The lands of present-day Belarus have been inhabited since prehistoric times, but the story that shaped the country begins with the arrival of the East Slavic tribes between the 6th and 9th centuries. The Krivichs, the Dregovichs and the Radimichs settled along rivers such as the Western Dvina, the Neman and the Dnieper, in a landscape of dense forests and wetlands that would define life in the region forever.
By the 9th and 10th centuries, many of these communities had fallen within the orbit of Kievan Rus, the great federation of Slavic principalities from which Belarusians, Russians and Ukrainians all descend. Polotsk, first mentioned in 862, is the oldest city in the country and became the first great centre of power in these lands. From very early on, the Principality of Polotsk showed a strong drive for autonomy from Kiev, with its own dynasty and its own Cathedral of St Sophia. That drive for independence is one of the deepest roots of Belarusian identity.
When the Mongol invasion shattered Kievan Rus in the 13th century, the Belarusian lands took a different path. Instead of falling under the Tatar yoke like north-eastern Russia, they became part of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, an expanding state that eventually stretched from the Baltic almost to the Black Sea. For many Belarusian historians, this was the country's true golden age.
The reason is cultural, and it's no small thing: although the ruling dynasty was Lithuanian, the administrative language of the Grand Duchy was Ruthenian, or Old Belarusian, the chancery language in which laws, treaties and official documents were drawn up. The famous Statutes of Lithuania of 1529, 1566 and 1588 — among the most advanced legal codes in the Europe of their day — were written in that language. It was also in this period, in 1517, that Francysk Skaryna, a native of Polotsk, printed the first book in an East Slavic language, decades ahead of Russian printing. Medieval Belarus was no backward periphery: it was a centre of culture, law and letters.
In 1569, the Union of Lublin merged the Grand Duchy of Lithuania with the Kingdom of Poland and created the Commonwealth of the Two Nations (or Rzeczpospolita), one of the great European powers of the 16th and 17th centuries. The Belarusian lands sat at the heart of that state, and with it came centuries of slow but deep cultural and religious Polonisation.
The local nobility gradually adopted the Polish language and, in many cases, Roman Catholicism, while the peasantry went on speaking Belarusian and mostly kept the Orthodox faith. In 1596, the Union of Brest created the Greek Catholic (Uniate) Church, which recognised the authority of the Pope but kept the Eastern rite; a large share of Belarusian peasants joined it. Old Belarusian lost ground as a written language to Polish, which became the language of power and high culture. It was the start of a long process in which the country's own language was pushed back into the rural world, something that would mark Belarus right up to the 20th century.
At the end of the 18th century, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, weakened and unable to defend itself, was carved up among its neighbours in the three Partitions of Poland (1772, 1793 and 1795). Almost all Belarusian territory was absorbed by the Russian Empire of Catherine the Great. A new era of domination began, this time from St Petersburg.
Under the tsars, the policy was Russification: the Belarusian language was persecuted, the Greek Catholic Church was forcibly abolished in 1839 and folded into Russian Orthodoxy, and the authorities flatly denied that a Belarusian nation existed, treating it as a mere regional variant of the Russian people. Many of these lands were also part of the so-called Pale of Settlement, the only region where the Empire allowed Jews to live, and they came to form huge communities in cities such as Minsk, Vitebsk, Grodno and Pinsk. The Polish-Lithuanian uprisings of 1830 and 1863 — the latter led in the region by Kastus Kalinouski — were crushed, but they planted the first seeds of a Belarusian national awakening that would only bloom in the early 20th century.
The First World War turned Belarus into a land of trenches and devastation. For years, the Eastern Front line split the country in two, with Russian and German armies facing each other on Belarusian soil, cities bombed and hundreds of thousands of refugees displaced deep into Russia.
The collapse of the Russian Empire in the 1917 Revolution opened up an unprecedented window. On 25 March 1918, under German occupation, a group of national activists proclaimed the Belarusian People's Republic, the first attempt at an independent Belarusian state. It didn't last long: with no army of its own and no international recognition, it went under as the Russian Civil War and the Polish-Soviet War fought over the territory. The Peace of Riga in 1921 ended up splitting Belarus in two: the western half went to the new Poland and the eastern half became the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic, part of the USSR. A single people was divided by a border for almost two decades.
The 1920s brought Soviet Belarus a period of cultural flowering. Under the policy of "Belarusisation", the national language was used in schools, newspapers and administration, and for the first time in centuries a public life in the country's own language seemed possible. But that spring was short-lived.
