Eastern Europe after the fall: a firsthand view.

• Author: Black, Jan Knippers

Where the Berlin Wall used to be, there now is a wall of traders and souvenir stalls dealing in instant nostalgia. Chunks of the wall go for international prices, but Lenin pins are sold by the kilo, and even the matryoshkas (nested hollow dolls)-including the new varieties containing a Brezhnev inside a Gorbachev inside a Yeltsin-sell pretty cheap. While they wait for jobs (about one-third of East Germans are unemployed) and for telephones, transport, and building codes to be upgraded, East Berliners amuse themselves with a rash of new jokes. It is said, for example, that taxi drivers often doubled as stasi (secret police) in the bad old days. Even now, they banter, you don't have to tell a taxi driver in East Berlin where you are going; he already knows.

Elsewhere, however, in the former U.S.S.R., even in areas like Belarus and the Baltics that had been among the most modern and prosperous, the new order is not nearly as new as we had imagined. The first indication of this came with trying to get a visa to visit Belarus. Intourist and the ex-Soviet, now Russian, Embassy, which still handles visas for what used to be the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic, shuttled us back and forth across London for a couple of days before they succeeded in convincing us that processing the applications really would take 14 days (working days, that is, meaning about four hours a day, four days a week). Once convinced of their determination to work-or not work - at that pace, we gave up the effort in London to resume it later in Germany.

In Bonn, the operation proved more expeditious, but also more expensive. After we spent almost two days standing in lines and chasing after the appropriate forms and currencies, they managed to produce the actual visa in a couple of hours. Notwithstanding our official invitations to visit as guests of an academic institution, the visas cost us $100 each.

Visas finally in hand, we boarded the Berlin-to-Moscow express, a Russian train that would take us overnight to Minsk. The express was not simply slow; it was a voyage backwards in time. Yet, it made up in local color what it lacked in speed and comfort. The only refreshment to be had was Russian tea, prepared in a small ceramic pot and dispensed by the all-purpose attendant. The "babushkas" (attendants) appeared to be homesteading in their sleeping cars and to assume a proprietary attitude toward them, particularly the restrooms, which they generally kept locked.

Sleep would have been a waste, given the entertainment that filled the wee hours. Shortly after the train crossed from Poland into Belarus, one or two of the cars at a time had to be jacked up to be refitted with wheels that operated on the narrower Russian gauge. The jacks that lifted the cars some six feet off of the rails were hydraulic, but most of the subsequent adjustments, which took more than two hours, were made by male and female grease monkeys who crawled into the pits under the rail cars with crowbars and screwdrivers and hammers from their lunchbox-sized toolboxes.

With its broad avenues and leafy parks, Minsk wears a placid face. At the farmers' co-op market, one can see tired shoppers waiting in long lines to buy eggs at subsidized prices, while the free-marketeers standing nearby offer the same eggs without the wait, but at prices few can afford. We were told that there was a seasonal shortage of sugar, but saw no evidence of panic buying or other manifestations of the trauma of transition reported from Russia.

Among former Soviet republics, Belarus has more than its share of productive agriculture and potentially profitable industry. Thus, it also has more than its share of visiting businessmen, hustlers, and would-be investors, Western and Eastern, though few of them are American. (Most of the Americans we saw in Minsk were evangelicals who had packed the municipal stadium for a revival meeting.) The chairman of the political science department at the University of Minsk, who does risk analysis on the side, quipped that U.S. businessmen come, find that the phones don't work, and leave. Chinese businessmen, on the other hand, come, find that the phones don't work, and stay to design a new telephone system to solve the problem. The Chinese, in fact, are installing centralized switchboards for ministries, hotels, and other establishments.

Another thing Belarus has more than its share of is military divisions. The Soviet front-line forces previously deployed in Poland and East Germany pulled back to where the second line of defense had been established - in Belarus - and there they remain. With some 250,000 military personnel, a ratio of one soldier...