Can Lord Bell’s PR skills combat the aroma of communism and cabbage?

Minsk is not a mecca for entrepreneurs or foreign investors, but it seems that the perpetual leader of Belarus, Aleksander Lukashenko, has decided to change that. The kolkhoz (collective farms) are not about to be broken up, and nor is the KGB ready to give up its paternalistic interest in business. But Lukashenko, Europe’s answer to Kim Jong-Il, needs cash and he needs it yesterday. The reason is that the cheap Russian gas that used to subsidise the economy is getting a lot more expensive: Gazprom has pushed the price up from a trifling $47 per 1,000 cubic metres in 2006 to $119 today. It’s still cheap compared to the European market price of roughly $370, but for a subsidised Brezhnev-type economy, it’s cold turkey. Worse still, if they hadn’t agreed to sell their pipeline operator to Gazprom, the tariff would have gone up much more, and in any case will climb to market levels in the coming years.