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I inquired whether Subways and Golden Arches had sprung up in Belarus, reportedly the most backward country in Eastern Europe.

“One under construction in the center of Minsk,” Tomás replied. “Already they have a McDonald’s.”

He pulled out his wallet, extracted a folded paper and waved it in the air. “This work permit. It takes me years.” He frowned. “I go four times, but I always fly out the same day. If I can catch a flight.” The small fleet of Belarusian-operated planes was substandard, he said. They weren’t permitted to land in many European airports.

“Too loud,” the Czech said. Besides, “Nothing happens in Minsk. Nothing. Economy—worst in Europe.” He shook an index finger in the air. “Money—worthless.” The red and blue rubles traded by the fistful were virtually play money. “No matter—it’s nothing to buy,” Tomás added. “They have a horrible dictator too, this Lukashenko. It’s like the worst days of Soviet Communism.”

A middle-aged man wearing a plaid tie and shiny brown shoes seated next to Tomás had been listening, shaking his head and smacking his lips noisily while using a jackknife to saw off hunks of a pungent salami wrapped in newspaper.

“They brought it all on themselves,” he broke in between mouthfuls. In flawless English, he introduced himself as a history professor from Warsaw.

“Wasn’t it a democratic election?” I asked the professor.

Brushing bits of salami from his moustache, he laughed. “Yes. Lukashenko won in a landslide. Belarus is a nation of followers. They’re too scared to be without Communism, so they elect this guy, Lukashenko—he used to be the boss of a chicken collective.” The professor lopped off several hunks of salami and offered them around. A brief nationalist movement had arisen in the early ’90s after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, he told me. Belarusian was declared the national language, and the country set out on the road to a privatized economy.

“But they weren’t ready for the breakdown of the Soviet Union,” the professor said. “For them, independence was a catastrophe. They saw Lukashenko as their solution.” In 1994, elections were held, and Lukashenko received eighty percent of the vote on his promise to recreate a lost paradise. He would revive the old system, restore full employment, provide free health care, and officially reinstate the familiar Russian tongue.

“Idiots!” the professor said, shaking his head. “They were glad to return to Communism. There’s no elite in Belarus to form an idea-oriented leadership. The Jews, maybe. But there aren’t many now—the Nazis got most of them during the war and the rest fled. Any Jews still there want to get out.”

Beyond the country’s political and economic problems, Belarusians face a gruesome array of health hazards, the professor added with a look of disgust. Most of the radiation from the 1986 Chernobyl explosion blew downwind from Ukraine into Belarus, contaminating half the country’s soil, possibly for the next hundred years. “Much of the food and water is probably still unsafe,” he warned me.

As my fellow travelers continued their litany of Belarus’s woes, the train rattled eastward, past the low hills and mistveiled forests of the Polish countryside. Against this graceful backdrop, it was hard to picture Poland’s neighbor to the east—backward, unlovely, and swept by the winds of Chernobyl. I envisioned Belarus as an island set adrift beneath a perpetually hovering raincloud.

As if reading my thoughts, the Czech stretched out both hands, palms up, his fingers spread in a gesture of futility. “Nothing there but ignorant people,” he said. “The people has disappeared in their minds. They are sheep. No national identity, no history.”

But, of course, Belarus does have a history, a tragic history of invasion, partition, and devastation that makes its current troubles appear not so much self-inflicted as the working out of some ancient curse. I’d caught glimpses of this past back in Detroit, while trying to flesh out a skeletal outline of events at Maly Trostinets. For four hundred years,