Of all the days I spent wandering with cameras in Belarus, one comes back with particular clarity. I remember cycling hard against the wind outside Gomel, a city with more pharmacies than supermarkets. Eventually the rough tarmac road gave way to a dirt track, which in turn became a field of cabbage. It was a flat, desolate landscape, punctuated by the odd water tower or ramshackle barn, and criss-crossed with loosely strung power lines. Every time I passed beneath one, I was vaguely unnerved by a high-pitched thrum. At this point, I was just forty kilometres from the Ukrainian border, in some of the most formerly irradiated land in Belarus.
By the late afternoon, I reached my goal - a chemical plant seen at twilight from the window of a banged-up minibus. Nearby were several mounds of phosphate rock, huge hills of white amidst the late-summer greens. On another occasion, on the perimeter of another plant, I was questioned by police via Google Translate. But here, as with most places, I could get very close. The towering flare stack must have been visible for miles, fulfilling for the Soviets an ideological as well as productive function. In spectacularising infrastructure, they sought to highlight historical rupture and dramatise their faith in the emancipatory potential of the act of unveiling. In the forecourt was a weathered Lenin on a ten-foot plinth.
Decommunisation drives in other former republics have sought to banish socialist monuments from public space. But in Belarus, Soviet symbolism remains deeply emmeshed in the structures of everyday life. On exiting the metro station at Plosca Lienina in Minsk, people still rub the nose of a bronze Lenin bust for luck. It was explained to me by an old guide at the Zair Azgur Memorial Studio, a shrine to Soviet sculpture, that Belarusians are 'more moderate, less impetuous than their Ukrainian and Baltic neighbours.
This was the country I'd imagined before landing - a landlocked holdout of the USSR more or less insulated from the flattening flows of globalisation but still caught between two systems, a periphery on two fronts. And out in the edgelands where many of these photographs were made, it's almost still possible to believe in the actuality of the fallen empire. Very little in the material realm disturbs the atmosphere of the 1980s, and the quiet of the big skies is broken only occasionally by a long-haul still many hours from touchdown. Deeper into the hinterlands, there are more than vestiges of the old folk world: cottages with ornate window frames, little wooden churches and geese waddling in vegetable gardens.
But in Minsk, semiotic contradiction is everywhere. The hammer and sickle intermingle with increasingly prominent advertising and multinational branding. I spent many days exploring the city's different districts, setting off from an apartment with Khrushchev above the fruit bowl. After closing the padded front door, I would emerge into a courtyard just off Independence Avenue, a rumbling arterial boulevard built to withstand the weight of tanks. A minute's walk away was a busy plaza dominated by two corporate 'spectaculars', affixed to the roofs of opposing Stalinist buildings. The place is known colloquially as 'Coca-Cola Square' - quite the turnaround for a drink once seen as emblematic of American imperialism.
A few stops down the line is Victory Square, where, at the foot of a granite obelisk, youths stand guard over the Eternal Flame. The Great Patriotic War is never too far from consciousness in Belarus. Indeed, the victory over fascism serves as a kind of founding myth for the regime. For many decades, President Lukashenko has sought reflected legitimacy in rituals, ceremonies and monuments glorifying the partisans, whose guerrilla tactics were instrumental in thwarting Generalplan Ost, the Nazi blueprint for the extermination of most Slavic peoples. And yet, by the war's end, around half the Belarusian population was dead or displaced - a proportional cost much higher than any other European country.
In spite of this, the territory was rebuilt and industrialised in a spirit of triumphalist fervour following liberation in 1944. Minsk is modernist in the Socialist sense, with self-contained workers' districts and a startling integration of production and recreation. But it's also an Enlightenment city of landscaped parks, axial streets and colonnades. It doesn't take long to orientate yourself in the highly rational centre, where austere government buildings look out onto similarly stark squares. The most striking is the Constructivist House of Government, one of the only significant products of pre-war architectural experimentalism surviving in Belarus.
And as the country becomes more permeable to foreign capital, goods and people, the city is being relayered once more. Its throwback department stores are joined now by a sleek shopping centre with juice bars and zigzag walkways, and an undulating office complex straight from a Dezeen feature has risen on the banks of the Svislach. Wealth is becoming ever more conspicuous in Lukashenko's Belarus. I came across a row of unfinished mock châteaux on an unlovely thoroughfare outside Vitebsk, and an American limo parked near Mogilev's Saviour Transfiguration Cathedral. Although Soviet society was of course never truly egalitarian, its more unpalatable excesses tended to be concealed in Baltic forests or Black Sea coves.
These contrastingly explicit signs of status in Belarus, representing more than stirrings of the kind of oligarchical decadence denounced by Lukashenko as having fallen upon Russia, suggest something interesting about the contemporary social psyche. The gradual but inexorable cracking of the ideological façade has helped to bring about a shift in a people increasingly pacified using consumerism. One which runs against the president's cynical call for Belarus to carry forward the spirit of Leninism and fulfil its 'great role' as the leader of Slavic civilisation.
