century right up to the final partitions of Poland--and it has been at the same time a major centre for the Slavs of Lithuania, the Belarusians. Polish influence grew, naturally, though; Lithuania and Belarusian were languages of the peasantry, Polish was the language of state, and well after the partitions--at least until the 1860's and the Tsar's successful attempts to detach the Poles from their former fellow citizens to their east--Polish was the language of this city. Indeed, Poland's national poet Adam Mickiewicz was born in this city--or just outside, the biographies were unclear about that. After the Nazi-Soviet partition of Poland, though, Nowogrodek became Soviet Byelorussian Novogrodek, the Jews were slaughtered by the Nazis, the Poles deported to Poland, and the Belarusians who'd had the city all to themselves for forty years were slaughtered by the Americans.
I spent my first while touring Novogrodek. The signs are mostly in Polish, as befits this most Polonized area of Belarus. I went and saw the castle ruins; I went and saw the stone-built Farny Catholic Church, built in 1723 on the site of a church founded in 1395 during the reign of the Lithuanian Prince Vitaut. And, I went outside Novogrodek to see the countryside: the Nalibockaja Pusca, an ancient woodland, and the Sviciaz' lake, one of the most beautiful lakes in Belarus. The whole area was supposed to be important in Polish and Belarusian literature, and I wandered with my camera, filming. I stopped short when I heard a couple talking in English.
"Hello," I said to them in English. The man smiled and introduced himself: "Hi, I'm Andrius Karalaskas, and this is my wife Lana." She waved to me and spoke, in a perfect unaccented English: "Good day, and you?"
"I'm Mikael Bergstrom, I'm from Denmark, I'm doing a film on this country." Her accent was odd, in English, it was unexpected yet familiar. "Are you British?" I asked. "Scottish, Irish, English ..." My voice trailed off as Lana looked at me. "Australian?"
"No, American," she smiled tiredly, "from Deccan Traps Earth. Everyone's surprised when they find out, you're not the first."
"Really?" I smile and shrug. "Well, my wife is Syrian-American, from Estates-General." To be specific, Leila is a Druze; yes, but the Kingdom of America is unique: It combines medieval porosity of sovereignty and ethnicity with a truly post-modern acceptance of the other. The term "Lithuanian-American" couldn't mean anything to our world's Americans, more's the pity. But on Deccan Traps Earth, where the United States seems to have been
quite a pleasant to live in, the term did mean something. More's the pity that our world's United States wasn't a tenth as liberal as that world's, or as any of the civilized countries on our world. A trade could have been good for us.
Andrius Karalaskas speaks excitedly into the camera, the American Lana holding his hand: "It's wonderful to see Nawahrudak, the place where the Grand Duchy of Lithuania--my country--was born. Even with all that's happened to it," he adds regretfully.
I nod, and quietly ask him, "What do you think about the Belarusians, their relationship to the Grand Duchy?"
He squints at me, and his mop of brown hair falls over his forehead. "How so? You mean, Belarus being a colonial territory?"
"No, I mean that the original capital of Lithuania was Navaharodak, in the heart of Belarus, that Lithuania's official language in that "Lithuanian" state was Belarusian and that the Grand Duke and the duke`s court, like most of the population, spoke Belarusian?"
Andrius frowns and looks at me sternly. "I won't hear anything of that. Ethnicity didn't matter, anyway. What's important is that the Grand Duchy was Lithuania; if the Belarusians want to join in, well, I can't blame them, poor devils."
And the Belarusians might indeed want to join Lithuania. The Grand Duchy is the only thing close to a nation-state that the Belarusians can claim, and certainly the Lithuanians were far more benign overlords than the Tsars, much less the Soviets. The Belarusians remained themselves in the Grand Duchy, never Balticized as they were Russified. Perhaps a federation? The suggestion has been made, repeatedly, but I fear the Lithuanians will never take up the offer.
In 1981 (the old guidebooks remind me), greater Minsk was home to some 1 780 000 people, with another 486 thousand living in communities within a twenty-kilometre radius of Minsk's borders. This made greater Minsk home to a quarter of the Byelorussian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic's population, and the fourth-largest city in the entire Russian Soviet
Federative Socialist Republic, behind only Moscow, Leningrad, and Gorky.
How things change.
Driving into Minsk from the west, you see the bedroom communities that have been abandoned. The buildings have been weathered, some breaking down, others crumbling at the edges with shattered windows and doors hanging on hinges (or by hinges): Soviet construction methods were never good to begin with, and two decades without maintenance did nothing to avert this
post-apocalyptic landscape.
Perhaps if the Second World War hadn't intervened and Belarus had stayed Polish, at least after a fashion; perhaps if the Belarusians had been as strong in their nationality after the Second World War as the Ukrainians were in theirs; perhaps if Chang had showed some pity in the end; perhaps, possibilities, all closed off by our history, and made irrelevant by a nation's death.
And how could I chronicle its rebirth, I wondered, as I entered the heart of the city, if they're not sure there was a nation in the first place?
So, comments?
