Word: minsk
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...Physically and psychologically, the town is stuck in a strange twilight between the Brezhnev-era Soviet Union and the modern European Union. In Minsk, the capital 250 miles away, the government retains the sheen of its totalitarian past. In 2006, Aleksandr Lukashenko, a Soviet-era official who claims to have been the only member of the Belarus legislature to vote against the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, was elected to his third term as president. With his command of 84% of the vote and a tight leash on opposition parties, he has good reason to expect that he will...
...Although taxes are levied on the properties, none of the revenue is spent locally; all of the money goes to Minsk. Nor would there be any local structure such as a town council or community board to spend tax revenues. In the old days, a rural soviet (committee) would have met regularly. But attendance was enforced, and everyone understood that the proceedings were largely meangingless. Nowadays, no one bothers...
...chairman receives a small salary from Minsk, but he provides very little in the way of governance, preferring instead to tend to his own affairs such as constructing a new barn on his property, while leaving residents to resolve disputes amongst themselves...
Passions were riding high Jan. 8, as the hockey team of Russia's state-run energy giant Gazprom locked horns with the Belarus national team in the final game of the annual Belarus President's international hockey tournament in Minsk. In a desperate moment, a Belarusian tripped the Gazprom captain with his stick, but the Russian scrambled back to his feet to pass the puck in a lightning movement that led to a goal. Gazprom won the game 4-3, and the cup. And well it should, smiled the Gazprom captain Alexander Medvedev, 51, because Gazprom always wins...
...whose every move is tactical, Gorbachev is intent on one overriding goal, stability, for the country and himself. In a speech last month in Minsk, he told workers, "I am decisively in favor of political and economic stabilization, for strengthening order, so that authority is authority and not jelly." He now favors a "stable political coalition of centrist forces" that will include more than the Communist Party but exclude radical democratic groups. He apparently envisions parliament and national politics as Communist- dominated but co-opting enough dissent to keep the comrades on their toes. "It is necessary to turn...