Under Stalin, repression came down with full force. The forced collectivisation of agriculture destroyed the traditional peasant world, and the purges of the 1930s decimated the Belarusian intellectual and political elite: writers, scientists and leaders were shot or sent to the Gulag, accused of "nationalism". In the Kurapaty forest, near Minsk, the Soviet secret police executed and buried tens of thousands of people between 1937 and 1941; the exact number is still debated, with estimates ranging from tens of thousands to much higher figures. Meanwhile, in western Belarus under Polish rule, the Belarusian population suffered discrimination and Polonisation. In 1939, after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between the USSR and Nazi Germany, the Red Army occupied western Belarus and reunited the country within the Soviet Union.
No European country, in proportion to its population, suffered as much in the Second World War as Belarus. On 22 June 1941, the German invasion of the Soviet Union (Operation Barbarossa) struck Belarusian soil first, and the Brest Fortress, on the border, held out for weeks and became a symbol of Soviet resistance. All of Belarus remained under Nazi occupation for three years.
The figures are hard to take in. Around two million people are estimated to have died, close to a quarter of the country's population; some estimates put the figure even higher. The Nazis razed at least 5,295 villages, many with all their inhabitants inside, in reprisal for partisan activity. The best-known case is Khatyn: on 22 March 1943, an auxiliary unit under German command locked the village's population in a barn and set it on fire; 149 people died, 75 of them children. Khatyn later became the national memorial to Belarusian suffering. On top of this came the Holocaust: Belarus's huge Jewish population — the majority in many towns — was almost entirely wiped out in ghettos and mass shootings. At the same time, Belarus was one of the great centres of the anti-Nazi partisan movement, with tens of thousands of fighters hidden in its forests.
Belarus came out of the war in ruins: entire cities had been razed and Minsk, the capital, was almost completely destroyed. Soviet reconstruction rebuilt the country, and Minsk was reborn as a modern city of wide avenues and monumental Stalinist architecture, with its huge square and Independence Avenue as its emblem.
In the post-war decades, the Byelorussian SSR became one of the most industrialised and prosperous republics of the Soviet Union. Large factories for tractors, lorries and heavy machinery were set up, and the country went from mostly rural to urban in barely a generation. As a form of recognition — and also as a political move by Stalin to add friendly votes — the Byelorussian SSR got its own seat in the United Nations General Assembly from its founding in 1945, alongside Ukraine and the USSR. The Belarusian language, however, kept losing ground to Russian, which dominated urban life, higher education and administration.
On 26 April 1986, reactor number 4 of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, in Ukraine, exploded just a few kilometres from the border. Geography and the wind meant that most of the disaster fell not on Ukraine but on Belarus: around 70% of the radioactive fallout is estimated to have landed on Belarusian territory, contaminating about a quarter of the country.
The south-eastern regions, above all Gomel, were the hardest hit. Hundreds of villages had to be evacuated, thousands of people were resettled and large farming areas became unusable due to contamination with caesium-137 and other isotopes. The Soviet authorities initially hid the scale of the disaster. The health consequences — especially the rise in thyroid cancers, many of them in children — and the social trauma dragged on for decades. Even today, more than thirty-five years later, a significant portion of Belarusian territory is still affected by radiation, and Chernobyl is etched into the country's memory as a silent catastrophe added to those inherited from the war.
The end of the Soviet Union, curiously enough, had its decisive moment on Belarusian soil. On 8 December 1991, at a hunting lodge in the Belovezhskaya Pushcha forest, near the Polish border, the leaders of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus — Boris Yeltsin, Leonid Kravchuk and Stanislav Shushkevich — signed the Belavezha Accords, which declared that the USSR had ceased to exist and created the Commonwealth of Independent States in its place.
Belarus had already declared independence in August 1991, amid the Soviet collapse. But unlike other countries that left the USSR on a strong wave of nationalism, Belarusian independence was more the result of a collapse than of a great liberation movement. The young republic adopted its own flag and coat of arms — the historic white-red-white symbols — and began a difficult economic transition, marked by inflation and falling living standards, in a country where much of the population still felt deeply tied to Russia and the Soviet past.
In 1994, in the first — and so far only — presidential elections considered free, a former collective farm director and ex-border guard named Alexander Lukashenko won on a campaign against corruption and in favour of closer ties with Russia. He took office on 20 July 1994 and, more than three decades later, is still in power.
Over the years, Lukashenko concentrated ever more power: he changed the Constitution to expand his powers and remove term limits, brought back Soviet-style symbols in place of the historic ones, kept much of the economy under state control and silenced the opposition and the independent press. His government has often been described as the most authoritarian in Europe. In foreign policy, he maintained a close alliance with Moscow, with which he signed a "Union State" treaty, though he also manoeuvred to keep some room for autonomy. Under his rule, the country kept unemployment low and enjoyed relative social stability, but at the cost of political freedoms.
