THE people of Belarus have long been familiar with the minutiae of Aleksandr Lukashenko’s life. No television news bulletin in the former Soviet republic is complete without pictures of their authoritarian president opening a factory or haranguing a minister. His love of ice hockey is considered a matter of public interest.

Yet when Lukashenko took his mistress and sons to Austria on a luxurious skiing holiday last year, the trip was supposed to be a secret. As word leaked out, embarrassed aides claimed the president was there to meet leading western politicians.

Valery Levonevsky, a regional opposition leader, was incensed. He distributed a poem about the hardship of life in Belarus and a leaflet urging people to join a protest against “somebody going on a skiing holiday in Austria and having a good time at your expense”.

Levonevsky paid a heavy penalty for his insubordination. First his son was arrested and held for two weeks; then his young daughter was briefly detained and strip-searched.

Finally, last spring, he and Alexander Vasilliev, a fellow critic of the regime, were sentenced to two years in prison for offending the president.

For months they were held in one of the country’s worst remand jails, sharing a cell meant for 18 with more than 30 inmates, many of them suffering from tuberculosis. Levonevsky has since lost more than six stone and Amnesty International has declared both men prisoners of conscience.

“The truth about Belarus is it’s a dictatorship,” said Volodya, Levonevsky’s son. “Everything is under Lukashenko’s control and people live in fear. What happened to my father sent out a clear message: say anything against the president and you will be banged up.”

To fly into Lukashenko’s Belarus, a country of 10m people sandwiched between Russia and Poland, is to enter a Soviet time warp. Visitors joke that when you arrive you should put back your watch 30 years.

The culture shock begins at the airport in Minsk, the capital, where most of the lights are switched off to save electricity. It continues on the 30-mile road into the city. There are fewer than 30 billboards and several have been covered up after the president complained of seeing too many foreign models in Belarussian advertising.

The wide avenues of Minsk are almost empty: few Belarussians can afford a car. There are no kerbside vendors, beggars or stray dogs, and armies of workers keep the streets spotless.

The biggest hoardings feature police officers chatting to elderly women or giving flowers to children under the slogan: “We are always near”. It is an ominous reminder the city is one of the most heavily policed in the world.

Lukashenko, 50, a former collective farm manager, was accused last month by Condoleezza Rice, the new American secretary of state, of turning Belarus into one of the world’s six “outposts of tyranny”, along with Iran, North Korea, Burma, Cuba and Zimbabwe.

A good deal of international opprobrium has accumulated since Lukashenko became president in 1994. In 1995, when a hot air balloon involved in a competition drifted into Belarussian airspace, the president had it shot down, killing the American pilot.

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