Up until the last Olympics, most Kiwis would have known little about Belarus. But after the rather masculine Belarusian shot-putter, Nadzeya Ostapchuk, was caught out as a drug cheat, and the gold medal was awarded to New Zealand’s Valerie Adams, Belarus was noticed a lot more.

Ostapchuk is back in the news after being the object of a humorous but off-colour joke by Air New Zealand this week.

Along with Ostapchuk looking like something out of a 1970s iron curtain Olympics, she was a reminder that her country is still stuck there. Belarus is in fact one of the hold-out nations from the Cold War. It is still basically a Soviet dictatorship, run by Soviet hard man Alexander Lukashenko, a former director of a state-run collective farm before entering politics.

This is perhaps appropriate. As it turns out, one of Belarus’ major exports are tractors, named simply Belarus. Since 1948, Minsk has produced more than 3 million tractors – at a rate of 46,800 per year. In fact, by the late 1980s, these were a classic example of Soviet Union engineering: shonky, unreliable, and available in one colour. They have since improved, but the countries the tractors are sold to are semi-dictatorship heavy.

Over 50% of the Belarusian population is employed by the state, and its Soviet-style economy is underpinned by Russian loans and cheap Russian gas (a former Russian finance minister describes them as having a parasitic attitude towards Russia).

The upshot is that Belarus has gone from being a relatively prosperous USSR country to a comparatively poorer, independent Soviet-style dictatorship. While other former eastern bloc nations have embraced capitalism and varying degrees of democracy, and the material well-being of their people has improved, the Belarusians have slipped behind drastically.

This is important to remember because, although the caricature of an Eastern European mannish shot-putter may be amusing, the continued existence of these oft-forgotten Soviet states is not. They should be a constant reminder that policies matter, and centrally planned economies simply don’t deliver the economic goods.

Insofar as the aim of most governments is to improve the well-being of their people, these regimes fail.

Soviet states are good for only two things: creating dictators and impoverishing its citizenry. They can't even cheat properly.