a protective barrier in World War II of Maginot proportions (and delusions)
This is the twelfth in a series about train and bicycle rides from Switzerland to Belarus
in those carefree days before pandemic lockdowns
Once I got the hang of riding my bicycle on the sidewalks in Minsk
as the sidewalks are wide and there were few people on foot
And I was there before tens of thousands took to the streets in opposition to the strong-man band of President Aleksandr Lukashenko
On most days I set off with a checklist of things to see—Oswald’s apartment
etc.—and so long as I stayed out of the streets no one minded the intrusion of a bicycle in the capital
although I only saw a handful of other riders during my stay
Since the art museum was just around the corner from my hotel and was sometimes open in the evenings
and inside I could buy postcards and wander among the paintings
many of which reminded me of the farmland through which I had biked to get to the Berezina Crossing
I found myself drawn to the landscape paintings of Alexey and Sergey Tkachev
brothers and artists who survived the Great Patriotic War (World War II) and whose paintings can be found in Russia and
The village where they were born is now close to the border between Russia and Belarus (then it was just western Russia)
and their paintings evoke the rural simplicity that is still prevalent across much of Russia and Belarus
One painting in the museum shows the women of a village—obviously during the war as all the men are absent—walking to a riverside church
Another painting is of a simple wooden house—it could well be in Studienka
on the Berezina—where a woman is tending a flock of ducks
Yet another painting shows a war widow posing—if not begging for food?—with her husband’s war medals that have been pinned to a suit jacket that he once owned
The jacket is on a hangar and hanging on a city wall
Her expression is both apprehensive and stoical
A portrait of a war veteran posing in the 1980s
Perhaps he is a thoughtful university professor
but also somehow detached from the present
as if lost in thoughts about the horrors of the war that he witnessed and survived
I spent a morning at the Great Patriotic War Museum
during the more recent street demonstrations
is where the protesters often end their marches
sits on a small hilltop that is capped with Minsk’s “Hero City” obelisk (Stalin awarded it)
Nor far from the museum is the residence of Belarus President Aleksandr Lukashenko
All around the museum there are steps and grass
and in good weather and bad it’s a logical place for an anti-government rally to end—perhaps to make the point that it’s patriotic duty to oppose an autocratic president
To understand the current relationship between Vladimir Putin’s Russia and Lukashenko’s Belarus
the Great Patriotic War Museum is not a bad place to start
as it makes little distinction between the “two Russias,” and from the museum it would be easy to come away with the impression that the Soviet Union (at least between Belarus and Russia) is alive and well
Most of the exhibits in the museum are life-sized dioramas with tanks
all of which tell the (Soviet) story of the war
which means leaving out the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Non-Aggression Pact or Stalin’s liquidation of hundreds of professional military officers just before the war (leaving Russia at the mercy of a German attack)
As the legatee of the now defunct Soviet Union
Russian President Vladimir Putin sees Belarus as the lynchpin in his country’s forward line of defense against the heirs of Napoleon’s France and Nazi Germany
both of which took cracks at Moscow (in 1812 and 1941)
With NATO in the Baltic states to the north and knocking on the door in Ukraine to the south
Putin thinks of Belarus as a wedge (a huge Pripet Marsh?) in Russia’s forward defenses
The people of Belarus might despise Lukashenko
who takes direction from the Kremlin (as if the last Soviet satellite in Eastern Europe)
but Putin will never concede a post-Soviet Belarus to the Western sphere of influence
To do that would be to withdraw Russia’s line of defense to the flatlands just west of Smolensk
would love to imagine that they are having their Solidarity moment (with tens of thousands rallying on Sundays in Minsk)
but the most likely outcome will be that of the 1956 Hungarian revolt
which ended with Russian tanks in Budapest
Whether Putin personally likes Lukashenko or not (I think he does
otherwise he might not have dumped $1.5 billion into the Belarusian economy recently
the fact remains that the Russian president sees his own fate tied to that of his counterpart in Minsk
the lesson of Yalta—the Russians believe in buffer states
while the West puts more faith in spheres of influence
Before and during World War II, Belarus was part of what Yale historian Timothy Snyder calls the “Bloodlands” (comprising Poland
in which not only Jews but many other groups and races suffered genocidal losses when caught for years between Stalin’s Russia and Hitler’s Germany
In listing the crimes that took place here
Snyder writes about the victims of the Soviet famines in neighboring Ukraine (in the 1930s)
which in all claimed more than 10 million lives
Belarus lost about a quarter of its pre-war population—to war
etc.—and most of its cities were destroyed
Many pictures in the museum show Minsk reduced to rubble
Some 10,000 villages were destroyed across the country
Walking around the museum I spent a lot of time studying the maps of the so-called Stalin Line that prior to 1941 stretched from the Baltic to the Black Sea
and was supposed to protect the Soviet Union from a western invasion
It was a static line of World War I conception
but was swept aside by the German blitzkrieg
which is why from 1941-44 Belarus was under German occupation
there are preserved sections of the Stalin Line which can be visited—a day out of town to visit rusting artillery and tanks
One afternoon I took my bicycle on a commuter train and traveled out to the town of Zaslawye
The ride took about 45 minutes—it stopped often—and the train dropped me near the historic remains of a medieval village
It felt somewhat like the Belarus equivalent of colonial Williamsburg
although when the Germans took the town they rounded up the 248 Jews living there in a ghetto and killed them
I asked directions to the Jewish cemetery in town—I had read that it had recently been discovered and preserved—but no one I spoke with had any idea where it was
It might well have been over the horizon of a flat earth
The Stalin Line at Zaslawye isn’t just a few bunkers and trenches with barbed wire
But the trucks on the busy thoroughfare north from Zaslawye spooked me on to side roads
and by the time I got to the park’s entrance
and I decided against trying out a tank on the proving grounds
I didn’t think the park would have an exhibit entitled
Later, when I got home, I looked up the answer in Alan Clark’s Barbarossa: The Russian-German Conflict 1941-1945
which I first read on a big red train ride from Moscow to Ulan Bator in 2008
and he quotes one intelligence report that said it was “a dangerous combination of concrete
cornfields cut according to the trajectory of machine gun fire
Its whole extent right up to the positions of the defenders was camouflaged with a consummate art…” He adds
that “the fortified districts were not linked…and the term ‘line,’ although it may have denoted an ultimate goal
no more than a geographical illusion founded on the presence of a sequence of fortified districts all in roughly the same longitude.”
after Russia partitioned Poland with Germany in 1939
it moved its “line” from near Minsk well west into Poland (in the flatlands between Warsaw and Brest)
which meant that when the Germans attacked in 1941
the Russians were newly established at their forward bases to the west and easily swept aside
Had Stalin not felt the need to yet again partition Poland
he might well have been spared the sieges around Leningrad and Moscow
Only after I left Belarus did I come across a copy of Peter Mezhiritsky’s On the Precipice: Stalin, the Red Army Leadership and the Road to Stalingrad, 1931-1942
and much stream of consciousness) about the reasons Russia was so vulnerable to a German invasion; he blames Stalin’s purges of the senior officers in the Red Army
had there been no purges… matters might have never reached the need for a defense of Stalingrad.”
Next: Lukashenko’s Belarus. Earlier installments can be found here
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