Belarus lies between Europe and Russia and is a dictatorship. How is it to live in Belarus, Europe´s last dictatorship? Belarus is located on the main route between Russia and Europe. The focus has always been on Russia, but that seems to be changing. And: more than the half of Belarus was radioactively contaminated by the Chernobyl disaster. How does Belarus and the people living inside a dictatorship deal with this?

In this eight-part travel series the Dutch journalist and author Jelle Brandt Corstius travels through Russia and visits the neighbor countries Latvia, Moldova, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan. What image do the Russians have of their neighbors and vice versa? What are the relations between the powerful Russia and the other former Soviet republics? And how do the countries around Russia treat their Russian inhabitants? A series about propaganda and identity.

Dutch Journalist used to live close to the Belarusian embassy in Moscow. Inside the embassy they used to have small shoe shops. Shoes from Belarus are incredibly popular in Russia. In the Soviet era but still today, they are produced in Belarus. Dutch Journalist Corstius takes a look at the shoe factory and talks to the employees about their country. They are all very positive about their homeland. It is a stable country as they say. That may be true, but it goes hand in hand with a dictatorship, whose beating heart is President Lukashenko´s palace.

After a bomb detonated in the metro in Minsk in 2011, 15 people died. Two people were taken as prisoners and executed two days later. Death penalty still exists in Belarus. A mother of the executed tells us her story and what kind of person her son was, that was made responsible for the attack. Belarus looks like a clean country. This appearance is kept up the hard way. The population has no priority in a regime, where the president is busy with building a new nuclear plant.

Original title: Een heldere dictatuur (5/8)
Director: Alexander Oey and Jelle Brandt Corstius
© VPRO September 2015

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