ABSTRACT
Belarus is a small country with some ten million citizens located between Russia proper in the east, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland in the west, and Ukraine in the south. Its history includes being part of Kiev Rus in the very early middle ages, later to become part of Lithuania and then Poland. When Poland gradually fell apart in the eighteenth century, what is today’s Belarus became part of Russia. Belarusian nationalism surfaced only in the nineteenth century after rather severe Russification attempts. The fact that Belarus was one of the early four Soviet Republics in 1922 (and later member of the UN General Assembly after 1945) testifies to its somewhat elevated status. Today, many of its citizens regard themselves as Russians (ethnic Russians do constitute some 10 per cent), and Belarus nationalism, although diligently propagated in the 1990s, has not yielded any strong anti-Russian sentiments. Although Belarusian is the official language, Russian was made an official language as well in 1996 and then gradually took over as the language of communication.
