Belarus.

Belarus is a landlocked country in Eastern Europe, bordered in the north and east by Russia, in the south by Ukraine, in the west by Poland, and in the Northwest by Lithuania and Latvia. Minsk is the capital. Until it achieved independence in 1991, Belarus was the Belarussian Soviet Socialist Republic within the USSR.

Land and Resources.

Most of Belarus is a flat plain, a chain of hills runs through the central portion of the country. Marshy lowlands cover the southern region of Polesye in the basin of the Pripyat River. The major rivers drain either westward into the Baltic Sea (the Western Dvina and the Nieman) or southward into the Black Sea (the Dneper, with its main tributaries, the Berezina and the Pripyat). Numerous streams and lakes are a prominent feature of the landscape, and a network of canals links the navigable waterways. About one-third of the country is covered with forests. There is a rich variety of wildlife including the European bison in the forest reserve of Belaya Vezha (Bialowieza).

Belarus was long thought to he poor in minerals, its natural resources are limited to peat, gravel, sands. Recent surveys have uncovered major deposits of coal, shale, oil and potassium salts. Limestone and other building materials are also present. The soils are generally pour and much of the land has been contaminated by radioactivity from the Chernobyl nuclear accident of 1986.

The climate is moderately continental. The temperature averages – 6 degrees C (21 degrees F) in January and 18 degrees C (64 degrees F) in July. Average annual precipitation is 550-700 mm (22-28 in).

People.

More than three-fourths of the population consists of ethnic Belorussians. As a branch of the East Slavs, mostly Eastern Orthodox in religion, the Belorussians are linguistically and culturally closely related to the Russians and Ukrainians. They have traditionally been rural people, and only since the 1980s have a majority of them resided in cities. The Russians, who form 13% of the population, are much more highly urbanised and the Russian language has long predominated in the cities and government. The official use of Belorussian has increased since 1990, when it was declared the country's official language.

Education and Health Care.
Near universal literacy was achieved in Belarus by the 1950s. 11-year primary and secondary education is free, 9-year education is compulsory, higher education is mostly free and entrance is by examination. In education the Russian language predominated.

Medical services have been free since the early Soviet period. The quality of medical care has declined since the 1970s reflected in rising infant mortality and lowered life expectancy. The impact of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster on public health was severe.

Major cities, in addition to Minsk, are the administrative centres: Brest, Gomel, Grodno, Mogilev and Vitebsk.

Culture.
Belarus possesses a rich folklore and a legacy of literature, art and architecture from the Kievan and Lithuanian periods. A Belorussian literary rebirth began at the turn of the 20th century.

Economy.

Until independence Belarus was fully integrated into the centrally planned Soviet economy, in which resource allocations, production targets and monetary policy were determined in Moscow. The economic difficulties were intensified after independence. Movement towards a free-market system has been slow and largely limited to the service sector. Most industry continues to be under state management and agriculture remains collectivised.

Agriculture.
Livestock (cattle, hogs, sheep and goats) accounts for more than half the value of agricultural output in Belarus. The country's chief crops are fodder and potatoes, followed by cereals grains (mainly rye, barley and oats) and sugar beets. Flax and hemp are also important.

Industry.
Belarus experienced industrialisation only after World War II. It long specialised in such, light industries as food processing, woodworking and textiles. Newer industries include chemicals, oil refining, instrument making and electronics. Important products include trucks, tractors and agricultural machinery, as well as consumer goods such as sewing machines, pianos and watches.

Government.

During the Soviet period, the Communist party of Belarus was subordinated to the central party organs in Moscow. The first free and partly contested elections in Belarus were held in March 1990. The newly elected parliament, though still dominated by Communist deputies, gradually asserted greater autonomy from Moscow. After August 1991 the activities of the Communist party were suspended, but the development of a multiparty system proceeded slowly.

The new constitution, adopted in March 1994, provides for a popularly elected president who serves for a maximum of two five-year terms. The president is head of state and commander in chief of the armed forces. In the first presidential election (June-July 1994) the two main candidates were then Prime Minister Vyacheslav Kebich and a former factory manager, Aleksandr Lukashenko, who ran on an anticorruption platform. Lukashenko won by more than half of the vote.

History.

In the beginning of the 6th century the territory of modern Belarus was settled by East Slavic tribes, the ancestors of the Belorussians. In the 9th and 10th centuries several principalities emerged, the most important being centred around Polotsk. Through dynastic links they came to be part of Kievan Rus' and were converted to Orthodox Christianity.

After the disintegration of Kievan Rus' in the 13th century, the Belorussian lands were incorporated into the expanding Grand Duchi of Lithuania. At first the Belorussians exerted a strong religious and cultural influence on the pagan Lithuanians; after the dynastic union of Lithuania and Poland in 1386, however, the Lithuanians converted to Latin Christianity, and the position of the Orthodox Belorussians began to decline. The Belorussians bishops accepted union with Rome in 1596. Most of the population adhered to the Eastern Rite (Uniate) church, but the nobility largely adopted Latin Rite Catholicism along with the Polish language and culture.

In the Partitions of Poland (1772,1793, and 1795; see Poland, partitions of), Belarus was annexed to the Russian Empire. In the 19th century the Russians and Poles competed for the loyalty of the Belorussian (largely peasant) masses. Only in the late 19th century, after a peasant revolt led by Kastus Kalinovski (Konstantin Kalinovsky) in 1863, did a distinct Belorussian national awareness begin to develop. This was further stimulated by a literary revival, exemplified by the works of the Belorussian poets Yakub Kolas and Yankla Kupala.

An independent Belarus was proclaimed (March 1918) after the collapse of the Russian Empire. After the Polish-Soviet War of 1920, however, western Belarus was occupied by Poland, and the eastern regions became the Belorussian SSR, part of the Soviet Union. In 1939, at the beginning of World War II, the western territories were also annexed by the USSR. As a principal theatre of the war, Belarus suffered enormous devastation and lost one-quarter of its population.

Post war reconstruction was followed by a period of considerable economic development and rapid industrialization. The reforms begun by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in the mid-1980s stimulated a national revival, including the formation of a mass popular movement called Adradzhenne (Rebirth) in 1989, and unrest among Belorussian workers contributed to the economic crisis that hastened the end of the USSR. When the commonwealth of independent states was formed by the former Soviet republics in December 1991, Minsk became its capital.

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