br23 blog - minsk, belarus

Slutsk (Słucak) is a town where the biggest anti-Russian, anti-Soviet uprising took place in 1918. But if you go there now, you wouldn’t find a single mention of that. Slutsk is an old town, first mentioned in 1116, and in 1160 it became the capital of its own principality. In the 17th century the town […]

Today’s New York Times carries an article about Alexander Milinkevich and our presidential “elections” that will take place in just 20 days. An American journalist Steven Lee Myers made a pretty good overview of the current political situation in the country. It’s a highly recommended reading for anybody who’s interested:
On March 19, Aleksandr Milinkevich will […]

It’s not only Warsaw or Stockholm. Last week a dozen Belarusians staged a protest in front of the Belarus’ embassy in Washington, DC. They were joined by a Congressman Thaddeus McCotter (MI-R). An acquiantance sent me a few photos from the protest:

[photo #1] [photo #2] [photo #3]
The British “Times” published a nice article about it:
“It […]

I’ve heard that Google agreed to self-censor its search results on Chinese Google (google.cn). Although I couldn’t repeat this behaviour in my own browser (google.cn immediately redirects to google.com), some of my friends in Google Talk confirmed that when you search Google Images for “Tiananmen” it only shows nice fountains and buildings on that square. […]

For all the NHL and hockey fans in my audience:
The biggest success of Belarus ice hockey national team came in Salt Lake City at the Olympic Games (2002) when they beat Sweden 4:3 in quater final and reached semis. The game was pretty tough, and the score was tied at 3:3 just two and a […]

Today’s issue of New York Times has an article about Belarus:
NYT. French Faces, Farewell: Belarus Has Beauties of Its Own (you might need to login to read it, but you can use a password from bugmenot.com for example)
NYT is reporting the news that are one year old, that’s something! Nothing new or interesting there anyway, […]

Robert Sheckley, a brilliant sci-fi master with comic and satiric mood, has died at the age of 77. I loved his short stories. He was pretty popular in Minsk (and former USSR in general, I think). I just wrote a short entry about him in the Belarusian Wikipedia.
A Russian media specialist who has a […]

“Former U.S. president Bill Clinton will come to Prague next Friday. One of the initiators of the Prague forum is former Czech President Vaclav Havel. The participants are to include former Irish President Mary Robinson, Canadian former Prime Minister Kim Campbell, French ex-Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, former Brasil President Henrique Cardoso and Open Society Fund […]

As an ethnic group, Belarusians may be new to Americans but they are not newcomers to this country, and their first linkage with America may have been our ubiquitous soldier-adventurer Captain John Smith. Smith had traveled through Belarus in 1603 when it was part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and the craftsmen he brought to Virginia’s […]

In the last several days three giants of the newspaper media world New York Times (1), International Herald Tribune (2) and Time ran stories about Alexander Milinkevich, a united opposition candidate for the upcoming presidential elections, our potential Anti-Lukashenka. Not bad.
P.S. Wikipedia already has a nice article about him: Alaksandar Milinkievič (as well as articles […]