The Shortest, Longest Bus Trip

I love The European Review of Books – based in Maastricht, it’s renowned for its brilliant essays about life across the continent and beyond. This story comes from the East, reporting on a visit to Belarus. There’s lots of rich detail here about life in “Europe’s last dictatorship”, and the absurd vanity of Alexander Lukashenka (the text uses the Belarusian transliteration of his name, rather than the Russian ‘Lukashenko’). But readers in the West shouldn’t feel too comfortable in their cosy democratic freedoms, because the absurdities only intensify once it’s time to cross back into the EU. I hope you’ll enjoy this glimpse of a Europe that not many Europeans get to see.

On 1 July 2024, the European Union announced that, starting from midnight on 16 July, no passenger car with a Belarusian license plate would be allowed entrance into the EU at the border of Belarus and Schengen. The Belarusian capital of Minsk is a mere 185km from the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius; bus services run between the cities. That July, I took a bus to Minsk and back. The “and back” part revealed a border laid bare.

The passenger car ban had long been coming. In 2020, the Belarusian president, Alexander Lukashenka, officially won the presidential elections in a landslide of 80.23 percent of the votes, unleashing the largest anti-government demonstrations in the history of Belarus. (Lukashenka has been in power since 1994: the country’s first and only president since the office was established.) Extreme repression followed; political opposition was mostly incarcerated, except for those who managed to flee in time, usually to Lithuania and Germany. In response, the West issued economic sanctions.

On 23 May 2021, a Ryanair flight from Athens to Vilnius was intercepted as it flew over Belarus and was diverted to Minsk, so that Belarusian authorities could arrest the opposition activist and journalist Roman Protasevich. Facing even more sanctions, Lukashenka threatened to “flood” the EU with “drugs and migrants”: “Now you will eat them and catch them yourselves.” Throughout 2021, tens of thousands of unauthorized border crossing attempts were recorded by the governments of Estonia, Lithuania and Poland. Migrants, stemming mostly from the Middle East and North Africa, explained that they had had the support of the Belarusian authorities, who had given them instructions about how and where to cross the EU’s border, what to tell the border guards on the other side, and even provided them with wire cutters and axes. The EU accused the Belarusian KGB of engaging in hybrid warfare and of manufacturing a migration crisis.

War in Ukraine, with Belarus deemed a co-aggressor, brought more sanctions – together with more problems for Belarusian citizens, especially those who had emigrated, or wanted to. Their countries of reception (mainly the Baltics and Poland) were adopting increasingly restrictive immigration policies under the banner of “national security”. In just four years the Belarusian-Schengen border had grown thicker, denser, mightier than ever.

The day after the EU’s car exclusion took effect, Belarus responded with strategically open arms. The Belarusian Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced a temporary visa-free entry on land for all EU citizens, to be effective from 19 July, 8:00am, through the end of 2024 (a policy extended into 2025, and then 2026). The stated goal: “to further demonstrate the openness and peacefulness of our country, its commitment to the principles of good-neighborliness, as well as to facilitate inter-human contacts and improve freedom of movement.”

And so in late July I found myself couched in seat #3 of a Eurolines bus to Minsk. I am, I should mention, a Spanish graduate student of Slavic languages and cultures. To improve my Russian, I’d been living in Tallinn, Estonia, with a Belarusian family. Long story short, they had driven to Minsk before the EU’s ban, and were therefore stuck in that city with a car they couldn’t drive back. My diversion to Minsk was not the stuff of spy novels but of pedestrian border policies: I was to deliver a second set of keys to that family’s vestigial Hyundai (so that they could sell it, at a loss, before returning home to Tallinn). And while I was at it, to glimpse that riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma that is (as Condoleezza Rice nicknamed Belarus back in 2005) “Europe’s last dictatorship”.