In August 2020, after presidential elections in which the authorities announced that Lukashenko had won around 80% of the vote, the largest protest movement since independence broke out. Broad sections of society denounced massive fraud and backed opposition candidate Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, who had stood after her husband was jailed. For weeks, hundreds of thousands of people marched peacefully through the streets of Minsk and other cities.
The government's response was harsh repression: tens of thousands of arrests, reports of torture and beatings, forced exile for opposition leaders and the closure of media outlets and organisations. According to estimates by human rights organisations, the country racked up thousands of convictions and a persistent number of political prisoners in the years that followed. Tsikhanouskaya and much of the opposition had to go into exile. In 2022, Belarus was also dragged into the conflict in Ukraine by allowing its territory to serve as a base for the Russian invasion, which deepened its dependence on Moscow and its international isolation. Today Belarus remains a tense country, with a firmly entrenched regime and a significant part of its society — especially the younger, urban part — calling quietly, or from exile, for a different future.
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Minsk is first mentioned in 1067, in connection with a battle between princes of the Rus, and during the Middle Ages it was a principality in its own right within the orbit of Polotsk. Set on the Svislach river, in the geographical centre of the country, it grew as a crossroads of trade routes between the Baltic and the Black Sea.
Under the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and later the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Minsk was a market town with a mixed population of Belarusians, Poles, Jews and Tatars. After the Partitions it passed to the Russian Empire and became a provincial capital. By the early 20th century it was a city with a strong Jewish character, with Yiddish as one of its everyday languages, and an important centre of the Empire's labour and revolutionary movement.
The Second World War was an absolute catastrophe for Minsk. Occupied by the Germans a few days after the invasion of June 1941, the city held one of the largest Jewish ghettos in occupied Europe, where tens of thousands of people were confined and then murdered. On its outskirts, at Maly Trostenets, one of the largest extermination sites in the East operated.
When the Red Army liberated Minsk in July 1944, the city was practically destroyed: only a tiny fraction of its buildings is thought to have been left standing. The population had dropped to a fraction of its pre-war size. Minsk was, along with Warsaw, one of the most devastated European capitals of the conflict.
The Minsk you see today is, to a large extent, a city built from scratch after 1944. Soviet planners raised it according to the ideal of Stalinist architecture: wide straight avenues, monumental squares and buildings with imposing façades. Today's Independence Avenue, with its kilometres of colonnades and porticoes, is one of the best-preserved examples of that style anywhere in the former USSR.
In the post-war decades, Minsk also became a major industrial hub, home to factories making tractors, lorries (the famous MAZ and BelAZ) and watches. The city grew quickly to more than one and a half million inhabitants, drawing migrants from the countryside and establishing itself as the political, economic and cultural centre of the country. Beneath the modern surface, though, a few corners of the restored old town survive, such as the Upper Town (Nyamiha) district, which evoke the Minsk that existed before the destruction.
About fifty kilometres from Minsk stands Khatyn, the most solemn memorial in Belarus. It remembers the village that was wiped off the map on 22 March 1943 by an auxiliary unit under German command: its inhabitants were locked in a barn and burned alive. 149 people died, 75 of them children; only a handful survived.
Opened in 1969, the memorial doesn't rebuild the village but evokes it. Where each burned house stood there is a concrete monument topped by a bell that rings at intervals, so the whole site tolls constantly in memory of the dead. Khatyn doesn't stand only for its own village: it symbolises the more than five thousand Belarusian villages razed during the occupation. A monument with three birch trees and an eternal flame in place of the fourth recalls that one in four Belarusians died in the war.
With independence in 1991, Minsk went from being the capital of a Soviet republic to the capital of a sovereign state. It houses the presidency, the government and the parliament, and is also the administrative seat of the Commonwealth of Independent States, the organisation born of the Belavezha Accords.
In August 2020, the streets and squares of Minsk were the epicentre of the largest protests in the country's history, when hundreds of thousands of people demonstrated against the results of the presidential elections. The repression that followed left its mark on the city and its people. Today Minsk combines that simmering political tension with the image of an orderly, clean and monumental capital, where the weight of the Soviet past sits alongside open questions about the future.
Eastern Belarus stretches across the basins of the Dnieper and the Sozh, the great rivers that flow south towards Ukraine and the Black Sea. It is a region of fertile land and forests, historically linked both to Rus and, later, to the river trade that connected these lands with the south.
