The Pizkuny Wall: An Iron Curtain in the East
The collapse of the Soviet Union divided a community on the border between Lithuania and Belarus. Now the village straddles a more significant border, between the eastern EU and Europe’s last dictatorship. But where are people happier?
…Many of the lofty hopes that accompanied the collapse of the Soviet Union have not been fulfilled. Only three of the 15 successor states of the Soviet Union are stable democracies: Lithuania and its Baltic neighbors, Estonia and Latvia. Autocrats and their clans control the five Central Asian countries, from Turkmenistan to Kazakhstan. A similar situation applies in the Caucasus nations of Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan. And Ukraine can’t seem to decide whether it wants to lean toward Russia or the West.
Two worlds stand in sharp contrast to one another on the border between Lithuania and Belarus: a particularly authoritarian successor state of the Soviet Union and one of the young Eastern European democracies. And, again, an Iron Curtain divides them.
So it seems even more surprising that many on both sides of the border yearn for the old Soviet Union. “At least we had work back then, but today we don’t know what will happen tomorrow,” says Alenzynovich. Across the border in Belarus, Gennady, the husband of his Aunt Janina, hopes that “Putin will reunite us one day,” referring to the Russian prime minister. Wasn’t it Putin who once characterized the Soviet collapse as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century”?