The morning air in Minsk was alarmingly warm. The clock and thermometer outside the Central Bus Station read 9am / 29 degrees. I tried to capture free Wi-Fi from the McDonald’s, to activate my Belarusian data plan. But it wasn’t a McDonald’s, it was a Mak.by, with a similar yellow “M”. (McDonald’s suspended all its operations in Russia and Belarus in 2022. The restaurants were taken over by local chains that simply rebranded McDonald’s items.) I barely made it to the Niamiha metro station, which is inside a sizable underpass crossing the even more sizable Niamiha Street (the great Niamiha river once flowed through Minsk, but has now been banned to subterranean pipes). In 1999, that underpass had the grim honor of hosting a human stampede when a concert-going multitude trampled over its slippery pavement. In front of it, there’s the socialist realist relief, called “Solidarity”, carved in the 1960s: a phalanx of laborers charging forward toward a socialist utopia. Today they charge over the smile of Colonel Sanders; the relief stands atop a KFC (a real one, opened in 2015).

The thing about Minsk’s Stalinist architecture is that there’s no shade in the large expanse of flat terrain. The impossibly broad avenues leave you openly and frontally exposed to the scorching sun, which can hunt down citizens directly and effectively. Nor do the grand buildings offer any refuge: their windows have no balconies, as if to better shoot the light back down to the ground level and leave you completely exposed. There are no narrow meandering alleys into which to escape; no denser part of the city to vanish into. No point in trying to outrun the chasing enemy; every stride forward draws you closer to another gigantic square, where you’ll feel even tinier and more defenseless. Independence Avenue felt purposely designed for chasing down future demonstrators more easily – to turn the city into the government’s first collaborator.

I wandered around the Galleria Minsk, the newly-built, more-or-less Americanized shopping mall. In a massive shop that looked like Sephora but was not Sephora, I looked for an Yves Saint Laurent tester, but all the testers had disappeared. One grandiose building leads to another grandiose building, from the Minsk City Hero Obelisk in front of the Belarusian State Museum of the History of the Great Patriotic War to the Independence Palace, the Square of the National Flag, the Olympics-sized Fitness World and the Football Club Minsk, and then back to the Independence Avenue, all the way past the Lenin Monument, and the Museum of Modern Belarusian Statehood, and the State Theatre, the Victory Monument, along all the Faculties of Linguistics and Academies of Sciences.

In front of the National Library – a massive 26-sided bulb (a rhombicuboctahedron) completed in 2006 – there’s a big statue of Francysk Skaryna, the Belarusian monk who in the sixteenth century translated the Bible into Ruthenian (Old Belarusian), the language of the mighty Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Not so far away, on Communist Street, was the spot where Lee Harvey Oswald lived from 1960 to 1962. He left roughly one year before killing Kennedy. (“See?” said my guide, the patriarch of the Hyundai family. “We’re not that irrelevant!”)

I kept noticing funny signs. “2024 — Год качества. !а Беларусь!” (“The Year of Quality. For Belarus!”) This, I was told, started at the end of 2011, when Lukashenka stamped 2012 as “The Year of Book” to improve “the role of books and reading in our society” and “the development of patriotic literature”. (In 2003, on the occasion of the death of Vasil’ Bykau, one of Belarus’ main writers, Lukashenka lyrically reminisced on Russian television about how he’d studied Bykau’s poems in school. Bykau, regrettably, never wrote any poems; he was a prose writer.) This thing about naming years was, at first, part of Belarus’s brief “western turn”, when the regime was courting the West and promoting its own “national culture” to keep its Russian dependency at bay. The Year of Book was followed by The Year of Thrift (2013), The Year of Hospitality (2014), The Year of Youth (2015), The Year of Culture (2016), and The Year of Science (2017). The Year of the Little Motherland, as it happened, lasted three years, from 2018 to 2020. 2021 had to contend with 2020’s post-election chants of “Л,каше.ка, УХОДИ!” (“Lukashenka, LEAVE!”), and so it was dubbed The Year of National Unity. To its aid came The Year of Historical Memory (2022) and, for good measure, The Year of Peace and Creation (2023). 2024 was the Year of Quality, and 2025 The Year of Improvement of Public Services. We are now in The Year of the Belarusian Woman; the future is yet to be branded.

Unless every year is the Year of Historically Bad Timing. To helicopter into Minsk – or to bus into Minsk, into its architecture and its branded years – is to contemplate that history. And to glimpse the centuries of historical and geographical twists swirling beneath the arbitrary, non-negotiable borders of the national present.

