Starting September 1, the average pension in Belarus will rise by about 5 percent to 980 rubles (around $320). This is the second increase this year. Discussing the news on air at Radio Minsk, host Alena Rodovskaya noted that the days when pensioners had to scrape by are long gone. Now Belarusian pensioners can even afford to travel.
“Remember how our grandmothers in the Soviet Union, once they retired, poor things, would sell flowers. There was a problem, a real problem, just trying to survive on that pension. Meanwhile, we saw foreign grandmothers who, forgive me, were traveling all over the world. And look at how much has changed in 30 years. Our grandmothers now, together with their grandfathers, also travel the world and explore beautiful Mother Russia. Thankfully, there are no borders and a shared mentality,” Rodovskaya said on air August 14.
There are no official statistics on travel among Belarusian pensioners. However, the WTF team found survey results from the Sociology Institute of the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus among people of retirement age. In 2023, when asked “How do you most often spend your free time?” only 3.3 percent of respondents said they travel. The most common answer was “I watch television or listen to the radio.”
For comparison, in the European Union that same year nearly 40 percent of people over 65 took extended trips (at least four nights) either within their own country or abroad. The leaders were Norwegians and French. About 70 percent of them travel at least once a year. The least travelled pensioners were in Romania, Bulgaria and Lithuania, where only 7 to 8 percent travel. But short trips of one or two days are chosen by residents of these countries twice as often as by Belarusians. If weekend getaways with an overnight stay are included, every other European pensioner took such a mini-trip. The numbers have been slowly rising for nearly a decade, excluding the pandemic years.
