In the Western imagination there are no proper countries between Poland
and Russia. Many would find it difficult to place Belarus on a map – especially
on a map from which it had been deliberately removed: back in 2000, a
predicted ‘Map of the European Union’ in 2010 assumed that neighbouring
Belarus would long have been (re)absorbed by Russia. Belarus has been
home to other disappearing tricks. Its capital city, Minsk, was where the
assassin of President Kennedy, Lee Harvey Oswald, stayed as a would-be
Soviet ‘ordinary worker’ in 1960–2. Mythical ‘Minsk’ is also where Phoebe’s
boyfriend David the Scientist Guy disappears to in the US sitcom Friends,
which is just a plot device to remove him from the face of the Earth.