Belarus

The republic that changed least, and the one where the Soviet Union in some sense did not end. Its lands were the core of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, where Ruthenian was the chancery language, then passed to Poland and to Russia in the partitions. Belarusian national identity formed late and thinly, suppressed under the empire and then encouraged briefly in the 1920s before Stalin destroyed the intelligentsia - the Kurapaty woods outside Minsk hold tens of thousands of victims. The war was catastrophic beyond almost anywhere: roughly a quarter of the population died, the Jewish community was annihilated, hundreds of villages were burned with their inhabitants, and Minsk was left in ruins. Postwar reconstruction made the republic a showcase of Soviet industry, which is one reason nostalgia there is genuine rather than imposed. Chernobyl's fallout landed disproportionately on Belarus, contaminating a large share of its farmland. Independence in 1991 was not much sought, and Alexander Lukashenko, elected in 1994, kept state ownership, the security service under its old name of KGB, and Soviet symbols. Mass protests after the disputed 2020 election were crushed and their leaders imprisoned or exiled. Russian is far more widely spoken than Belarusian. The country hosted Russian forces invading Ukraine in 2022. Minsk is the capital. About two-fifths of the country is forest, including Belovezhskaya Pushcha, the last old-growth lowland forest in Europe. The Soviet Union was formally dissolved in that forest in December 1991. Potash is the country's main mineral export. The Belarusian language has two competing orthographies, one official and one used by the opposition.

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