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Tom Parfitt

The blood had already congealed on Vassily Grodnikov's caved-in skull by the time his brother found his body.

The 67-year-old writer got drunk and fell on his head, prosecutors in Belarus later concluded.

'It's absurd,' said Grodnikov's brother, Nikolai, who shook with fear at speaking openly for the first time about the death. 'There wasn't a drop of alcohol in his body.'

As strong-handed leaders across the former Soviet Union regain their grip, the euphoria that accompanied people-power 'colour revolutions' in Georgia and Ukraine is wearing off.

Protests after rigged elections in Azerbaijan last month  fizzled out and 11 days ago Kazakhstan's President Nursultan Nazarbayev was reelected for a seven-year term with a dubious 91 per cent of the vote.

On the edge of Europe in Belarus, a despotic regime is slowly choking all signs of opposition.

President Alexander Lukashenko runs the country as his own personal fiefdom. Wedged between Poland and Russia, Belarus looks and feels like a microcosm of the old USSR, complete with bad suits, big squares and ruthless KGB  oppression.

Last week, parliament approved a new law making it a crime punishable with up to two years' imprisonment to discredit Belarus by passing 'false information' to a foreign country or organisation about the country's political, economic or legal situation.

And while the boulevards of the capital Minsk are spotless, they conceal a dirty underworld of abuse, disappearances and killings.

Grodnikov's alleged murder in October came as Mr Lukashenko's hard-line regime twists a tourniquet on the slightest sign of dissent in the run-up to presidential elections next year.

Grodnikov's body was discovered at a cottage outside Minsk, where he wrote articles about state corruption for one of the last surviving independent newspapers, Narodnaya Volya (People's Will).

'They killed him because they are terrified of a revolution, and he found out about their plans to squash any protest,' Nikolai said.

While there's no direct proof of official involvement, it has emerged that Grodnikov was investigating rumours of police plans to secretly detain opposition activists at a dacha settlement for senior interior ministry officials.

Such incidents have forced the US and EU countries to crank up pressure on Mr Lukashenko ahead of next summer's presidential poll.

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice   wants Belarus to throw off 'the yoke of tyranny' and Britain is taking a confrontational stance as head of the EU presidency, with ambassador Brian Bennett  visiting interned dissidents and accusing Mr Lukashenko of leading 'a slide into dictatorship'.

The US has set aside US$25 million to kick-start democracy in Belarus, while the EU is  funding independent radio broadcasts to its isolated population from neighbouring states.

It is a risky strategy as paranoia grows in Russia and Belarus about western 'meddling'.  The two countries have close ties: military co-operation is strong and their peoples are practically inseparable in terms of national identity.

Moscow props up the Minsk regime with cheap energy supplies and wants to preserve it as a buffer zone against Nato encroachment. Privately, Vladimir Putin,  the Russian leader, is said to dislike Mr Lukashenko, but he knows that 'abandoning' Belarus would be deeply unpopular.

Mr Lukashenko has warned foreign states to keep their noses out. 'It's clear that haters of the Slavic people now want to subordinate the Belarusians and enslave them to civilised Europeans,' he told students at a recent meeting.

While he is banned from travelling to most EU states and the US, the Belarusian president has tried to cultivate ties further afield. This month he visited Beijing and signed an agreement on upgrading economic co-operation with President Hu Jintao .

Observers say that although Mr Lukashenko's henchmen easily fixed past elections and a referendum last year that removed the limit on how many terms he can serve, he was rattled by recent uprisings in the former Soviet states.

'He's worried,' said  a senior diplomat. 'He knows he can engineer 80 per cent of the vote in his favour, but he's forming special police units to break up crowds, just in case.'

The opposition faces a huge task to oust Europe's pariah. Anti-Lukashenko parties have not a single seat in parliament. Revolutionaries in Ukraine and Georgia had access to free media and backing from powerful businessmen, but neither exist in Belarus.

State-run enterprises control  80 to 90 per cent of the economy and the independent press is being hounded out of existence.

At the office of Narodnaya Volya, an interview with editor Josef Seredich is punctuated by the sound of his reporters stamping thousands of newspapers by hand. The stamp reads 'for advertising purposes': a loophole which allows the probing daily to be handed out free after state-run monopolies refused to distribute it.

'I'm not sure how long we can go on,' said Mr Seredich, who owns the paper. 'All we want is to work fairly. But when you play chess and someone hits you on the head with the board rather than moving a piece, what can you do?'

Not far away, opposition leader Alyaksandr Milinkevich plots a strategy with his aides in a mouldy  flat with stained carpets.

'Lukashenko put fear into this country in a way that hasn't been seen since Stalin,' said the physicist, who was elected head of a loose coalition of democratic forces in October, and will run for  presidency. 'It falls to me to stop it.'

Mr Milinkevich was placing his hopes on the support of entrepreneurs and the younger generation, he said. Underground youth movements such as Zubr (Bison) are small, but their numbers are swelling as increasing numbers of students are expelled from university for dabbling in politics.

'If the presidential election is falsified, we will go to the streets to protect our rights,' said Nikita Sasim, 21, an activist who said he was hospitalised with concussion after police beat him at a recent protest.

Zubr is promising a 'denim revolution' - its chosen symbol of defiance after the 'rose' and 'orange' revolutions in Ukraine.

Yet the opposition's chances are slim and many Belarusians seem transfixed by their strong-arm leader. 'He is an excellent example in all areas,' said Sergei Yuran, 45.

In television appearances, Mr Lukashenko poses as the country's sole guarantor of stability, a stance especially popular with the older generation.

Ludmila Yolkina, a music teacher walking past the presidential administration, said: 'We don't want all that civil unrest like in Ukraine. Look at our ordered city and nice clean streets.'



Belarusian leader's iron fist waves flag for Soviet-era controls