The republic of belarus Unitary state

History and developments

Belarus is a presidential republic.

Although the country belongs to the original homelands of the Slavic languages, and the former Polesia is a historical region which was once part of such great powers as the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Russian Empire, Belarus is a young state. The Belarusians did not fully acquire their own sense of identity until the 19th century, and did not become known to the rest of the world until their country became a republic of the USSR.

Belarus has been independent since the dissolution of the USSR in 1991. Its relations with Russia have however remained very close, the countries sharing a common language in the form of Russian (Belarusian is found primarily in writing, on road signs or in museums, and as the everyday language used in rural areas).

Belarus did not undergo liberally inspired economic reforms in the 1990s like its cousin Russia; its industry and agriculture, at the time more developed than the rest of the USSR, are relatively well preserved (especially the manufacture of tractors and refrigerators, and cattle farming), and inequality is less pronounced than it is in Russia.

Since July 2010, Russia and Belarus (as well as Kazakhstan) have formed a customs union, which has involved the removal of controls on their common borders in particular.

Certain western governments and media organisations view Belarus as Europe’s last authoritarian regime, the wave of democratisation of central and eastern European countries that followed the fall of communist regimes in the continent having been quickly repressed from 1992 under the presidency of Stanislav Shushkevich. The current president of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko, together with the majority of his close collaborators, has been subject to EU and US visa bans since February 2011 due to political practices which have been described as dictatorial and oppressive.

The ancestor of Belarus, the Principality of Polotsk, was mentioned for the first time in the 10th century. At the time this was a state populated by the Eastern Slavs. Minsk was first mentioned in historical chronicles in 1067. The principality was incorporated in 1129 into Kievan Rus. At the point of the schism between the Churches of the East and West, their sovereigns and populations chose the orthodox faith. The invasions of the Mongols and the Golden Horde in the 13th century resulted in the fall of Kievan Rus and its dislocation into a multitude of small fiefdoms. The Principality of Polotsk, now in decline, became part of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which was capable of protecting it from additional invasions. The Grand Duchy was made up predominantly of present-day Lithuania and Belarus; its other territories were Northern Ukraine and the region of Smolensk.