Belarus has two founding lines and keeps one

Who ruled the Belarusian lands before the partitions

The towns came first. Polatsk appears in the written record in 862, Turaw in 980, Brest in 1019 and Minsk in 1067, by Britannica's dates, all of them river settlements of the Slavic tribes who reached the area between the sixth and eighth centuries. The Krivichi, the Dregovichi and the Radimichi absorbed the Baltic peoples already living there, and from the mid-ninth century their principalities came under the loose suzerainty of Kievan Rus. Polatsk behaved like a capital. Its princes repeatedly asserted their independence from the other centres of Rus, and its Cathedral of the Holy Wisdom, built between 1044 and 1066, took the name of the churches in Kyiv and Novgorod and of the Hagia Sophia behind all three.

The Mongol sack of Kyiv in 1240 ended that order. Over the next 150 years the Grand Duchy of Lithuania absorbed the Belarusian principalities, some by conquest, some by dynastic marriage and some that joined of their own accord. The conquered lands kept a large degree of autonomy, and in a state where Lithuanians were outnumbered the East Slavic population carried the written culture. One estimate for 1493 counts 3.75 million Ruthenians, the ancestors of Belarusians and Ukrainians, among 7.5 million people in Poland and the grand duchy together. Chancery Ruthenian was the language of administration from at least the reign of Vytautas, and the first Statute of Lithuania, the grand duchy's code of civil and property law, was issued in it in 1529 before being translated into Latin in 1530 and Polish in 1532.

Whose state that was is argued over. Historians in Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine have long disputed whether the grand duchy was essentially Lithuanian or a Ruthenian-Lithuanian state in which Ruthenian culture carried the weight, and the Lithuanian and Belarusian national revivals of the nineteenth century both drew on it. This catalogue records the dispute and takes no side in it.

The Union of Lublin in 1569 federated the grand duchy with Poland. The Belarusian lands stayed inside the grand duchy, which kept its title and its statutes, but the joint Sejm seated 134 representatives from Poland against 46 from Lithuania. A Polish-speaking Catholic nobility formed over an Orthodox peasantry that the agrarian reform of 1557 had already reduced to full serfdom, and the magnate families grew rich enough to be called states within the state. The Radziwiłł residence at Nesvizh, inscribed on the World Heritage List in 2005, and the castle complex at Mir, inscribed in 2000, are what that nobility left standing. The Union of Brest of 1596 then split the Orthodox population by creating an Eastern-rite church under the pope. Francysk Skaryna of Polatsk had printed his Belarusian Bible in Prague and Vilnius between 1517 and 1525; by the late seventeenth century Polish had replaced Ruthenian as the language of the chancery.

What Russian rule did to written Belarusian

Russia took the Belarusian lands in three steps. The First Partition of Poland in 1772 gave Catherine the Great the east, with Vitsyebsk, Mahilyow and Homyel; the Second, in 1793, gave Minsk and the centre; and the Third, in 1795, the remainder. The empire divided the territory into the governorates of Minsk, Vitebsk, Mogilev, Grodno and Vilnia. Napoleon's army crossed it twice in 1812, and a major battle of his retreat was fought at the Byarezina.

The empire governed the region as a borderland to be drawn away from Poland. In the 1840s Nicholas I banned Belarusian from public schools, campaigned against Belarusian publications and pressed those who had become Catholic under Polish rule to return to Orthodoxy. The gentry rose in 1830 and again in 1863, when Konstanty Kalinowski, also known as Kastus, led the revolt in the Belarusian lands. Kalinowski had published Mużyckaja prauda, a newspaper in modern Belarusian, in 1862 and 1863, and printed it in Latin script. After the revolt failed the government imposed Cyrillic on Belarusian in 1864. No documents in Belarusian were permitted from then until 1905.

Industry arrived slowly. Timber working, glassmaking and, along the rivers, boatbuilding grew in the towns in the nineteenth century, and the pace picked up after the emancipation of the serfs in the 1860s and the railways of the 1880s. Rural poverty drove emigration. In the 50 years before 1917 nearly 1.5 million people left the provinces that contain present-day Belarus, most of them to the United States or to Siberia, and more than 600,000 went to Siberia between 1896 and 1915. Minsk also hosted, in 1898, the small congress that laid the foundation for the Russian Social-Democratic Workers' Party.

How two Belarusian states were declared within a year

German troops took Minsk on 21 February 1918. Under the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, signed on 3 March, Soviet Russia gave up part of present-day Belarus to Germany, and in that occupied space a Belarusian council declared the Belarusian People's Republic on 25 March 1918. It was the first attempt at an independent state under the name Belarus. The German administration allowed Belarusian-language schools, which the empire had banned, and the republic flew a flag of white, red and white.

It lasted as long as the occupation did. The Germans left Minsk on 3 December 1918 and the Red Army entered on 10 December. The council, the Rada, went into exile, first to Kaunas, then to Berlin and finally to Prague. The Bolsheviks proclaimed a Soviet Socialist Republic of Byelorussia on 1 January 1919 by Britannica's date, or 2 January in the Wikipedia account, and dissolved it again on 17 February, sending part of it to Soviet Russia and merging the rest with Soviet Lithuania into a joint republic, known as Litbel, with its capital at Vilnius.

