Waiting for change

Throughout the whole of September of 1991, I was on a language exchange programme in Minsk. It was an amazing time. Poland had become enamoured of the free market and was preparing for its first free elections, while in Belarus a carnival of freedom had also broken out, which lasted from the announcement of independence to the dark days of Lukashenko’s rule. However, communism clearly wasn’t giving up without a fight. Just a few months before we set off for Minsk, Soviet tanks had rolled onto the streets of Vilnius in neighbouring Lithuania, while the Red Army had even appeared on the streets of the Belarusian capital in reaction to the attempted 1991 coup in the USSR. But perhaps the most symbolic event, and the one I remember most fondly of all from my time in Minsk, was the replacing of the flag on the roof of the Belarusian parliament. When we arrived the red and green Soviet Belarusian flag was still fluttering above the building. But during our stay there a new flag w