The history of Belarus

Belarus is a land of forests, rivers and marshes on the great plain between Poland and Russia, crossed by the river routes that once linked the Baltic to the Black Sea. Baltic peoples lived here before the East Slavs settled, and the principality of Polotsk was one of the leading states of Kievan Rus'. For more than four centuries the Belarusian lands formed the heart of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and then of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, before Russia annexed them at the end of the eighteenth century. In the twentieth century the country suffered as few others did, through war, Stalinist terror, the Nazi occupation and the Holocaust, and Chernobyl, before becoming independent in 1991. Since 1994 it has been ruled by Alexander Lukashenko, whose government is closely allied with Russia.

Hunters moved into the region as the ice sheets of the last Ice Age retreated, and Neolithic communities of fishers and hunters lived along the rivers and lakes. Farming spread slowly in the forested north. Over the first millennium BCE and the early first millennium CE the area was home mainly to Baltic-speaking peoples, related to the ancestors of today's Lithuanians and Latvians, whose fortified hilltop settlements dot the countryside. Scythians and other steppe peoples touched the south.

From about the sixth century CE Slavic farmers spread into the region and gradually absorbed the Balts, a largely peaceful process that left many Baltic river and place names. By the ninth century three East Slavic tribal groups lived in what is now Belarus: the Krivichs in the north around the upper Dvina and Dnieper, the Dregovichs in the marshy centre, and the Radimichs in the east.

Scandinavian traders and warriors, the Varangians of the Viking Age, used the Dvina and Dnieper as part of the route from the Baltic to the Byzantine Empire, and the East Slavic lands were drawn together under the Rurikid princes of Kievan Rus'. Polotsk, first mentioned in 862, became the seat of a powerful principality. Its prince Rogvolod was killed around 980 by Vladimir of Novgorod, the future Grand Prince of Kyiv, who took his daughter Rogneda as a wife, and their descendants ruled Polotsk as a separate branch of the dynasty.

Christianity arrived from Byzantium after Vladimir's conversion in 988, and the Cathedral of Holy Wisdom was built in Polotsk in the mid-eleventh century. Prince Vseslav of Polotsk challenged Kyiv itself; in 1067 his rivals defeated him on the Nemiga River, in the earliest written mention of Minsk. In the twelfth century Euphrosyne of Polotsk, a princess and abbess, founded monasteries and became one of the first women recognised as a saint among the East Slavs. Turaŭ, in the south, was another important principality. As Kievan Rus' fragmented in the twelfth century, these principalities went their own ways.

The Mongol invasion of the 1230s and 1240s, which destroyed Kyiv, largely spared the Belarusian lands. Instead, the pagan Lithuanian princes to the north-west, led by Mindaugas in the mid-thirteenth century, extended their power over the Belarusian principalities by conquest, alliance and marriage. Under Gediminas and his successors in the fourteenth century the Grand Duchy of Lithuania became one of the largest states in Europe, stretching from the Baltic towards the Black Sea, and the Ruthenian, East Slavic population of what is now Belarus formed the majority of its people.

The Ruthenian language, the ancestor of modern Belarusian, was the main written language of the grand duchy's administration and its law codes, the Statutes of Lithuania of 1529, 1566 and 1588. Belarusian towns such as Polotsk, Vitebsk, Hrodna and Brest received German-style municipal rights. The Union of Krewo of 1385 led to Grand Duke Jogaila's coronation as king of Poland in 1386, beginning a long partnership, and in 1410 Lithuanian and Ruthenian troops fought alongside the Poles to defeat the Teutonic Order at Grunwald. From the late fifteenth century the rising power of Muscovy under Ivan III and later Ivan the Terrible fought the grand duchy for the eastern lands of old Rus'. In 1517 the Polotsk-born scholar Francysk Skaryna printed in Prague the first of his Bible translations in a Belarusian version of Church Slavonic, among the earliest printed books of the East Slavs.

Pressed by Muscovy, the grand duchy agreed to the Union of Lublin in 1569, which created the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, a single state with an elected king and a powerful nobility. The Belarusian nobility increasingly adopted the Polish language and Catholicism, and in 1696 Polish replaced Ruthenian as the official language of administration. The Reformation briefly won over great magnates such as the Radziwiłłs, whose seats at Niasviž and Mir are now among the country's best-known monuments. In 1596 the Union of Brest brought part of the Orthodox Church into union with Rome while keeping its Byzantine rite, and by the eighteenth century most Belarusian peasants belonged to this Uniate, or Greek Catholic, Church.

The seventeenth century brought devastating wars. During the Russo-Polish war of 1654 to 1667, Muscovite and Cossack armies overran the Belarusian lands, and the region may have lost around half its population to fighting, disease and deportation. The Great Northern War of the early eighteenth century brought further destruction. The Belarusian lands also became home to one of the largest Jewish communities in the world, making up a large share of the population of towns and small market towns.

In three partitions, in 1772, 1793 and 1795, the Russian Empire of Catherine the Great, Prussia and Austria divided the Commonwealth, and all of present-day Belarus passed to Russia. In 1812 Napoleon's army crossed Belarus on its way to Moscow, and during the retreat suffered catastrophic losses crossing the Berezina River in November. The Belarusian lands lay within the Pale of Settlement, the zone where most of the empire's Jews were required to live, and in many towns Jews were the majority.

