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Article: Back in the USSR: two decades after the end of the Cold War, Belarus has yet to warm to democratic capitalism--for good and ill.(World)(Country overview)
- Article from:
- The American Conservative
- Article date:
- September 8, 2008
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2008 The American Conservative LLC. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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I STILL REMEMBER the first time I passed through the fence that once separated our world from the other one, a somnolent spring afternoon on the border between what were then West Germany and Czechoslovakia. Until that day, I never knew how mixed my feelings could be.
I hated what I expected to hate and feared what I expected to fear. There they all were: rolls of barbed wire; border guards crawling over and under the train; the sudden change from clean and modern to old and grimy; smoggy air and wet cobbles; red banners; wobbly, rationed goods in shop windows, the flaccid pork and exhausted vegetables; the wary, closed white faces and stainless steel false ...