When the Belarusian intelligentsia began its national awakening in the first decades of the twentieth century, most of them lived in Vilnius, and also spoke Polish or Russian. Beyond that urbane intelligentsia, “Belarusians” (i.e., peasants who spoke some Belarusian) were to be found all across what is nowadays Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia, and parts of Ukraine, Poland and Russia. To nationalists’ dismay, they did not necessarily think of themselves as “Belarusians” in nation-state terms; they were simply “from here” (tutejszy, an adjective derived from tut: “here”). That Belarusian intelligentsia was devoured in the bellicose twentieth century; it was not them but the Soviet Union that ushered in the Belarusian state that endures, and it was in the Soviet period that Belarus modernized and became its own thing, its own country with its own identity. A certain Soviet nostalgia still reigns in the Soviet Union’s wake, to which Lukashenka can appeal as inherently Belarusian.

The intercity bus-hopping tourist feels the ironies and inversions. The greasy potato pancakes (“bulviniai blynai” in Lithuanian, “draniki” in Belarusian) taste the same, as does the cold beetroot soup (“šaltibarščiai” in Lithuanian, “holodnik” in Belarusian). Across the Lithuanian border, in Vilnius, the old KGB building is now a museum of “national liberation”, detailing the horrors of Soviet repression, aligning valiant Lithuanian anti-Nazi with valiant Lithuanian anti-Soviet partisan resistance. The other Baltic capitals, Tallinn and Riga, have similar museums. Minsk’s KGB building, though, still houses the Belarusian KGB, on Independence Avenue 17. There’s a Lenin statue nearby, right in the middle of Independence Square (where many anti-Lukashenka rallies took place in 2020).

After Lithuania’s independence in 1990, Vilnius’s Lenin statues and Soviet symbols disappeared from the city landscape, all taken to Grūtas Park, in southern Lithuania, 130 km away from Vilnius and 25 km from the Belarusian border. The center of Vilnius is now guarded by statues of Mindaugas (the first Grand Duke of Lithuania, in the thirteenth century, and its only crowned king) and Gediminas (fourteenth-century Grand Duke, central to the city’s founding myth), in the same way that Lenin still guards Minsk’s. De-Leninization elsewhere makes Minsk seem, well, as-yet-still-Leninized, still rehearsing behind an iron curtain that its neighbors have already been performing in front of.

The ironies extend even to the rivers around which these sibling cities emerged. The River Niamiha once flowed through, and once shaped, Minsk. Also known as the Nemiga River, its banks were “the bloody banks of the Nemiga river” referred to in the foundational Slavic medieval epic, The Tale of Igor’s Campaign. The Niamiha had a tendency to flood, so in the nineteenth century it was tamed: its floor was deepened and its waters covered with wood. (Tsarist Russia, which had by then absorbed Minsk, was adept at taming rivers since Peter the Great’s construction of St. Petersburg.) In the twentieth century the river was tamed in a different way, and buried once and for all. It now runs through subterranean pipes, the construction of which began in the 1920s and finished during the post-war Soviet reconstruction of Minsk. (85 percent of the city had been reduced to rubble in the war.) Nowadays, the River Niamiha is nowhere to be seen, except for the culverts from which it flows into its freer sibling, the River Svislach. Every now and then, it still insists on bursting from its pipes.

Vilnius was also shaped since time immemorial by a river – the River Vilnelė, together with its larger sibling the River Neris – but the rivers’ expressive histories could not be more different. Consider Vilnius’s Republic of Užupis, founded on April Fool’s Day 1997 by a bunch of artists in the neighborhood of that name. (“Užupis” means “beyond the river” or “on the other side of the river”.) Article 1 of the Republic’s cheeky constitution establishes rights for both humans and rivers (or at least one river): “Everyone has the right to live by the River Vilnelé, while the River Vilnelé has the right to flow past people.” If jealousy was a right, Minsk’s river Niamiha ought to have the right to be jealous of the River Vilnelé.

Among the other rights in the 41-point Užupis Constitution are the right to be idle, the right to cry, the right to understand nothing, the right to celebrate or not celebrate their birthday, and of course the powerfully paradoxical right to have no rights. The constitution also announces that “everybody has the right to be of any nationality”, which, sure, would be nice. And it’s possible, in the hipster pockets of both cities, to forget where one is, to forget nationality.