Unlike the west, strongly shaped by Poland, eastern Belarus came under the rule of the Russian Empire as early as the first partitions at the end of the 18th century, and its cultural ties to Russia are closer. Its two main cities, Gomel and Mogilev, grew as administrative and industrial centres and are now among the largest in the country.
Gomel (Homiel), on the banks of the Sozh, is the second most populous city in Belarus. Its emblem is the Rumyantsev-Paskevich Palace ensemble, an elegant neoclassical palace surrounded by a large park that slopes down to the river. It was built at the end of the 18th century by Count Pyotr Rumyantsev, a leading military commander of the Russian Empire to whom Catherine the Great granted these lands, and later enlarged by the Paskevich family.
The ensemble, with the palace, the Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul, the observation tower and the gardens, is one of the most beautiful urban spaces in the country and reflects the splendour of the Russian imperial aristocracy that ruled eastern Belarus after the partitions. Before the Second World War, Gomel also had a large Jewish population, like almost every city in the east.
Gomel province, in the far south-east of the country, was the area worst affected by the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. Its closeness to the plant, just across the Ukrainian border, meant that much of the radioactive fallout landed on its fields and villages. Large areas were declared uninhabitable, tens of thousands of people had to be evacuated and resettled, and many villages were abandoned for good.
The health and social consequences hit the region hard for decades: thyroid cancers rose, especially among children, and life expectancy fell in the most contaminated areas. Even today there is land off-limits to farming and there are ghost villages. For eastern Belarus, Chernobyl is a wound that is still open, added to the long list of catastrophes that marked the country in the 20th century.
Mogilev (Mahilyow), on the banks of the Dnieper, is one of the historic cities of eastern Belarus. Founded in the Middle Ages, it prospered under the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth as a centre of trade and crafts, with self-government rights and a central square that still keeps its historic layout.
In the First World War, Mogilev played an unexpected role: it was the seat of the Stavka, the supreme headquarters of the Russian army, and Tsar Nicholas II lived there for long periods. In the 1930s there was even a Soviet plan to move the capital of the Byelorussian SSR there, which never came about. Today it is one of the country's main industrial and university cities.
Like the rest of the country, eastern Belarus lived through the horror of the Second World War: Nazi occupation, the extermination of the Jewish population, burned villages and intense partisan activity in its forests. The Mogilev region in particular saw heavy fighting both in 1941, during the invasion, and in 1944, during the Soviet offensive that liberated Belarus.
After the war, Gomel and Mogilev industrialised with chemical, metalworking and machinery plants, and grew into large urban centres. After independence, the east kept its industrial profile and its strong cultural and economic ties with Russia. Between the memory of the war, the lingering shadow of Chernobyl and the weight of old Soviet industry, the east sums up many of the tensions and burdens that run through Belarus today.
Polotsk, on the banks of the Western Dvina, is the oldest city in Belarus: it is first mentioned in the year 862. It was the centre of the Principality of Polotsk, the first major state to emerge on Belarusian soil and one of the most important in all of medieval Rus, rivalling Kyiv and Novgorod.
In the 11th century, Prince Vseslav the Sorcerer turned Polotsk into a regional power, and the city built its St Sophia Cathedral, one of only three cathedrals of that name in all of Rus (along with those of Kyiv and Novgorod), as a sign of its prestige. For Belarusian national identity, Polotsk is a founding place: this is where the state was born from which many trace the start of the country's history.
Polotsk was not only a centre of power, but also of culture and faith. In the 12th century it was home to Euphrosyne of Polotsk, a princess who became a nun, founded monasteries and schools and devoted herself to copying books; she is one of the most revered figures in Belarusian religious history and the country's patron saint. The famous Cross of Euphrosyne, a masterpiece of medieval goldsmithing, became a national symbol (the original was lost during the Second World War).
Polotsk was also the home town of Francysk Skaryna, a humanist and physician who in 1517 printed in Prague the first book in an East Slavic language, decades ahead of printing in Moscow. Skaryna is considered the father of book publishing in Eastern Europe and a key figure in Belarusian culture. The fact that the country's oldest city is also the cradle of its first state and its first printed book makes it a place loaded with meaning.
Vitebsk, on the same Western Dvina river, is the second oldest city in Belarus and another of the great historic centres of the north. Sitting at a crossroads of trade routes, it prospered under the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth as a merchant city, with self-government rights under the Magdeburg model.
Like so many Belarusian cities, Vitebsk suffered enormously in the Second World War: under Nazi occupation its Jewish population, which was very large, was exterminated, and much of the city was destroyed. Rebuilt after the war, today it has a mix of restored historic architecture and Soviet-era buildings.
