US and EU diplomats stayed as far away as possible from Friday’s inauguration of President Lukashenko.

But in Moscow, Vladimir Putin posed Thursday with his visiting counterpart from Belarus. Turning to the microphones, he announced $4 billion in energy subsidies to Belarus, plus a brand new $6 billion nuclear power plant.

Is Belarus, Russia’s North Korea?

As a reporter, I have visited Belarus three times and North Korea three times. Compared to North Korea, a nation run by the Kim family like an 1830s American cotton plantation, Belarus is a land of milk and honey.

For decades, China has propped up North Korea, repeatedly facilitating the prolongation of the Kim dynasty rule. A collapse of Kim family control of North Korea, the Chinese reason, would mean two things: millions of impoverished northern Koreans flooding into a Chinese border area that is already dominated by ethnic Koreans. (Some Korean maps of “greater Korea” include Chinese territory.) More importantly, Chinese fears a North Korean collapse would mean American troops again on the Yalu River. The arrival of American troops on China’s river border in 1950, triggered the Chinese invasion and the restoration of North Korea as a buffer state.

In Russia’s case, Belarus stands between NATO expansion east to the Russian border. Although there may be a maximum of 100 American tanks left in Europe, Russian generals still play war games based on an armored threat rolling in from the west.

The threat is never far from people’s minds.

In Fortress Brest, a blockbuster movie that played across the Russian world during the Christmas holidays, a heroic band of Red Army soldiers hold out against the Nazi onslaught during the first days of World War II.
Brest, then on the western border of the Soviet Union, is now on the western border of Belarus. At one point in the film, a captured German soldier is interrogated about the Nazi invasion plans. The movie German’s answer drew an audible gasp from Saturday night patrons sitting around me in a theater in Minsk. “In one week,” he said, “we will be in Minsk.”

For the Kremlin, Belarus buys time.

This does not mean that the leaders in Moscow or Beijings like the leaders of their buffer neighbors. Both find them irritating, demanding, hard to control, and generally untrustworthy. But as foreign ministers have said for centuries: countries don’t have friends, they have interests.

That said, buffer states are inhabited by real people.

Twenty years ago, the peoples of Central Europe unexpectedly rose up.

Moscow lost a wide belt of buffer states it had nurtured for almost half a century. Vladimir Putin knows this from experience. As the Berlin Wall fell, he was barricaded in the KGB’s office in Dresden, East Germany while colleagues feverishly burned files.

In Belarus, the length and depth of the Lukashenko crackdown indicates that he believes he can only keep power through fear, by bullying the people. How long Belarussians will put up with him is anyone’s guess.

Two days before the election, I interviewed Andrei Sannikov. He said he was tired of living in a buffer state, and wanted to live in a normal country. Belarus Sannikov Buffer

Two days later, after Sannikov placed second in the election, riot police broke his legs and detained him incommunicado. Police then turned on his wife, Irina Khalip, yanking her out of a car while she was conducting a radio interview. She also is detained incommunicado. Child welfare officials then threatened to take their 3 year old son away from his grandmother and put him in an orphanage.

Thanks to Warsaw’s Belsat television, Washington’s Radio Liberty, and the internet, most Belarussians are believed to know this story. Maybe that is why the streets of Minsk were oddly empty Friday afternoon when President Lukashenko was driven to his fourth inauguration.

For a man who enjoys winter sports, it is appropriate that President Lukashenko has bought a large ski chalet in Krasnaya Polana — a ski resort in southern Russia.

Brooke boys and Russian friends Polina and Julia pause from skating on Red Square on Russian Orthodox Christmas Eve

Kremlin leaders regularly say they want to increase tourism in order to diversify a Russian economy that is overly dependent on oil and gas. Tourism is labor intensive, geographically dispersed, and carries the potential to promote trade and investment.

That may sound like a good plan, but Russia’s bureaucracy doesn’t always cooperate.

As an accredited foreign correspondent, I was told that my three sons could come and go as they pleased. In reality, that meant paying $140 for each son’s single entry, eight-day work visa. The fact that my sons are college students and had no intention of working during their week in Moscow was ignored. Then there was the visa form with questions that seem designed give visitors second thoughts about visiting Russia.
Question 30: “Do you have any specialized skills, training or experience related to firearms and explosives or to nuclear matters, biological or chemical substance? If yes, please specify.”

Forms filled out, money orders purchased, the boys — James, 20, William, 18, and Alexander, 18 — encountered a new obstacle at the Russian Consulate in New York.

Alexander said on a phone call: “To get the Russian visa, they say we have to get AIDS tests.”

I checked around. Mike, an American executive here who shares my stinginess, had a suggestion: “No sweat, just send them uptown to get a free AIDS test. Just don’t tell them it’s for a visa or they won’t do it.”
Three AIDS tests at a Harlem clinic later, $420 paid to the Russian consulate, and the boys were winging their way toward Moscow.

Alex, William and James Brooke enjoy Moscow's January Snow outside Russia's Air and Space Museum

Once here, they briefly joined a community of about 5,000 Americans registered with the American embassy as living in Russia.

On the flip side of the coin, there are an estimated 5-million Russian speakers now living in the United States.

Echoes of this 1,000 to one ratio can be seen in Europe.

