Territory of Contrasts

Gaidai's "The Diamond Arm" has been popping up all the time lately.

The reality in Belarus now drives either bile or adrenaline, or inspires with a new Tsesler, or ad nauseam swiftly pulls to the bottom with the unsympathetic predatory inhabitants which it is better not to get to know closely. It saves me in such a situation - to recall a suitable episode from any film and imagine myself not as a participant in what is happening, but as a spectator. As if you can turn off this movie, give it a rating of one, and return to a conditionally normal life.

And although there seems to be no reason to have fun, Gaidai's "The Diamond Arm" has been popping up all the time lately: "The topic of the lecture is "New York - a city of contrasts." "But I haven't been to New York." "Where have you been?" "I was in Istanbul, Marseille..." "Here you go: "Istanbul is a city of contrasts," what's the difference? We will rewrite the announcement."

Oh, I think this is about us, and everyone can become a lecturer because everyone was here “from our housing office”. Come on, I'll start.

Minsk is a city of contrasts. Only here a special forces brigade can detain a guide, who an hour before had given them an excursion in the museum of the history of the Great Patriotic War, because of the "Pahonia" badge. The cadets liked their leisure time, the guide received 15 days in jail in gratitude.

However, what am I talking about? Hrodna is also a city of contrasts. Only here was the "rehabilitation and justification of Nazism" discovered in... a painting. The curator of the exhibition, where a portrait of a participant in the anti-Soviet movement Yevgeny Zhikhar was presented, was scared and released after 72 hours, and a criminal case was opened against the author of the painting, artist Ales Pushkin. Now he is one of 354 (the figure for April 15) political prisoners.

Homel is also on the list of contrasting cities. If you remember, back in 2018, probably the most expensive public restroom in the country was opened here - they say that the toilet on the waterfront cost the city a million dollars. Maybe they just say it? In 2020, they were somehow modest, and the Cyclopean flagpole with a height of 60 meters cost, funny to say, just over 650 thousand dollars. You could, as city activists have calculated, buy more than 20 thousand rapid tests for coronavirus for the same money, but why - the tests are not “a symbol of pride in the country?”

And it is absolutely impossible to imagine that for this amount from the bowels of the regional budget it was possible not only to buy but also to preserve and even partially restore the palace in Naroulia. But no, the revival of the dying and undeservedly forgotten architectural monument is literally done by the hand of its new owner, the writer Andrei Horvat, and the Belarusians-volunteers who care.

Or Vitsebsk, a city of contrasts. Here, in the emergency hospital, in the fall of last year, problems began with the supply of oxygen... The situation was serious! But in the end, it was not the chief physician or even the Minister of Health that was fired, but the one who spoke too loudly about the problems, the anesthesiologist-resuscitator Uladzimir Martau with 30 years of experience.

In general, doctors are so highly valued in our country that they promise to double their salaries by 2025. But at the same time, in the conditions of the most severe shortage of doctors and nurses (in total, more than 5800 vacancies are open in the country), they are fired easily at the slightest hint of "politics." Only in the last two weeks, for example, in Minsk, there have been four fewer experienced doctors - a dentist, a cardiologist, a neurologist, and a doctor of laboratory diagnostics.

And the exhibition "The machine breathes, but I do not" about the heroism of medical workers, who were actually thrown unarmed on the embrasures of the fight against covid, turned out to be so inconvenient and dangerous for prosperous stability that it worked for only one day. Then it was hastily closed, and both organizers were detained. Tatstsiana Hatsura-Yavorskaya was released only ten days later without having been charged, but they mischief in the end - her husband was deported from the country.

In general, "you understand everything." In the meantime, Belarus is a country of contrasts.

Only we, back in July last year, managed to defeat the coronavirus, but at the same time, in November 2020, for some reason, a mandatory mask regime was introduced in Minsk, and in April 2021, we limited "mass entertainment, cultural, entertainment, and sports events" - halls and stadiums can be no more than half full. Moreover, the Ministry of Health recently officially recognized the third wave of covid! I'm afraid to assume what's with large animals in the Belarusian forests.

And, by the way, only here, according to the official statistics of the Ministry of Health, the former chief infectious disease specialist of the capital Nikita Solovey, from January to mid-April miraculously 7,844 patients cured of covid were discharged from hospitals, which is more than there were registered cases of COVID-19 during the same time...

In our amazing latitudes, journalists and lawyers are imprisoned or deprived of official permits for conscientious work, but in the press services of various government agencies, as they say, not a single star on the shoulder straps is removed for open incompetence.

Only with us, reasoning about the highest level of Slavianski Bazaar, Aliaksandr Saladukha, distributing tickets for his concert on the bus, is not upset because of the refusal of Ukrainian and Russian artists to take part and asks: who is Galustyan? (I vaguely suspect that the champion of the Higher League of KVN-2003, Mikhail Galustyan, also does not know who Saladukha is, and is unlikely to even ask).

Only in our country, on the eve of the 35th anniversary of the Chernobyl accident, from the repertoire of the Theater of Belarusian Drama, the play “Chernobyl Prayer” based on the book by Svetlana Aleksievich suddenly disappears without explanation. The production, by the way, has been in the theater since 2002.

And the crown of contrasts of the last days, the cancan on the grave of common sense is the answer of the Uzdzenski regional executive committee about whether the clothes of white and red colors violate the Law on Mass Events(!).

In a country where white and red (since the 19th century also black) are the main colors of a national ornament with a centuries-old history, officials of the 2021 sample write that “according to moral and ethical standards(!), one should not use a combination of red and white colors in clothes during a mass event as the Belarusian people (!) associate it with the crimes of the German fascist invaders and their accomplices on the territory of Belarus during the Great Patriotic War."

Here I can reflect for a long time, but I have run out of exclamation marks.

Keep away from me such contrasts. How to rewind our film to the moment where stern Lelik desperately and doomly admits: “Calm down, Kozlodoev, we'll all go to jail!”?

Viktoryja Tseliashuk, Free News