The reason we couldn’t check in yet was because Belavia, the national airline of Belarus, was still deciding which aircraft to fly from Warsaw to Minsk. “It is Boeing or Tupolev,” the woman was saying. “You want Boeing.”

A few minutes later, the delay was resolved. “It is Tupolev,” she said.

I never quite understand the rules governing international borders in airports, but it is accurate to say that we started to arrive in Belarus, Europe’s last dictatorship and Soviet boutique state, the moment we climbed through the door of the Belavia Tupolev-154 on a distant runway of Warsaw airport.

Entering the aircraft, a Cold War curio, its brand name redolent of Aeroflot emergencies, was to step into décor that is probably enjoying at least its second fashionable revival in some hip western circles. Rust flickered the door and a grey mouldy fuzz was happening around the limits of the blue carpet. The safety information card was sprinkled with English that might have been jotted down during former disasters – “Fire!” “Thick Smoke!” “Debris and Obstructions!” – and laser disc players, capriciously, were banned. But when the engines, all packed, rocket-like in the tail, were fired, the jet rattled merrily and started to roll, then faster, and blasted off into the darkness and the east.

Before leaving for Minsk, I had two conversations, entirely contradictory, that remained in my head throughout my three-day visit. I had confided in Iryna, my attentive travel agent who keeps a string of pleasant apartments in the city, that I was a journalist. Would that be a problem for my visa? She scoffed. “Belarus is very open country,” she said. But then there was the political analyst in Slovakia who I had also spoken to about my trip. “You will be there in March, which is the national protest time,” she said. “You will be followed of course, but just act naturally.”

So what was it to be, this holiday? A break in a touristless, culturally-interesting eastern European city, or a short sentence in an authoritarian, spy-ridden society, whose ruler, Alexander Lukashenka, a former chicken farmer, has done his best to preserve a corner of the world that is forever USSR? In case you think I managed to figure out the answer to Belarus in three days, I think it’s fair to warn you now: it’s a nyet.

Everything, more or less, that we saw and did carried elements of the mixture that makes Belarus at once energising and depressing, weird and sad. In its tiny banknotes, shop windows and policemen’s hats, everywhere there is evidence of a country that is both startlingly new – despite having its own culture for centuries Belarus only became properly independent in 1990 – and yet exhausted by history.

The government is a dictatorship but wages are rising. Everyone speaks Russian rather than Belarusian yet no one wants to be part of Russia. Belarusians are charming and swear they have the most beautiful country on earth and at the same time are routinely described as unhappy and have the second highest divorce rate on the planet. What can you possibly make of it all?

Landing in the freezing fog at Minsk airport and catching sight of the moustachioed, variously-uniformed set of guards preparing to meet our Tupolev, I didn’t feel much like finding out. Things didn’t improve when it turned out we didn’t have enough cash on us to afford our visas (two words: bring dollars) and had to be traipsed, under (moustachioed) guard, to a dark little bureau de change where two women peered suspiciously at our English banknotes.

But, documents in order, our trip was brightened when we met Yuriy, the Minsk end of Belarus Rent, the agency we used to organise the holiday, who drove us fast down the spookily empty highway towards the city. “We had communism bullshit,” he said. “And now we have democracy bullshit.” A relief. Here was humour, here were streetlights, here were restaurants, Europe's frontier. So why did our papers, on closer inspection, have us invited by a company we had never dealt with and staying at a hotel we had never heard of? We never asked, and we never found out.

Minsk on a radiant, snow-melt morning is beautiful. The streets are wide and maniacally clean. Indeed, the only public officials we saw with as much in the way of uniforms and materiel as the many, many police were Minsk’s battalions of street sweepers. It is also simply arranged, so if, like us, you can’t read Russian or Belarusian, you can still find your way around. The main, charging road, a six-lane monster of tractors, old-school Soviet trucks and hordes of imported European cars, is Nenavisimosti (Independence) Avenue. Until three years ago it was called Francis Skaryna Avenue, after Belarus’s great hero of the printing press, and people still call it that, but such is Minsk.

Walking around the centre of the city, with its parks, icy river and neo-classical design, is to feel close to something very White and Russian (the meaning of the word Belarus). It takes a great effort to remember – really you need to stop walking and say the words out loud, see the heat of them in the air – that 95 per cent of Minsk was destroyed during the Second World War, that only three large buildings remained standing. Almost every edifice around you has a similar vintage to the Royal Festival Hall.

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