Belarus << behl uh ROOS or byehl uh ROOS >>, also spelled Byelarus, is a country in eastern Europe. Minsk is its capital and largest city.
The Belarusians trace their history to Kievan Rus, a state founded by East Slavs in the 800’s. Belarus became part of Lithuania in the 1300’s. It passed to Poland in the 1500’s and to Russia in the late 1700’s. A Communist government was established in Belarus in 1919. Belarus became a republic of the Soviet Union in 1922. It remained a Soviet republic until 1991, when it declared its independence.
Government.
Under the Constitution of Belarus, originally adopted in 1994, a president is head of state and has broad powers over the government. The president appoints a prime minister, who heads the Council of Ministers.
The country’s legislature consists of two houses, an upper house called the Council of the Republic and a lower house called the House of Representatives. The council has 64 members. The House of Representatives has 110 members.
Belarus is divided into six provinces, each named for the capital of the province: (1) Brest, (2) Homyel, (3) Hrodna, (4) Mahilyow, (5) Minsk, and (6) Vitsyebsk. A council elected by the voters governs each province. The president, however, appoints regional executives, who supervise and appoint local executives. The appointed executives control the regional and local councils.
The Constitutional Court is the highest court of Belarus. The judicial system also includes a Supreme Court and provincial, city, and district courts.
The armed forces consist of an army and an air force. Men who are between the ages of 18 and 27 are required to serve from 12 to 18 months in the military.
People.
More than three-fourths of the people of Belarus are ethnic Belarusians, a Slavic people. About 13 percent are Russians. The population also includes small groups of Poles and Ukrainians.
Belarusian, the native language, and Russian are the official languages. Belarusian is a Slavic language that resembles Russian and Ukrainian. It is written in the Cyrillic alphabet, the same system of writing used for Russian. The government strongly promoted the use of Russian when Belarus was a part of the Soviet Union, so more people speak Russian than Belarusian, especially in the cities.
Most Belarusian families are small, with one or two children. Most city people live in apartments. Many of the rural people of Belarus work on large collective or state farms, which are run by the government. Many rural people live in small wooden houses or community housing blocks.
Most people in Belarus wear Western-style clothing. Traditional Belarusian costumes, which are white with colorful embroidery, are worn on special occasions.
Potato and mushroom dishes are particularly popular in Belarus. Many Belarusians also like thick stews, such hearty vegetable soups as turnip borsch, and rye bread and oat bread. Tea and coffee are the country’s most popular beverages.
Belarusians enjoy a number of recreational activities. These include soccer, volleyball, track and field, swimming, camping, and chess.
Most of the people of Belarus follow the Eastern Orthodox faith and belong to the Belarusian Orthodox Church. Roman Catholics form the second largest religious group in Belarus. Most of the Roman Catholics are Poles. Other religious groups include Protestants, Jews, and Muslims.
Most Belarusians finish high school, and many receive higher education. The country has several universities. The most important of these is the Belarusian State University in Minsk. Belarus also has a number of specialized academies and technical institutes.
The Belarusians are known for their weaving, straw-inlaid boxes, and other traditional handicrafts, and for such performing arts as dancing and puppetry. The village of Neglyubka is famous for its textiles, which are woven in elaborate patterns.
In the early 1900’s, two Belarusian poets, Yanka Kupala and Yakub Kolas, helped promote the use of the Belarusian language in literature. Formerly, most literary works were written in Russian or Polish.
Land.
Most of the country consists of flat lowlands. Forests cover northern Belarus. A ridge of higher ground runs from northeast to southwest in central Belarus. The ridge includes the country’s highest point, a hill called Dzerzhinskaya Gora that rises 1,135 feet (346 meters) above sea level. Southern Belarus is made up of marshes, swamps, and forests. This region includes a vast, forested swamp called the Pripyat Marshes.
The chief rivers of Belarus are the Bug, the Neman (also spelled Nyoman), the Western Dvina, and the Dnieper (also spelled Dnepr or Dnyapro). Belarus has over 10,000 lakes, mostly small ones.