Poland then advanced from the west. Polish forces took Vilnius on 17 April 1919 and Minsk on 8 August 1919. The Red Army retook Minsk on 11 July 1920 and a Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic was declared once more on 31 July 1920. The Treaty of Riga, signed on 18 March 1921, ended the Polish-Soviet war by dividing the Belarusian lands between Poland and Soviet Russia along the line of the First Partition. When the armistice line handed Slutsk to the Bolsheviks, the town organised a militia under the name of the People's Republic and held out for nearly a month, until the Red Army brought two divisions against it. The Rada prepared a national uprising until the League of Nations recognised the Soviet Union's western borders on 15 March 1923.

How Moscow assembled the Soviet republic piece by piece

The Soviet republic that survived Riga was small: 52,400 square kilometres and 1.544 million people in 1921. The Wikipedia history of the Soviet republic argues that its weak national sentiment would have made it easy to fold into Russia, and that it was kept as a full union republic because Soviet leaders who still expected to advance west wanted a bridgehead facing Poland. At the 1920 census many people in the area recorded themselves as Russian to avoid being annexed to Poland. On 30 December 1922 it became one of the four founding republics of the Soviet Union.

Moscow then enlarged it twice. In March 1924 Russia handed back most of the former Vitebsk and Mogilev governorates, which doubled the area to 110,600 square kilometres and raised the population to 4.2 million. In December 1926 Gomel and Rechytsa followed, taking the area to 126,300 square kilometres. The census that year counted 4,982,623 people, 83% of them rural. Belarusians were 80.6% of the total and 39.2% of the towns, and Jews had made up almost 44% of the urban population in 1925.

The republic of the 1920s had four official languages, Belarusian, Russian, Yiddish and Polish, and under the Soviet policy of korenizatsiya it put Belarusian into schools and print, partly to draw the Belarusians across the Polish border toward it and partly to leave the exiled Rada without an audience. Stalin's rule ended that. The purges of the 1930s executed almost all the prominent Belarusian national intelligentsia, many of whom are buried at Kurapaty, thousands more were deported to Asia, and in 1933 Belarusian orthography was reformed toward Russian.

West of the Riga line, Poland settled up to 30,000 families of military veterans on land that had belonged to the tsar's family and the Russian aristocracy, and from the early 1930s pursued Polonisation of its minorities. By the spring of 1939 there was no official Belarusian organisation and no exclusively Belarusian school left in Poland, and 44 schools still taught the language.

What the German occupation cost Belarus

The Soviet Union invaded Poland on 17 September 1939 under the secret protocol of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and joined Western Belarus to the Byelorussian republic. The twenty months that followed brought Belarusian-language schooling, in more than 75% of schools by October 1940, together with arrests, deportation to the Gulag and executions whose victims were mostly Polish and Jewish.

Germany invaded on 22 June 1941 and took Minsk on 28 June. By the end of August 1941 the whole of the present territory was occupied, much of it as the General District Belarus inside the Reichskommissariat Ostland. The occupation deported some 380,000 people for forced labour. About 800,000 Belarusian Jews, around 90% of the Jewish population, were killed in the Holocaust, and in 1942 the ghetto of the small town of Lakhva rose against the Germans. German units destroyed at least 5,295 settlements along with some or all of their inhabitants. More than 600 villages, Khatyn among them, were wiped out entirely.

Partisans held the forests and the marshes and attacked the railways. At Asipovichy on 30 July 1943 they destroyed four German trains carrying supplies and Tiger tanks. Not all of them were pro-Soviet. The occupiers also recruited, setting up a Belarusian Central Rada under German control with symbols close to those of 1918, and the white-red-white flag was used under the occupation in 1943 and 1944. The government now cites that use against the flag.

The Soviet offensive known as Operation Bagration opened on 22 June 1944 and the Red Army retook Minsk on 3 July. The Wikipedia history of the Soviet republic puts the dead at over 2 million in three years of occupation, almost a quarter of the population, and Britannica gives the toll as about one-fourth. About 9,200 villages and 1.2 million houses were destroyed over the war, and Minsk and Vitsebsk lost more than 80% of their buildings. Minsk was named a Hero City and the Brest fortress a Hero Fortress. Fifty-two years later the republic made the day Minsk was retaken its Independence Day.

Why Soviet Byelorussia sat in the United Nations

The Byelorussian republic became a founding member of the United Nations on 24 October 1945, with its own seat in the General Assembly, alongside the Soviet Union and the Ukrainian republic, while remaining a constituent republic of one federal state. The seat came from a deal with the United States over the balance of the General Assembly and in effect gave the Soviet Union two additional votes. A Byelorussian diplomat, G. G. Chernushchenko, presided over the Security Council in January and February 1975. The republic also belonged to UNESCO, the International Labour Organization, the World Health Organization and the International Atomic Energy Agency, and joined the International Olympic Committee in 1949. It held a vote in the General Assembly for 46 years before it declared independence.