After the Polish-led uprisings of 1830 and 1863, the tsarist government pursued a policy of Russification. The Uniate Church was abolished in 1839 and its followers were made Orthodox, Belarusian-language publishing was restricted, and the Lithuanian Statute ceased to apply. The 1863 uprising in the Belarusian and Lithuanian lands was led by Kastus Kalinoŭski, who was hanged in Vilnius in 1864 and later became a national hero. Serfdom was abolished in 1861, but the countryside remained poor, and many peasants emigrated. A Belarusian national movement grew in the early twentieth century around the newspaper Nasha Niva, published in Vilnius from 1906, and poets such as Yanka Kupala and Yakub Kolas.

During the First World War the front ran through Belarus from 1915, and much of the population fled or was evacuated east. After the Russian Revolution, the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk left the west under German control, and on 25 March 1918 Belarusian activists proclaimed the Belarusian People's Republic. It never controlled real territory, and its council has survived to the present as a government in exile. The Bolsheviks of Vladimir Lenin proclaimed a Soviet Belarusian republic in 1919, and after the Polish-Soviet War the Treaty of Riga in 1921 divided the country. The east became the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic, a founding member of the Soviet Union in 1922, while the west was incorporated into Poland.

In the Soviet east the 1920s brought a period of encouragement for Belarusian culture, with Belarusian, Russian, Yiddish and Polish all official languages. Under Joseph Stalin this ended in collectivisation, famine and mass terror. Tens of thousands of people, including much of the Belarusian intelligentsia, were shot, and at Kurapaty, on the edge of Minsk, the secret police buried many thousands of victims between 1937 and 1941. In western Belarus the Polish government restricted Belarusian schools and organisations, especially after 1935.

In September 1939, under the Nazi-Soviet pact, the Red Army occupied eastern Poland, and western Belarus was annexed to the Byelorussian SSR, followed by deportations of tens of thousands of people. On 22 June 1941 Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union, and the defence of the Brest fortress was one of the first battles of the invasion. Within weeks all of Belarus was under German occupation, which lasted three years and was among the most brutal of the Second World War.

The Jews of Belarus were murdered in the Holocaust, in mass shootings by German units and local collaborators and in ghettos such as the one in Minsk, one of the largest in occupied Europe. Maly Trostenets, near Minsk, was one of the largest killing sites in the occupied Soviet territories, where Jews deported from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia were also murdered. A large partisan movement fought the occupiers from the forests, and German forces responded by burning villages with their inhabitants; at Khatyn in March 1943, 149 villagers were killed, and hundreds of villages were destroyed in the same way. In the summer of 1944 Operation Bagration destroyed the German Army Group Centre, and Minsk was retaken on 3 July. About a quarter of the population, perhaps 2.2 million people or more, had died, and most towns lay in ruins.

The war's end confirmed the western border roughly along the Curzon Line, giving the republic the lands taken from Poland in 1939 except the Białystok area, and many Poles left for Poland. The Byelorussian SSR became a founding member of the United Nations in 1945, alongside the Soviet Union and Ukraine. Rebuilt Minsk became a showcase Soviet city, and under leaders drawn from the wartime partisans, notably Kirill Mazurov and Pyotr Masherov, the republic industrialised rapidly, producing tractors, trucks and machinery. Russian increasingly replaced Belarusian in schools, offices and cities.

The explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear plant, just across the border in Ukraine, in April 1986 spread much of its fallout over southern Belarus, forcing the evacuation of whole districts. Under Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms, a national revival emerged. In 1988 the archaeologist Zianon Pazniak published evidence of the Kurapaty mass graves, and the Belarusian Popular Front was founded that year.

Belarus declared sovereignty on 27 July 1990 and independence on 25 August 1991. On 8 December 1991, at a hunting lodge in the Białowieża forest, the leaders of Belarus, Russia and Ukraine signed the agreements that brought about the dissolution of the Soviet Union and created the Commonwealth of Independent States, with its headquarters in Minsk. A new constitution in 1994 created a presidency, and Alexander Lukashenko, a former state farm director campaigning against corruption, won the election that July with about 80 per cent of the second-round vote, still the country's only presidential election widely accepted as free.

Lukashenko kept most of the economy in state hands and moved towards Russia. Referendums in 1995 and 1996, criticised by international observers, made Russian an official language alongside Belarusian, restored Soviet-style national symbols and greatly expanded presidential power. Belarus and Russia formed a Union State by treaty in 1999. Several opposition figures disappeared in 1999 and 2000, and later elections in 2001, 2006, 2010 and 2015, all judged neither free nor fair by observers, were followed by arrests of protesters and candidates. Relations with Russia were punctuated by disputes over the price of gas and oil.

The presidential election of 9 August 2020 was officially won by Lukashenko with about 80 per cent of the vote, but the opposition candidate Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, who had stood in place of her jailed husband, claimed victory. Hundreds of thousands of people protested across the country in the following months. The authorities detained tens of thousands, and the UN human rights office received reports of hundreds of cases of torture and ill-treatment. Tsikhanouskaya and other opposition leaders went into exile, and the European Union, the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada imposed sanctions and declined to recognise Lukashenko as the legitimate president. In May 2021 the authorities forced a Ryanair flight from Athens to Vilnius to land in Minsk in order to arrest the journalist Raman Pratasevich, and later that year Belarus was accused of channelling migrants towards the borders of Poland, Lithuania and Latvia.

In February 2022 Belarus allowed Russian troops to launch part of their invasion of Ukraine from its territory, bringing further sanctions. Lukashenko was declared the winner of a seventh term in January 2025 with more than 87 per cent of the vote, in an election critics called a sham after independent media had been closed and opponents imprisoned or exiled. In February 2026 the human rights centre Viasna counted more than 1,100 political prisoners in Belarus. Russia remains by far its main economic partner, accounting for about two-thirds of its trade.