The forests of Belarus teem with deer, foxes, hares, minks, and squirrels. A nature preserve lies along the border between Belarus and Poland. It is called the Belovezha Forest (Bialowieza in Polish), and it is a remnant of the virgin forest that covered much of Europe in prehistoric times. It has majestic old spruces and other trees. Its rare animals include a herd of European bison, also called wisent.
Climate.
Belarus has cold winters and warm summers. The temperature averages about 22 °F (-6 °C) in January, the coldest month, and about 65 °F (18 °C) in July, the hottest. The country’s annual precipitation ranges from 20 to 26 inches (50 to 66 centimeters).
Economy.
Service industries account for about half of Belarus’s economic output and over half of its employment. Leading service industries include education, health care, and wholesale and retail trade.
Manufacturing produces much of the economic output of Belarus. The country is known for the heavy-duty trucks and tractors it produces. Belarus also manufactures cement; fertilizer and other chemical products; food products, including dairy and meat products; and machinery. The forests yield many paper and wood products.
Agriculture accounts for about one-tenth of the country’s economic output. The major crops include barley, potatoes, rye, sugar beets, tomatoes, and wheat. Many farmers raise cattle, chickens, hogs.
Belarus has only a few mineral resources. It is rich in peat, which is used for fuel, and in potash and rock salts. Southern Belarus has petroleum.
Belarus imports oil and natural gas from Russia and reexports refined oil and gas products to other countries. Belarus also imports iron and steel, and machinery. It exports fertilizer, machinery, tractors, and trucks. Russia is its leading trade partner. Belarus also trades with China, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, and Ukraine.
The country’s transportation system includes railroad and highway networks connecting the cities of Belarus with other major European cities. Trains are an important means of long-distance travel. The country’s chief airport is in Minsk. The Dnieper-Bug Canal and other canals link many of the rivers of Belarus with ports on the Baltic and Black seas.
Belarus’s newspapers are published in Belarusian, Russian, and other languages. The country has both state-owned and privately owned radio and television stations. Cell phone and Internet usage have increased rapidly since the early 2000’s.
History.
The area that is now Belarus was inhabited by various groups of people beginning in prehistoric times. Slavic tribes moved in by the A.D. 500’s.
The Belarusians, along with the Ukrainians and Russians, trace their history to the first East Slavic state. The state, called Kievan Rus, was formed in the 800’s. Belarus made up the northwestern part of Kievan Rus. During the 900’s and 1000’s, Kievan Rus was a major European political, economic, and military power.
Lithuanian, Polish, and Russian rule.
In the 1200’s, Mongol invaders overran the eastern part of Kievan Rus, while Germanic tribes threatened from the west. To protect themselves from invaders, the Belarusians formed a military alliance with neighboring Lithuania. The alliance led to Belarus becoming part of Lithuania, which grew into a large and powerful state. Part of present-day Belarus first began to be called Byelaya Rus, meaning White Russia, in about the 1300’s.
In 1386, the grand duke of Lithuania married the queen of Poland and began to rule both Lithuania and Poland as king. Lithuanian-Polish kings ruled the two states for nearly 200 years until Lithuania—including Belarus—merged with Poland in 1569.
Between 1772 and 1795, Russia, Prussia, and Austria divided Poland. Russia received much of eastern Poland, including Belarus. In the 1800’s, Russian officials began a policy called Russification. This policy promoted the Russian culture and language at the expense of other cultures and languages. Russification aroused the Belarusian people’s sense of national distinctiveness, and resentment of Russian control grew during the 1800’s and 1900’s.
Soviet rule.
In 1917, revolutionaries known as Bolsheviks (later called Communists) seized control of the Russian government. In March 1918, the Belarusians established an independent state called the Belarusian National Republic. But the Communists overthrew the republic later that year. The Russian government renamed the country Byelorussia, a name derived from the Russian words Belaya Rus (White Russia). In January 1919, they proclaimed a Communist-ruled state called the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic. Poland gained control of western Belarus in 1919, at the start of the Polish-Russian War. In 1922, Byelorussia joined with three other republics to form the Soviet Union.