Vitebsk is, above all, the city of Marc Chagall. The painter was born in 1887 into a modest Jewish family in Vitebsk, and his skies full of floating figures, fiddlers and wooden houses are directly inspired by the city of his childhood. Chagall is one of the great names of 20th-century art, and his memory is very present in the city, where his childhood home has become a museum.
After the Russian Revolution, Chagall returned to Vitebsk and founded an art school there that drew other avant-garde figures, such as Kazimir Malevich, the creator of Suprematism. For a few years, this provincial city was a hotbed of world-class artistic experimentation. Today Vitebsk keeps that cultural calling and hosts the Slavianski Bazar international festival, one of the biggest music events in the country.
The north of Belarus, led by Polotsk and Vitebsk, holds a special place in the shaping of national identity. If Minsk is the political centre and the west holds the legacy of the nobility, the north is where many place the spiritual and political origins of the country: the old land of Polotsk Rus, the chancery language, the first books, the first saints.
It is also a region of gentle landscapes, lakes and forests, crossed by the Dvina, which for centuries was a trade route to the Baltic. For the Belarusian national movement of the 19th and 20th centuries, reviving the memory of Polotsk and its figures was a way of asserting that Belarus was not just a province of Russia, but a nation with a long history of its own.
Western Belarus is the part of the country most shaped by Polish and Lithuanian influence. For centuries it was the heartland of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and later of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which is why it has the country's highest concentration of castles, palaces and Baroque churches. It is also a region with a strong Roman Catholic presence alongside the Orthodox majority.
After the First World War, this whole area became part of the Second Polish Republic between 1921 and 1939, while eastern Belarus belonged to the Soviet Union. That split of almost twenty years left cultural traces you can still notice today: western Belarus keeps a somewhat different character, more closely linked to the legacy of the old Rzeczpospolita.
Brest, on the border with Poland, is a city with centuries of history, but its name became forever linked to two events of the 20th century. In 1918 the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was signed there, taking Bolshevik Russia out of the First World War at the cost of huge territories ceded to the Central Powers.
The other event is military. Brest Fortress, built in the 19th century where the Mukhavets and Western Bug rivers meet, was one of the first targets of the German invasion on 22 June 1941. Its garrison, surrounded and outnumbered, held out for weeks in desperate conditions. In recognition of that defence, the USSR awarded it the title of "Hero Fortress". After the war it became an imposing memorial complex, with colossal concrete sculptures that make it one of the most striking monuments in the country.
Two of the country's great architectural treasures are in the west, and both bear the stamp of the Radziwiłł family, one of the most powerful noble dynasties of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Mir Castle, built in the early 16th century, is a Gothic-Renaissance complex of red brick with corner towers, surrounded by a moat, and is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
A few kilometres away, in Nesvizh (Niasvizh), stands the Radziwiłł residence, a complex of palace and fortifications with gardens and a moat that was the heart of their vast estate. Also a World Heritage Site, it reflects the splendour of the aristocracy of the old Rzeczpospolita, who ruled these lands almost as their own principalities. Both monuments speak of a Belarus that was, for centuries, home to a wealthy and cosmopolitan nobility.
Grodno (Hrodna), close to the borders with Poland and Lithuania, is one of the best-preserved cities in Belarus, partly because it suffered less destruction than others during the Second World War. With castles on the banks of the Neman, Baroque churches and a harmonious old town, it keeps a Central European feel that is rare in the country.
Under the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Grodno was one of the royal residences: the diets (sejm) met there, and King Stephen Báthory made the city one of his centres of government. It was also in Grodno that the last sejm of the Commonwealth was held before the state disappeared. The city historically had a very diverse population, with large Polish and Jewish communities, and it is still one of the centres of Belarus's Catholic and Polish-origin minority today.
In the far west, along the border with Poland, lies Belovezhskaya Pushcha, one of the last fragments of the primeval forest that covered much of Europe thousands of years ago. A World Heritage Site, it is home to the world's largest herd of European bison (or wisent), the continent's largest land mammal, saved from extinction in the 20th century.
But this forest is not just a nature sanctuary: it also played a part in history. On 8 December 1991, at a hunting dacha in Viskuli, inside the reserve, the leaders of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus signed the Belavezha Accords, which sealed the end of the Soviet Union and created the Commonwealth of Independent States. So the same forest that shelters the last European bison witnessed the death certificate of one of the great empires of the 20th century.
Hardly anything that happened to Belarus happened on its own: these are the histories next door.
