Eastern Belarus is home to the most unhappy town in Europe. Once it was a fortunate place but its luck ran out. When the nuclear power station in Chernobyl exploded in 1986 the area in which Svetlogorsk now stands was saved by the direction in which the wind blew.
The nuclear fall-out was far less than anticipated, but drug addiction and the highest per-capita HIV-positive incidence in Europe threaten to devastate the town's young population.
The town of Svetlogorsk was founded 30 years ago by a decision of the Soviet planning authority. The intentions were good. A new town of between 60,000 and 70,000 people would be created with two major industries - a paper mill and a chemical plant - as its economic basis.
The name Svetlogorsk (Bright Mountain) itself was a hopeful one and portrayed the optimism of planners who were confident that their system would triumph.
What is known in western business circles as a "greenfield site" was chosen. Land was set aside in a location 200 km south east of the Belarusan capital Minsk and close to the regional capital Gomel. The idea was to have a city of open spaces with green parks and low-rise buildings in which everyone had a job. For a while this was achieved.
People were brought in from Russia, Ukraine and other republics of the USSR. The paper and chemical plants flourished and the young population felt better-off than in many other parts of the Soviet Union.
But a new generation grew up and its arrival at adolescence coincided with the collapse of the communist system and the dismantling of the Soviet Union at the end of 1992. A period of turbulence and criminality began in the former Soviet countries and it lasts to this day.
In the mid 1990s two youngsters returned to Svetlogorsk from college in St Petersburg. They brought with them the drug culture which had grown up in Russia's former capital. Their expertise included the ability to grow poppies in the hot, short summers of Belarus and the technique to turn their crop into opium.
Nowadays heroin is imported into Svetlogorsk and the drug culture is so firmly established that young users were prepared to shoot up heroin in front of photographer Vasily Fedosenko without any apparent fear of retribution. In an opinion poll among the youth of Svetlogorsk only one in 20 claimed never to have used drugs.
It was in this way that one of Europe's most frightening stories began. A town designed for full-employment and the "bright future of humanity" became, with the change of ideologies and the ensuing chaos, a hell of drug addiction. No town in Europe has a higher proportion of people who are HIV positive.
According to Dr Svyatoslav Samoshkin, who runs Svetlogorsk's anti-AIDS programme, there are 1,318 young people registered at his clinic as HIV positive. Usually the ratio of unregistered to registered in this category is about 10 to one, but Dr Samoshkin feels that so much work has been done in his town that there are just three times as many unregistered HIV positive young people.
Even if this conservative estimate is correct, the figure is still astounding: almost 4,000 HIV-positive young people in a population of a little more than 70,000 is almost beyond comprehension. And things could get worse.
Dr Samoshkin dreads what might happen in a year or 18 months when significant numbers could develop AIDS. "We will be faced with very difficult problems. How will we treat people with AIDS? What medicines will we use? What medicines will we be able to afford? Who will treat these people? We have, after all, other diseases here which need to be treated."
In Belarus, as in other countries of the former USSR, hospitals are very poorly equipped despite western help. The country's economy was devastated by last summer's economic crisis to the extent that it now takes 300,000 Belarus roubles to buy a single US dollar.
The spread of contagious diseases is a constant concern for health-care workers in the regional capital Gomel and other parts of the area. A new hospital for contagious diseases has been under construction for 10 years. It is scheduled to open this year but is unlikely to be finished in time, as central and local government has allocated only one third of the estimated cost, according to the independent Belapan news agency. Under the plan put forward, the new hospital would have a special section for the treatment of patients who are HIV positive.
The old hospital was built in 1949 and is in such a poor state of repair that its operation is becoming more and more unsafe. Despite this, it manages to cope with 5,000 patients each year.
There is also a tendency to sweep bad news under the carpet. Under its eccentric president Alexander Lukashenko, Belarus resembles a Soviet theme park. Few names have been changed. The KGB is still the KGB, whereas in Russia the dreaded initials are no more. All the old street names, ranging from Lenin through Marx and Engels to Kalinin and Kirov, still exist.
A massive bust of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Soviet secret police, still stands on its pedestal just off the main avenue in the country's capital, Minsk. Dzerzhinsky's statue was the first to be tumbled by angry crowds in Moscow in 1992.
Freedom of expression in Belarus is limited. The big state-owned newspapers follow the government line. The privately-owned press which openly criticises the government and publicises the situation in Svetlogorsk circulates among a tiny minority of the population.