In the 1930’s, Joseph Stalin, the dictator of the Soviet Union, attempted to unify Byelorussia and other non-Russian republics by enforcing the use of the Russian language. The Soviet government also seized land from private farmers to form large state-run farms.
In 1939, the Soviets occupied western Belarus, which Poland had controlled since 1919, and reunited it with Byelorussia. Nazi Germany occupied Byelorussia and other Soviet territory from 1941 to 1944, during World War II. The area suffered great damage during the war. Minsk was almost entirely destroyed. After the Nazis lost the war, the Soviets regained Byelorussia, including western Belarus. In 1945, Soviet Byelorussia became a founding member of the United Nations.
An explosion and fire that occurred at the Chernobyl (now Chornobyl) nuclear power plant in Ukraine in 1986 had a major impact on Byelorussia. The winds caused about 70 percent of the radioactive fallout from Chernobyl to fall on Byelorussia. The radiation contaminated the republic’s food and water supplies and caused many health problems, including increased cancer deaths.
Independence.
In 1990, the Byelorussian parliament declared that the republic’s laws took precedence over the laws of the Soviet Union. In August 1991, conservative Communist officials failed in an attempt to overthrow the Soviet Union’s president, Mikhail S. Gorbachev. During the upheaval that followed, Byelorussia and several other Soviet republics declared their independence. In September, the republic changed its name from the Russian form Byelorussia to the Belarusian form Belarus. In December, Belarus joined with other republics in a loose association called the Commonwealth of Independent States (C.I.S.) to deal with their common economic, political, and military problems. Minsk became the administrative capital of the C.I.S. The Soviet Union was formally dissolved on December 25. 
During the period that Belarus was a Soviet republic, the Communist government of the Soviet Union controlled the entire economy. After Belarus became independent, it planned, like other former Soviet republics, to reduce government control of economic activities. The plans called for many inefficient state-owned factories, farms, and other businesses to close, and for the number of private businesses to grow. But the country’s slow pace in changing to a free-market system led to reductions in international aid. As a result, Belarus moved to form closer ties with other former republics of the Soviet Union, especially Russia.
Recent developments.
Alexander Lukashenko became president of Belarus in 1994, the same year the country adopted a new constitution. In 1996, however, Lukashenko pushed through a referendum for a new constitution that would expand his power. The referendum, which passed, extended Lukashenko’s term to 2001 and gave him increased control over every branch of government. Opponents of Lukashenko said the vote had been falsified. They accused him of establishing a dictatorship and limiting the freedoms of the people.
Lukashenko was reelected in 2001. However, government officials interfered with the campaign of his opponent, and independent observers of the election claimed the vote was unfair. In another disputed referendum in 2004, Lukashenko won the right to run for president again in 2006. He was reelected in 2006, 2010, and 2015 in elections that were widely criticized as undemocratic. In August 2020, Lukashenko claimed victory in another election international observers considered undemocratic, after he had ordered the imprisonment of opposition leaders. Widely shared recordings of security forces brutally attacking peaceful demonstrators led to mass strikes at state-owned companies. Pro-democracy demonstrations that followed were the largest in the country’s history. The arrests and beatings of thousands of demonstrators quieted the protests later in the year. Many countries issued economic sanctions against Belarus and its leaders.
Tensions between Belarus and the West remained elevated throughout 2021. In May, police arrested a Belarusian journalist and activist after a Belarusian military jet forced his commercial flight to land in Minsk. The airliner had been traveling from Greece to Lithuania, over Belarusian airspace. Western nations condemned Lukashenko for the incident, but he drew support from autocratic governments in Russia and China. In June, Lukashenko threatened to release human traffickers and drug smugglers into other parts of Europe. Thousands of migrants, most of them from Afghanistan and the Middle East, soon crossed from camps in Belarus into neighboring Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland. European leaders accused Lukashenko of attempting to overwhelm public services among Belarus’s neighbors.
In 2022, Belarus served as a staging area for Russian troops invading Ukraine. The European Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States announced further sanctions against Belarus.
