belarusians.co.uk | Беларусы ў Вялікабрытаніі

Bradt Travel Guides, 2008, 304 pp, isbn 978-1841622071. Available from Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com

This is the most comprehensive travel guide to Belarus available in English. It is certainly worth considering if you are about to visit the country or are just interested to know more about it. The book has its strong and weak moments.

It is written by Nigel Roberts, an Englishman who speaks Russian, has spent a lot of time in the country and met diverse kinds of people over the years. This gave him material for the many amusing stories he tells through-out the book which will certainly make an entertaining read for someone coming across Belarus and Belarusians for the first time.

The author has made a good effort to write about history and politics – two extremely contested subjects in that part of the world – with attention and in great detail. The result is rather an eclectic mix which perhaps is not bad for such a publication. With a great degree of certainty one may guess that that is what many Belarusians perceive their history and the present day like: unexpected independence after two centuries of Russian occupation and being part of the Soviet Union.

The author knows a lot about the Chernobyl catastrophe and its legacy; he writes passionately about the efforts of Belarusians and their friends in other countries to minimise the adverse consequences of that tragedy.

Culture is presented in the book rather thinly and with numerous mistakes, misspellings and Russified forms of Belarusian names which are mostly the result of the author’s ignorance of Belarusian.

The second part of the book is full of practical information about visiting cities and regions – travel, accommodation, eating and sightseeing. Naturally a large chunk of it is devoted to the capital, Minsk, with its comparatively well developed tourist infrastructure. On many occasions the reader is rightly cautioned that visiting the country on his/her own – especially not speaking Belarusian or Russian – will hardly be wise or even possible on the account of undeveloped tourist industry.

On the other hand, the author is fascinated with the country precisely because it may offer an unexpected experience, totally different than most of us are used to while travelling as tourists. “It is so completely unspoiled by the trappings of modern tourism and Western materialism that it’s very easy to feel a sense of having slipped into another time and dimension. In many ways, the country is a living museum of Soviet communism, but to treat it that way would be a gross disservice to the astonishing resilience of its people”, he writes. He is fascinated with the unspoiled nature, mysterious Russian Orthodoxy; museums rich of artefacts, but empty of visitors; and most of all – with warm, honest and hospitable people. “But whisper all this softly, for we must guard but not spoil these riches” he concludes.

Despite the author’s warmth towards my country and its people, I got a feeling of being treated as furniture in a colonial store – amusing, puzzling, so different. These love and fascination are somehow mixed with paternalism. How else to explain his being able to tell a story of bribing the Passport Control official – without any evident embarrassment in his words?!

Despite its shortcomings (and among them is the poorly built index), this book is a welcome contribution to writings about Belarus. For the present, there is nothing better to recommend to prospective travellers to my country.

Ihar Ivanoŭ