My last dinner in Minsk was in one of those repurposed iron macrostructures where you can feel transnationally ultracool for the reasonable price of a papaya-flavored IPA and an avocado burger wrapped in a newspaper. I’d been to such a spot in Vilnius, in the century-old Lukiškes Prison (which, between the world wars, held West Belarusian prisoners and where, strangely, a chunk of Stranger Things season four was filmed in early 2020 [before the elections]). The Vilnius girls that now dined in the former prison, with their satin skirts and mermaid hair, looked like they came straight from Camelot. The Guineveres of Minsk, though, preferred denim maxi skirts (the 2024 summer trend, according to Vogue); their Lancelots were armored with half a bottle of Dior Sauvage. Potato, potahto.

The bus from Minsk to Vilnius left at ten to nine at night. From Vilnius, I would travel back to my temporary home in Tallinn. The guy next to me was a proper chevalier. He greeted me with a Russian “Hello Madam”, told me his name and said, “let us be neighbors”. (In Russian it’s not so old-fashioned.) It’s only 149 km from the city center of Minsk to the Lithuanian border; we reached it in an hour and a half.

Every time I have to cross a passport-guarded border, I think of an oft-cited paragraph from Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday: Memories of a European (1942), reflecting on the borders wrought by the First World War:

“Before 1914, the earth had belonged to all. People went where they wished and stayed as long as they pleased. There were no permits, no visas, and it always gives me pleasure to astonish the young by telling them that before 1914 I travelled from Europe to India and to America without passport and without ever having seen one. One embarked and alighted without questioning or being questioned, one did not have to fill out a single one of the many papers which are required today. The frontiers which, with their customs officers, police and militia, have become wire barriers thanks to the pathological suspicion of everybody against everybody else, were nothing but symbolic lines which one crossed with as little thought as one crosses the Meridian of Greenwich.”

Zweig started the book after uprooting from Austria in 1934, following Hitler’s rise to power. The vector of his nostalgia was toward the Austro-Hungarian empire of his youth, before the war. Zweig’s reputation is contested. At the time of his emigration he was one of the most translated authors in the world, although also one of the most reviled. In some accounts, “the Habsburg myth” he helped create lies at the cradle of the EU project.

As our bus was brought to a halt at the end of an endless queue of lorries, trailers, buses and personal vehicles, Zweig’s lament felt both prophetic and quaint. It is from the book’s final chapter, “The Agony of Peace”, and goes on to detail with keen bleakness the tedium of that post-1914 reality:

“The humiliations which once had been devised with criminals alone in mind now were imposed upon the traveller, before and during every journey. There had to be photographs from right and left, in profile and full face, one’s hair had to be cropped sufficiently to make the ears visible; fingerprints were taken, at first only the thumb but later all ten fingers; furthermore, certificates of health, of vaccination, police certificates of good standing, had to be shown; letters of recommendation were required, invitations to visit a country had to be procured; they asked for the addresses of relatives, for moral and financial guarantees, questionnaires, and forms in triplicate and quadruplicate needed to be filled out, and if only one of this sheaf of papers was missing one was lost.”

These humiliations were both inefficient and universal, and he blamed them on “the pathological suspicion of everybody against everybody else”. Our own era’s borders are more contradictory than the borders in Zweig’s melancholy account: the tedium is layered with higher-tech efficiencies, we bounce between biometric facial recognition and the clunk of a passport stamp. Zweig’s post-1914 border treated everyone like a criminal; our borders sift denizens into stratifications that are now internalized. Still, the crossing between Belarus and the Schengen Area would not have surprised him: it is a border laid bare.

Crossing the Belarusian-Lithuanian border by bus is, today, a complex ritual. Here’s how it’s done:

1. Arrive at the border.
2. Officers from the country of departure enter the bus and check all passports.
3. Proceed to the country of departure’s check-point.
4. Get out of the bus (without luggage) and enter the checkpoint for the country of departure’s passport control, while the bus is inspected.
5. Board the bus again, and drive one hundred meters or so to the country of arrival’s checkpoint.
6. Get out of the bus again (with luggage) and enter the checkpoint for the country of arrival’s passport control, while the bus is inspected again. If you have any goods to declare, declare them now.
7. Board the bus again, and wait for the red traffic light to turn green.
8. Leave the border.

