a week in Belarus
After the (too) short trip to Kaliningrad, I continued with the same tour company, and some of the same group members, to Belarus. An easy border crossing in this time, and the tour leader seemed to be trying to build bridges with those he’d previously offended, so I was hopeful that this trip – a full week – would go according to plan. & most of it did. Okay, so we didn’t get to visit the workshop of Ozgur, “one of the most esteemed sculptors of the USSR, his workshop full to the brim of monuments to Lenin, Soviet War heroes, and statues of other important communist figures from Kim II Sung to Fidel Castro”, nor to meet “our friend who supplies local film directors with uniforms and weapons of the Second World War. He will provide you with the uniform of a Red Army General and be able to take some fairly epic photos in the surrounding area” (this latter would not have interested me anyway) – and most importantly for most of us, at the Stalin Line (a series of bunkers on...