But some people are still prepared to speak out. Nikolai Khalesin, a human rights activist of the Charter 97 organisation was the first to bring Svetlogorsk's predicament to light. A Dutch-sponsored methadone project collapsed, he says, because of lack of support from the health ministry.
The planners, he says, simply didn't provide for the town's youth. "There are no entertainment centres. There isn't even a disco. For the young there is no option but drugs. When they finish school or work they know there is nowhere to go to except home. There are now 5,000 registered drug users in the town. The real number is much higher."
Belarus, with a population of 10 million, has quite a low HIV-positive incidence. Just 2,500 people are registered. Astonishingly, half of them are in Svetlogorsk where the drug culture has engulfed the town's young population.
At first, Khalesin says, parents simply didn't believe the problem existed but now it's obvious to all. Pushers sell heroin and raw opium openly at the entrance to the Tsentralny Univermag, the town's largest department store, as well as in the main square, despite the efforts of the local drug squad under Vasily Shukh, who has become a legendary figure in Svetlogorsk.
Starved of funds, Shukh's small force has few of the facilities enjoyed by his western counterparts. "They cannot even afford to have trained sniffer dogs. The police go round apartment blocks sniffing at doors themselves. The pushers and addicts spray their doors with cologne to deaden the acetone smell that comes from processing heroin," Khalesin says.
Shukh has only two assistants in the fight against drug dealers, so he operates on the edge of a law which states that the apartments of suspects can be examined but not searched. The police can enter an apartment and inspect it without touching anything.
Shukh's three-man team has been known to break doors down in the hope of catching people in the act of processing heroin, but dealers have reinforced the doors of their apartments to give themselves time to dispose of incriminating material. Often the police can tell the apartment belongs to an addict, Khalesin says, because it is completely bare. There might be just a bed and a couple of chairs. Everything else has been sold to feed the habit.
An information network has been built up to counteract Shukh's lack of manpower. He has "agents" all over town. Parents of drug users have been particularly active in getting information to the police about the activities and the whereabouts of dealers and processors.
There have been a few lucky breaks, including one of Belarus's biggest drug busts when a lorry with 70 kilos of heroin from Turkey was apprehended in Minsk two years ago.
But the drugs are still coming in. Khalesin says that most of the raw opium and heroin comes from the former Soviet republics of central Asia and the Caucasus. Traders from Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan and other countries in those regions sell to local street traders at a low price. These local dealers, many of them addicts themselves, then sell the drugs on to users, sometimes in unprocessed form but often in ready-to-use syringes primed with a drug solution which is impossible to test for purity. Nevertheless there have been very few deaths from drug overdose in Svetlogorsk.
The one bright spot and the main hope of containing the spread of disease is the city's free-needle programme. "The incidence of hepatitis has dropped since the programme was introduced. On average we used to have 15 to 20 hepatitis patients in our hospital on any given day. Now we have very few. There are also fewer cases of inflammation and sepsis," Dr Samoshkin says.
A new drug called Buprenorfin holds out some hope too. It focuses on the centres in the brain which control addiction and Dr Samoshkin would like to see it administered in his town if tests by the health ministry and international organisations are successful.
He has also set up a Belarus association against AIDS. "We are preparing documents to submit to international organisations, companies and individuals who we hope will be able to help us."
UNICEF has already given help in educating young people in Svetlogorsk about the dangers of drugs. Igor Kashlikov of the town's local TV station worked on the production of a 90second film clip which UNICEF funded. "The clip is shown at times when young people watch TV, when music programmes are broadcast," Kashlikov said. It also won a major award at a Polish film festival. "Our main achievement," he believes, "is that the rate of growth of drug addiction has dropped significantly."
In the film clip a young person tells the story of how he became addicted. Then viewers are told that he died after the film was made. Some deaths due to addiction have been horrendous. Nikolai Khalesin says: "I saw a young woman die. She was just 24 years old and she had wasted away to just 12 kilos in weight."
There is a real possibility that in 20 years Svetlogorsk could lose up to 30 per cent of its population, Khalesin believes. "It is the government's duty to act urgently. A successful methadone programme would be an important weapon in fighting addiction.
"The fact that young people have to register is another disadvantage in combating the drug problem. All treatment and free needles should operate on the basis of anonymity.
"Government action, a methadone programme and guaranteed anonymity are the three things most needed to give Svetlogorsk hope for the future."