At home it was rebuilt from very little. Industrial production in 1945 was less than 20% of its pre-war level, and most of the factories evacuated to Russia were never returned. Reconstruction was planned from Moscow and went past repair: plants such as BelAZ, MAZ and the Minsk Tractor Plant turned the republic into a manufacturing centre for the western Soviet Union. Minsk reached a million people by the early 1970s, and the republic counted 10 million by 1989. Workers came from Russia, Russian became the language of administration, and many small towns and rural districts lost population. More than 200,000 ethnic Poles left or were expelled to Poland in the late 1940s and late 1950s.

On 26 April 1986 the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, in Ukraine close to the Belarusian border, released a plume of radioactive debris, and the Wikipedia history of Belarus puts the share of the fallout that landed in Belarus at about 60%. The area affected is given two ways. Britannica has about one-fifth of the country contaminated with long-lived radioactive material; the Wikipedia history has about 50,000 square kilometres, roughly a quarter of the territory, formerly home to 2.2 million people and under permanent monitoring. It records 135,000 people resettled permanently. The IAEA counts at least 5,000 documented cases of thyroid cancer between 1991 and 2005 among people in Belarus, Ukraine and the heavily affected regions of Russia who were aged 0 to 14 at the time of the accident.

How independence came out of a Soviet republic

Britannica judges that the Byelorussian republic moved less vigorously than other Soviet republics to break away. Its Supreme Soviet declared sovereignty on 27 July 1990 and, after the failed coup in Moscow, independence on 25 August 1991, by giving the sovereignty declaration constitutional force; the Wikipedia history of the Soviet republic notes that the republic still regarded itself as part of the Soviet Union afterwards. On 19 September 1991 the Supreme Soviet renamed it the Republic of Belarus, and the white-red-white flag of 1918 became the flag of the state. On 8 December 1991, in Belavezhskaya Pushcha, Stanislav Shushkevich met Boris Yeltsin of Russia and Leonid Kravchuk of Ukraine and signed the accords that replaced the Soviet Union with the Commonwealth of Independent States. The Soviet-era constitution of 1978 stayed in force.

A new constitution was adopted on 15 March 1994. The presidential portal describes it as the first constitution in the history of sovereign Belarus and the fifth constitution of Belarus in succession since the October Revolution of 1917, which counts the Soviet constitutions as its ancestors. It created the office of president, and Alexander Lukashenko won the election held on 23 June and 10 July 1994. In December 1994 Belarus signed the Budapest Memorandum and gave up the nuclear weapons on its territory.

The referendum of 14 May 1995 turned to the symbols. On a turnout of 64.7%, 75.1% voted for a red and green flag adapted from the Soviet republic's flag of 1951, with the hammer and sickle and the star removed and the colours of the ornament at the hoist reversed. The same vote ended the exclusive status of Belarusian as the state language. The opposition rejected the result. Mikhail Pastukhov, a former judge of the Constitutional Court, wrote that the vote "cannot be recognized as legitimate" and that the symbols established under the laws of 1991 remain the lawful ones. A second referendum, in November 1996 and of widely disputed legitimacy, removed key powers from parliament and extended the presidential term, and in the same year 3 July was adopted as Independence Day.

Which past the Belarusian state claims today

The republic keeps the Soviet line in its calendar. Decree No. 157 of 26 March 1998 sets 3 July as Independence Day, keeps 7 November for the October Revolution of 1917 as a day off, and adds 2 April as the Day of Unity of the Peoples of Belarus and Russia. Neither 25 March nor 25 August appears among the holidays, commemorative dates or observances it lists. The flag's official gloss, as FOTW quotes it from the Belarusian mission's material, traces its red to "the victorious standards of the Belarusian regiments that had gained victory over crusaders at Grunewald" and to "the Red Army divisions and Belarusian guerrilla detachments". The sentence claims the grand duchy and the Soviet republic in one breath. The ornament at the hoist, by the presidential portal's account, was embroidered in 1917 by Matrena Markevich, a peasant woman from Kostelishche in Senno District.

The other line went to the street. Opposition groups and the diaspora kept the white-red-white flag after 1995, and the government prohibited its display, citing its wartime use under the occupation. It was the flag of the protests that followed the presidential election of August 2020, which Britannica describes as characterised by widespread vote rigging. A statement by the UN Human Rights Office on 1 September 2020 cited more than 450 documented cases of torture and ill-treatment of detainees. After that election the European Union, the United Kingdom and the United States declined to recognise Lukashenko as the legitimate president, and opposition leaders were imprisoned or left for exile, where the Rada of 1918 had been for a century. On 23 May 2021 the government diverted Ryanair Flight 4978 to Minsk and arrested the opposition journalist Roman Protasevich on board.

In February 2022 Russian forces invaded Ukraine from Belarusian soil and drove toward Kyiv along the west bank of the Dnieper. The constitutional referendum of 27 February 2022, held while that attack was under way, revised the preamble and 85 articles, added 11 and removed two, and by Britannica's account renounced the country's status as a neutral power. The presidential portal still counts the result among the amendments to the constitution of 1994, which it numbers fifth after 1917.