Eager for tourism, France last year gave visas to about 300,000 Russians and Spain gave visas to 445,000. Finland stamped a record 1-million visas for Russians. To pep up the economy of Northern Norway, Oslo has started a visa-free regime for residents of neighboring Russian regions. Last year, 140,000 Russians crossed the border. During Russia’s recently completed 10-day New Year holiday, 25,000 Russians swarmed into Arctic Norway and Finland.

But while the Finnish and Spanish consular officials stamp Russian passports like whirling dervishes, tourist traffic going the other way is barely a trickle. Carlos, a Spanish television correspondent here, says the Russian visa process in Madrid takes three weeks and 200 Euros. He guesses that at best 20,000 Spaniards visited Russia last year.

Once here, there is a lot to see and do. My sons skated on Red Square, sat in the captain’s chair of a submarine moored in the Moscow River, walked through the snow covered grounds of the Tsaritsyno estate, visited the modern art exhibitions at Garazh, and watched men with chainsaws shape sculptures from ice.

It was fun. But given the inertia of Russian bureaucracy, I’m not holding my breath for the visa process here to get any easier.

James Brooke and three sons pause on tour of snowbound Tsaritsyno Estate Moscow

For the next family reunion, we can meet in Helsinki or Kiev, which also have direct flights from New York. American tourists don’t need visas for Ukraine or Finland. For that matter, American tourists don’t need visas for most of Russia’s neighbors, including Japan, Mongolia, Georgia, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Norway. Instead of spending $420 on Russian visas, I’ll put that money into hotels, restaurants and museums somewhere else. That way, Moscow’s bureaucratic inertia can help diversify another country’s economy.

By James Brooke

Next week, Belarus will be back in the spotlight as European Union officials meet to impose visa sanctions against Alexander Lukashenko and the top leaders of the government. Several EU foreign ministers have charged that Lukashenko stole the Dec. 19 presidential election. Seeing the Belarus leader as illegitimate, they want to keep him from visiting their countries.

Poland is making it clear that visa sanctions should not target all 10 million people of Belarus. Last week, Warsaw waived visa fees for normal Belarussians. Instead, the proposed sanctions target the man called by critics, “the last dictator in Europe.”

Three weeks after the Belarus elections, most of the politicians who dared to run against the president remain in jail. Police beat the two most popular candidates, Andrei Sannikov and Andrei Neklayev, so badly that they cannot be presented before photographers.

The day before the election, these two candidates gave the best attended press conference of the campaign, speaking before a dozen cameras from international television networks. On the election night, policemen attacked Neklayev, beating him unconscious in front of reporters. Later that evening, I walked with Sannikov, conducting an interview as he headed a peaceful march down the central avenue of Minsk. About 90 minutes later, police attacked this well known leader, a former diplomat, breaking his leg and bloodying his head.

Officially, Lukashenko won 80 percent of the vote, and Sannikov came in second, with 2.5 percent. If the vote tally is true, what is the president afraid of?

Western officials say that independent exit polls show that Lukashenko did not win enough votes to avoid a second round — 50 percent plus one vote.

Whatever the real numbers might be, some are saying he has cracked down hard on dissident politicians and journalists, because hard economic times loom this spring. This year, Russia is slashing the subsidies that long underwrote the “Belarus miracle:” virtually unchanged living standards since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

There is an additional element: Lukashenko is now being Lukashenko.

After reluctantly posing as a democrat last fall, the real Lukashenko jumped out of the closet on election night. This is the well known hockey playing, former state farm manager who sees politics as a hard contact sport. The next day, in his post-election press conference, the president said that politicians who whine about being hit over the head are sissies.

In fact, none of his opponents have complained publicly about being attacked by police. They are being held incommunicado, locked up in “isolator” cells of a secret police force that in Belarus still is called the KGB.

The two hour press conference, televised live, gave the world a good portrait of the man who believes he now has a mandate to run his Central European nation through 2015, making a total of 21 years in power.

I watched the press conference as I packed my bags in my Minsk hotel room, the hours on my 4-day journalist visa draining away. Soon, it occurred to me that I was watching a Slavic version of Hugo Chavez.

This was not the charismatic Venezuelan army officer I followed on the presidential campaign trail in 1994. But the contemporary, bloated version, man who keeps a firm grip on all levers of power, convinced that he is the “salvador de la patria” — the savior of the nation.

In Minsk, the Belarussian version referred to his political rivals as “enemies of the people.” While the phrase is Stalinist, the thought is Louis IV. France’s Sun King liked to say “l’etat c’est moi” – the state is me.

Facing rows of sycophants in the press conference hall, Belarus’ president basked before a sea of sympathetic faces. They chuckled at every witticism, earnestly soaked up every morsel of wisdom, and clucked in agreement at every paternal scolding from a leader who calls himself “severe, but fair.”

Presumably, the audience was stacked with state employees and business people whose personal fortunes depend on presidential whim.

One journalist was so nervous with excitement at being picked to ask the first question, that she flubbed her lines. President Lukashenko indulgently allowed her to repeat the question.

“Mr. President,” she asked again, still trembling with excitement before national television. “When will the inauguration be?”

A better question might have been: how long will this go on?

With all levers of power in his control, Lukashenko exit may be decided by biology.

He could die of a heart attack tomorrow afternoon. But that is unlikely for a physically vigorous 56-year-old who presumably gets the best medical care in his nation. Good health could mean the Fidel Castro option. Sixteen years in power could stretch to 60.