Belarus

Belarusian identity — a nation between empires

Belarusian identity (Belarusness — Belaruskasts) has been among Europe's most suppressed and resilient — eliminated as a category under Russian imperial rule (when Belarusians were called "West Russians"), systematically eroded under Soviet Russification, and yet surviving in folk culture, language, and the 2020 uprising's extraordinary outpouring of national symbols, white-red-white flags, and Belarusian-language songs.

Polotsk and the first Belarusian state

The Principality of Polotsk (c. 960–1307 CE) — the earliest state centred on Belarusian territory — was a prosperous East Slavic principality on the Dvina River trade route linking the Baltic to Byzantium, ruled by the Rogvolod and then Izyaslavich dynasties, and home to Euphrosyne of Polotsk (c. 1110–1173), Belarus's patron saint and the first Eastern European woman to be canonised.

Belarus in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania — the real centre

The Grand Duchy of Lithuania (1236–1795 CE) had its cultural and demographic heart in what is now Belarus — Belarusian (then called "Ruthenian" or "Lithuanian Rus") was the official state language of the Grand Duchy, Vilnius (now Lithuania's capital) was a predominantly Belarusian-Jewish city, and the Statute of Lithuania (1529) — one of Europe's greatest legal codes — was written in Belarusian.

Soviet Belarus — WWII and the most destroyed nation in Europe

Soviet Belarus (1919–1991 CE) suffered more proportionally in WWII than any other European country — losing one-quarter of its entire population (2.2 million of 9.2 million people) to Nazi extermination, starvation, and battle, including virtually the entire Jewish community (800,000 people), in a destruction so total that entire cities and over 9,000 villages were burned to the ground.

Chernobyl's fallout — Belarus as the disaster's primary victim

The Chernobyl nuclear disaster (26 April 1986 CE) at the power plant in Soviet Ukraine released 70% of its radioactive fallout onto Belarusian territory — contaminating 23% of Belarus's land, forcing the evacuation of 350,000 people, rendering agricultural land in the south permanently unusable, and creating the Exclusion Zone that remains one of Europe's eeriest landscapes.

Alexander Lukashenko and Europe's last dictatorship

Alexander Lukashenko's Belarus (1994–present) — established through a referendum that extended his powers and abolished the original 1994 constitution — has survived as Europe's most durable authoritarian regime, crushing the 2020 democracy uprising that followed the most fraudulent election in Belarusian history, and tying Belarus permanently to Russia through economic dependence and political alignment.