One of the many jokes about Minsk, the Belarus capital, is that if a wall was built around it the authorities could charge people an entrance fee to the theme park called "Stalin-land".
Minsk is the only city in the former Soviet Union where the street names were not changed. There are Lenin, Marx and Engels streets. Lenin is still asking "What is to be done?" in Independence Square, and workers clutch hammers and sickles on giant murals. What is truly surreal is to stand at the statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the feared founder of the Cheka, forerunner of the KGB, and see the yellow neo-classical KGB headquarters to the left and further down the street the giant red M of McDonalds.
Belarus still has its KGB. Two weeks ago it honoured Dzerzhinsky, who was born in Belarus 120 years ago. The KGB is also seeking the funds to refurbish his statue and show proper respect to the man who was Lenin's secret police chief.
Minsk being a great city for protests, a wreath of barbed wired was laid at the statue as well. It was removed after 10 minutes. One man was arrested and fined.
The presence of the KGB is not a curious throwback, but a symbol of Belarus's ambivalent attitude to its own past. It suffered considerably under Stalin. A mass grave was discovered outside Minsk at a place called Kurapaty in 1988. In Belarus's killing fields there was evidence of perhaps 250,000 bodies, Poles and Belarussians who were shot between 1937 and 1941.
And as if that was not enough, there is the cover-up at the time of the Chernobyl fall-out in 1986. Belarus received 70 per cent of the fall-out.
News of the cover-up produced an understandable degree of suspicion of Russia, including the belief that it seeded the clouds ensuring polluted material fell on Belarus rather than Russia. This did not, however, seriously affect the movement for reunification with Russia.
This curious movement, in which Belarus would be the first country in history to ask the imperial power to take it back again, is led by two factors: a wish to return to the stability, subsidised wages and certainty of the Soviet era, and the ambitions of President Alexander Lukashenka.
Young Belarussians take a pro-independence line and many speak Belarussian, but older people remember the Soviet period with nostalgia, when Minsk was one of the most wealthy cities of the USSR.
President Lukashenka, a former collective farm manager, believes he could succeed President Boris Yeltsin. If that was a possibility he probably blew it by arresting the Russian public service broadcaster, Mr Pavel Sheremet. Held by the KGB for months, Mr Sheremet was released last week pending a trial on charges of crossing the border and abusing an official position. He could face up to eight years in jail.
Mr Sheremet told The Irish Times that President Yeltsin was instrumental in securing his release. Last Sunday Mr Sheremet took part in a demonstration against the draconian amendments to the press laws currently going through the Belarus parliament.
But Minsk is not just a strange glimpse at what the Soviet Union was like. There was a Belarus spring in which its own flag flew above the state institutions and the Belarus language was encouraged. Then the shutters were pulled down. It does have independent newspapers, along with the state-funded ones. They are vulnerable and suffer constant harassment. Most have to be printed in Lithuania because the state-run plant in Minsk will not print them.
Even with some signs of openness, all the evidence is that the economic situation is getting worse. Economists say the state sector accounts for about 70 per cent of activity.
Belarus got independence thrust upon it, when its leadership took the wrong side in the failed coup against Mr Mikhail Gorbachev in 1991. Mr Lukashenka, who was elected to fight corruption, has restored the Soviet flag, minus the hammer and sickle, and given Russia equal status to Belarus. He rules increasingly by decree, while the sacked constitutional court prepares impeachment proceedings.
Minsk was totally destroyed in the second World War. The city was rebuilt and is now almost entirely a city of the 1950s. It was to be a workers' paradise, a model city for the rest of the Soviet Union. It was granted the title, Hero City.
It can be grim in the rain, when all that concrete turns grey and water fills the pot-holes, but it is unexpectedly impressive as well. Much of the city centre is built in a Soviet neo-classical style, painted in pleasant pastel colours. There is even a small "old town" which the guidebook says gives a glimpse of what Minsk was like in the 19th century, only it was built in the 1950s too.
But Minsk is a sad city. It has none of the certainty that the Soviet system offered and few of the freedoms it might have expected after independence. It is a city of the KGB, McDonald's, poverty and paranoia.