In this episode, Ben Zand travels to Belarus to experience the sinister and at times bizarre side to living in a dictatorship..
Ben begins his journey in Belarus by heading to President Lukashenko’s home town. He sees a small shrine to the President, before setting off to find a mysterious spring in the woods, which Lukashenko apparently drank from as a child, and to which he attributes some of his dictatorial manliness and prowess.
After freezing his nuts off in the spring, Ben heads to Belarus’ capital city, Minsk. This is a country that most Brits only hear of once a year, during the Eurovision Song contest. And so Ben gets an introduction to the place from Belarus’ 2011 Eurovision entrant, Anastasia. She sang a song called I Love Belarus, and from Ben’s conversation with her, it doesn’t sound like she was lying. She insists that people in the country are content with the leadership.
But, Ben wonders, perhaps that’s because of the infamous KGB. Belarus is the only former Soviet Union country that hasn’t bothered to rebrand it’s secret service, and still calls it the KGB.
Perhaps it isn’t surprising – this is a country in which the President apparently isn’t worried about PR. When accused of being a dictator by the German foreign minister – who’s homosexual – President Alexander Lukashenko responded by saying that he’d rather be a dictator than be gay.
Given this, Ben wants to know more about what life is like for gay people in the country. So he heads to one of the most testosterone-fuelled environments he can find – an ice hockey stadium – to talk to a journalist who covers LGBT rights for a channel that’s illegal in Belarus, and has to broadcast from neighbouring Poland.
Having had a taste of dissent in Belarus, Ben goes to visit Pavel, a serial protester who at only 28 years old has already been to prison 19 times. Ben hears about his most famous protest, which saw him place teddy bears with pro-democracy s
