Grandpa Was Tumbling Around With A Stick

Ice palaces for Leps and casinos.

Rygorych's imagination was always irrepressible and boundless - even when he felt relatively safe in his native country. While now he sees the masses of people with white-red-white flags in every shadow that flickers in the corner, ten years ago he dreamed of his own unexplained children.

I remember how he told journalists in 2017, when he was asked when the story of ice palaces in every vegetable garden would end. Lukashenko replied: "I don't need ice palaces at my age, I only need 'a small spot to play with a stick', and I'm doing all this for you ingrates, so that all 'my children in Belarus - and there are millions of them - can hold a stick and run on skates'."

I'm telling you - fantasy is boundless. He made up millions of children for himself, knowing perfectly well that girls don't love him and there are no chances to realize his dreams of millions of little Lukashenka girls with clubs. All right, it's not harmful to dream. But is it for these non-existent children with clubs that he littered the whole country with ice palaces?

Metal hangars, different in size but similar in ugliness, were built throughout the thirty years of the dictatorship. Some, like those in Zhlobin, stood unfinished for years. Others, unfinished, were urgently opened for some "Dazhynki", as in Horki. The third, as in Bereza, were built for Chizh's money on Lukashenko's orders, and after Chizh's arrest and the complete decline of his business, they became a dead weight on the shoulders of local taxpayers. The fourth one, as in Borisov, was never built, but the townspeople got a lot of blood, forcing them (and just in the summer of 2020) to sign in favor of building an ice palace, not a park with an embankment.

There are 46 ice palaces in the country - more than residences. Even if Lukashenko became a real breeding bull, as he dreams, and would be engaged not in arrests of dissidents, but only in forced insemination, still he would not be able to fill all these senseless constructions with hockey players: his life would not be enough. But now Belarusians have something to admire: empty hangars painted in incomprehensible colors and bogged down in debts for public utilities. And Lukashenko has a reason to gloat: "You bastards hate me, you keep waiting for me to die or go to jail, but you can't erase the memory of me: go out on the street, see an iron barrack and remember me.

Every dictator has his own quirks - everyone knows that there are no adequate ones. Turkmenbashi built his own golden statues all over the country that turned to follow the sun. But at least they did not take much space, were easy to dismantle and did not eat up millions of budget money for their own heating and water supply. Turkmenbashi disappeared and the statues disappeared like the monuments to Stalin overnight. So if Lukashenko ordered to cast himself in gold with a club and put it in the center of Minsk - to hell with him, it can be easily removed on the day of revolution or obituary. Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha built 600,000 bunkers in a country of two million people. But at least they were underground and did not spoil the landscape. If Lukashenko had started digging dens and tunnels underground - let him, it would be all right. But everything that is being done at his will or order - here it is on the surface, it catches the eye, causes indescribable anger in a normal person, destroys all aesthetic feelings. Cities become alien, as if occupiers had driven through them on tanks. And occupants come there too.

Why, in fact, I even remembered about these rust-covered boxes? Just recently I decided to check: what if for many years we were all wrong, and dozens of NHL players have already come out of every ice palace. And I methodically went through the websites of these very palaces. So, most of their sites are already advertising online casinos. And only Gomel ice palace modestly invites to Leps concert. Which was required to prove.

Irina Khalip, especially for Charter97.org.

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