While in step 4, outside the bus, my red passport generates curiosity in the sea of blue Belarusian passports, and the guy next to me gave in: “Madame, where are you from?” he asks in Russian, “From where?” he repeats in English with a thick accent.

“From Spain, from Barcelona,” I reply in Russian. Ah’s and Oh’s ensue from the group, all Belarusians from Belarus or Belarusians from the Baltics. They ask if I’ve traveled under the new law.

At step 6, the Lithuanian passport control officer leafs through my Spanish passport, the third page of which lists “Place of Birth” as “Barcelona, Spain” and asks me: “From Spain?” No, Sir, from Sri Lanka – but I bite my tongue. Back home (in Spain, not Sri Lanka) a legend has it that the USA Traveler Entry Form asks, “Is the purpose of your visit to attempt against the life of the President of the United States of America?” Popular wisdom warns of holidays and honeymoons ending all too soon because somebody couldn’t resist ticking the Yes box. I give the officer my most law-abiding, paying-taxes-is-my-passion “YES” and hope it’s good enough. Not that I have anything to hide. My life is remarkably un-criminal. He smashes my passport closed, shoves it back to me, and the automatic doors open. I stride officially into the EU, into the Schengen space, which Lithuania joined on 21 December 2007.

Vilnius is only 39 km from the border, but the limbo at Schengen’s edge is endless. A tremendous summer storm falls upon us at 1:40am, as the last of us are cleared and get back into the bus [step 7]. We wait for one hour, and then two, and then three. At 4:40am, the red traffic light is still suspended in front of us. My neighbor-traveler shows me a photo of him and his girlfriend. They’re both from Minsk, but she wears a satin skirt like the Vilnius girls do, and there they are, happy in a repurposed iron macro-structure. 5:40, 6:40, the sun has risen, 7:40, 8:40. Why won’t the light turn green if this girl is also wearing a satin skirt, if they’ll also pay fifteen euros each for craft beer at the Lukiškes Prison?

At 10:30 in the morning, an older woman advances with difficulty up the aisle. Her neck, deformed by hyperthyroidism, connects directly to her bulldog cheeks. She pants with each step, and her short, dyed hair is plastered in her forehead.

“Driver,” she asks in Russian, “can we at least open the doors, to breathe a bit?”

“It’s not allowed.”

She contemplates the red light briefly, then tries again. “So, what? Aren’t we people? Aren’t we human too?”

What does a border know? Does it know its own arbitrariness? Does it know we don’t want to flood Schengen with drugs? Doesn’t it know we’re good people, and clean? Minsk is very clean! You could walk barefoot in Minsk, though you’d burn your feet on the shadeless pavement. I didn’t throw out a single cigarette butt in Minsk, because it was the Year of Quality, and even if Marlboro were sold in Minsk (which it isn’t because of the sanctions) I wouldn’t throw a single butt, because our potato pancakes are similar and we are all very hardworking and very well-behaved.

The driver shuts the engine off, the windows mist up quickly. There’s no sound; even the rain has flowed on, while the border still contains us here. It doesn’t really matter, though, because we have all begun to transcend. Our stories have halted. Petrification has started from the front, from the part closer to the blurred red circle that still shines bright. We’ll soon become somebody else’s uncanny. They’ll find us here, underground, fossilized alive, and we’ll horrify them. It will be delightful. Our driver is hunched slightly forward, hands on the wheel, eyes fixed on the red light. The great artist who is sculpting this future masterpiece has chosen to portray him at his most alert, seconds away from slamming the accelerator. Future art historians will emphasize the artist’s craft in capturing in stone the tension of his neck, the mental dynamism conveyed in the furrowed brow.

The European Review of Books is a magazine of culture and ideas. It sometimes reviews books, but it’s renowned for its long, adventurous essays, reporting from across the continent and beyond.

Paula Domingo Pasarín was born in Barcelona, and holds a MA from uChicago and a MPhil from Oxford. She’s currently doing a PhD in Slavic Studies at Princeton. Wisdom still eludes her – but the chase around the world is fun.

Dylan White is an artist animator moving between drawing, animation and comics. He often focuses on themes of deep time, landscape and animism through a mix of analogue and digital media. You can see more of his work on Instagram.

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