In Gorky Park the Minsk Eye was closed. There were icicles hanging from the edges of its metal lashes. The only thing sitting on the big wheel’s dangling chairs were piles of new snow, staring blankly down over the city. Below it a carousel of giant swans nestled, still and icy, their plastic wings folded in against the cold.
At first it seemed like nothing in the park was moving - twenty-five below zero is enough to freeze most things - but then a boy went hurtling by through the woods on a sled, watched by his mother from the top of a small hill. Further on I found a group of people chipping away at ice sculptures, fashioning miniature castles, chess pieces, dancing bears. Along the banks of the frozen Svisloch, near the weirs and bridges where patches of open water held off the encroaching ice, old men and women and young couples gathered to feed the flocks of wintering ducks. Against a backdrop of factory chimneys and looming apartment blocks, men fished through holes in the ice; sat on steel boxes and wearing hats of thick fur, they seemed to be reading secrets in the currents below. Footprints criss-crossed the river’s ice, leading backwards and forwards and turning in mysterious circles. If you looked closely there were traces of movement everywhere.
In a small nightclub near the new Belarusan National Library - a huge spherical building lit up on the outside by hundreds of blinking, multi-coloured lights, making it resemble a gigantic disco ball - a musician explained to me that the band playing that evening were performing some traditional Belarusan folk numbers. He was anxious for them to finish. He was due to play next. ‘What do you play?’ I asked. ‘Electronica’ he told me. ‘Avant-garde Electronica.’ I wasn’t exactly sure what avant-garde electronica was - and I’m still not exactly sure. What followed was slightly beyond my musical comprehension: a frenetic chanting set to scrambled loops of feedback and randomly generated bleeps and electric shrieks, that sounded something like a bunch of robot cats being strangled. Afterwards the musician informed me that this experimental music was mainly ‘an underground scene’ in Minsk. And yet, I thought, he’d shared the same stage and audience as the folk band. Rather like the new library, housing the country’s written heritage in a giant glitter ball, the evening appeared to reflect a certain characteristic of the city: the occasionally incongruous, sometimes garish, often bewildering, admixture of the traditional and the modern.
Perhaps the best illustration of this was to be found in another park. In Yanka Kupala’s Park a statue of the great Belarusan poet stands amongst the trees, trying to sneak a peak at a fountain a few hundred yards away, behind his left shoulder. Draped languidly over the edge of the fountain are two naked young women - done up beautifully in marble - who cast wreathes of flowers into the frozen water. The fountain is dedicated to the ancient Belarusan holiday of Kupalye, and offers a tentative glimpse into Belarus’s folk history - a history recovered and revitalised by ethnographers, writers and poets in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Like many similar projects undertaken in Europe during this period, it informed and reflected a burgeoning sense of national identity, to be grounded in the perceived (and imagined too) continuities of an ancient folk culture. However, you needed only walk to the edge of the park to witness the visible interruption of this project: in Minsk’s broad, rectilinear streets, in its colossal palaces of Stalinist neo-classicism, you can trace the gigantic footprints of twentieth-century modernity and empire.
What new footprints are being shaped in the snow and ice of contemporary Minsk I couldn’t say. Their exact form and direction always seemed to just elude my gaze. All I could see were traces and tracks, signs of movement and vitality that, like the wreathes of the young women cast into the waters of the fountain, hinted at destinations I could only guess at. Below the ice of the river the currents ebbed and flowed and circled.