Belarus

A borderland of Europe, from the Principality of Polotsk and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania to a sovereign republic in Russia's orbit.

Belarus is a land that has stood for more than a millennium at the meeting point of the East Slavic, Baltic and Polish worlds. Its first state, the Principality of Polotsk, emerged among the Krivichi as an early centre of Kievan Rus before being absorbed, after the Mongol storm, into the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, where the Ruthenian, or Old Belarusian, chancery language became the language of law and where Francysk Skaryna printed the first book in an East Slavic language in 1517. Joined to Poland in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Belarusian lands passed to the Russian Empire in the partitions of 1772 to 1795 and endured a long century of Russification before a fragile national awakening produced the short-lived Belarusian People's Republic of 1918 and then the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic. The twentieth century fell on Belarus with extraordinary violence: Stalinist terror at Kurapaty, partition with Poland under the Treaty of Riga, and a Nazi occupation in which the republic lost roughly a quarter to a third of its people. A founding member of the United Nations in 1945 and the place where the Soviet Union was dissolved at Belavezha in 1991, independent Belarus has since 1994 been governed by Alyaksandr Lukashenka in ever-closer union with Russia.