Unlike in Kiev, the revolution attempted here in the 2000s — not fortuitously called the “Jeans Revolution” — quickly fizzled out due to repression and indifference. Now, gatherings around the Lenin statue that still stands here are discouraged. As I took photos of it, a lone security guard slowly made his way to me and told me to stop, but I’d already taken half a dozen of them. The statue was sculpted by Matvei Manizer in 1933, and shows the great man speaking from a frame-like platform which looks distinctly like a guillotine about to slam down on someone’s head. The smaller high relief figures teeming around the leader hold aloft pitchforks. It is unmistakeably an image of revolutionary violence. The square itself, though, is a useful reminder that Soviet urbanism, when it is genuinely Soviet — clean, upkept, largely uncommercialised — is much less enjoyable than when the axes and formal ensembles have been allowed by dilapidation and decline to be roughed up a bit and used.

The similarities and differences with Kiev are especially instructive if you’ve been to both cities. Minsk looks richer and better managed, much less lively, a lot less desperate, and a great deal more controlled. You can walk for miles before finding overbearing oligarchs’ residences, giant ads, dereliction and dilapidation — though they’re all there to be found – and the relentless cleanliness of the streets and buildings is a genuine shock for anyone used to Kiev or even Warsaw. A few particularly impressive things stand out; the Post Office — florid, Piranesian and Roman — the domed Circus, the local GUM — with its preserved atrium of stained glass windows and frosted glass uplighters — and the House of Books, with its 70s ceramic abstract reliefs and its shrine to Lukashenko (this is the only thing I found of its kind — there is clearly a personality cult, though it is nowhere near on the scale of Putin, let alone Kazakhstan’s Nazarbayev or Aliyev in Azerbaijan). If, as Klinau is to be taken seriously, we compare this planned city with St Petersburg or Vienna or Paris, the most obvious change has been the increased heaviness of the architecture. Not only in comparison with St Petersburg’s delicate classicism, but also with the already lumbering and graceless bulk of 19th century imperial bombast. There are chubby columns and great sheaves of plaster wheat everywhere, the architectural equivalent of over-eating good stodgy, sugary food — fun for a while, but eventually leaving you somewhat bloated.

Large squares punctuate the street, such as the rond-point of Victory Square, around the Victory Obelisk, and the cooler, more chilling October Square. The latter is particularly interesting, balancing the splendour of the Trade Union Palace of Culture, its pediment stuffed with proletarian giants, with the much later Palace of the Republic, a late Soviet design not completed until the 2000s. Its stripped classicism looks harsh and stern in the context of the plushness of the rest of the street. Still, at least in my brief acquaintance, it didn’t feel like the parallel examples of the “real” city street in the capitals of Ukraine, Poland, Russia, but like a showpiece still, meant to be admired more than used. I could be wrong in this; in a recent paper on the current usage of the city’s Stalinist centre, Exeter-based Belarusian scholar Nelly Bekus argues that much of the local “civil society’s activities have involved trying to stop unsympathetic renovations to these buildings, such as a petition that successfully stopped the owners of a confectionery store from remodelling their 1950s interior and an unsuccessful campaign against a hotel built next to the Circus. In both cases, Soviet planning regulations were held up as a model that the city government hadn’t measured up against.”