Who ruled Minsk?

Minsk stands on the small river Svislach in the middle of the Belarusian plain, on the old routes between the Baltic and the Black Sea and between Warsaw and Moscow. That position has made it a trading town for most of its existence and a battlefield in almost every war fought across eastern Europe. Two things define its story: centuries as a provincial city of the Polish-Lithuanian state with a large Jewish population, and near-total destruction in the Second World War, after which it was rebuilt as a planned Soviet capital.

The town first appears in the written record in 1067, when the chronicles describe a battle on the Nemiga river near "Mensk" between the sons of Yaroslav the Wise and Prince Vseslav of Polotsk, after which the town was sacked. It belonged to the world of Kievan Rus, first under Polotsk and then, from the early twelfth century, as the seat of a small principality of its own. Like much of what is now Belarus, it escaped the worst of the Mongol invasions and by the fourteenth century had come under the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.

Under Lithuanian and later Polish-Lithuanian rule Minsk was a modest but busy market town. It received Magdeburg rights of self-government in 1499 and became the capital of a province in 1566. Its population mixed Orthodox and Catholic Belarusians, Poles and, increasingly, Jews. Wars with Muscovy in the seventeenth century, especially the conflict of 1654 to 1667, brought occupation and heavy losses.

The Second Partition of Poland gave Minsk to the Russian Empire in 1793, and it became a provincial capital. Napoleon's army occupied it briefly in 1812. Because the city lay inside the Pale of Settlement, where Russian Jews were permitted to live, Jews made up a majority of its inhabitants by the late nineteenth century. Railways arrived in the 1870s and brought factories and workshops, and in 1898 the founding congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, ancestor of the Bolsheviks, met secretly in a house in Minsk.

The First World War and its aftermath brought chaos: German occupation, the short-lived Belarusian People's Republic proclaimed in 1918, Bolshevik rule, and Polish control during the war of 1919 to 1920. The Treaty of Riga in 1921 left Minsk inside Soviet territory, as capital of the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic, only a few dozen kilometres from the Polish border. Stalin's purges fell heavily on its intelligentsia, and thousands were shot in the forest at Kurapaty on the city's edge.

German forces took Minsk within days of the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. The occupiers created one of the largest ghettos in occupied Soviet territory, holding over 100,000 Jews, including deportees from Germany and central Europe, and murdered almost all of them in the Holocaust. When the Red Army retook the city on 3 July 1944 most of it lay in ruins and only a fraction of its pre-war population remained.

Minsk was rebuilt from scratch with broad avenues and monumental Stalinist buildings, and grew into an industrial centre making tractors, trucks and machinery. When the Soviet Union broke up in 1991, Minsk became the capital of independent Belarus and the headquarters of the Commonwealth of Independent States. Alexander Lukashenko has governed the country since 1994, and mass protests in Minsk after the disputed 2020 presidential election were forcibly suppressed. The city now has about 2 million people, roughly a fifth of the country's population.