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Three sets of laws, known as the Lithuanian Statutes, codified civil and property rights in Lithuanian-controlled lands in the 16th century. In 1557 a far-reaching agrarian-reform plan was instituted, introducing the three-field crop-rotation system of agriculture and changing the obligations of peasants to landowners. The system, initially imposed on crown estates, was rapidly adopted on the properties of the nobility; it remained in operation with little modification until the 20th century. The combined effects of the changes reduced the peasants, who previously had retained at least some freedom to migrate, to full serfdom.
Three sets of laws, known as the Lithuanian Statutes, codified civil and property rights in Lithuanian-controlled lands in the 16th century. In 1557 a far-reaching agrarian-reform plan was instituted, introducing the three-field crop-rotation system of agriculture and changing the obligations of peasants to landowners. The system, initially imposed on crown estates, was rapidly adopted on the properties of the nobility; it remained in operation with little modification until the 20th century. The combined effects of the changes reduced the peasants, who previously had retained at least some freedom to migrate, to full serfdom.


The Union of Lublin (1569) made Poland and Lithuania a single, federated state. Although Lithuania retained the title of grand duchy and its code of laws, its western province Podlasia—which had been heavily settled by Polish colonists—was ceded to Poland, as were the steppe lands and Kiev. Among the Belarusian population a mainly Polish-speaking Roman Catholic aristocracy developed, but the peasantry on the whole remained Orthodox. In 1596 the Union of Brest-Litovsk signaled an attempt to unify the Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches in the Polish-Lithuanian state, combining acknowledgment of papal supremacy with the Orthodox rites and traditions. This new Eastern rite church made some limited headway, particularly among Belarusians and Ukrainians. (However, it later came under pressure from Russian—and, much later, Soviet—authorities, resulting in the conversion of some of its membership to Orthodoxy.) Meanwhile, the rule of the Polish landowners was often heavy and unpopular, and many Belarusians (especially those opposed to joining the Eastern rite church) fled to the steppe lands that were home to the Cossacks. Large-scale Cossack-led revolts occurred in 1648–54, but the Belarusian lands remained under Poland until the second half of the 18th century. Economic development was slow, especially in the extensive Pripet Marshes. The Belarusian population was almost entirely engaged in agriculture, while trade lay in the hands of Poles and Jews.
The Union of Lublin (1569) made Poland and Lithuania a single, federated state. Although Lithuania retained the title of grand duchy and its code of laws, its western province Podlasia—which ha


*Russian rule
By way of the First Partition of Poland in 1772, Catherine II of Russia acquired the eastern portion of present-day Belarus, including the towns of Vitsyebsk (Russian: Vitebsk), Mahilyow (Mogilyov), and Homyel (Gomel). The Second Partition (1793) gave Russia Minsk and the central region, and in 1795 the Third Partition incorporated the remainder into the Russian Empire.


Under Russian rule the area was divided administratively into the governorships (provinces) of Grodno (Belarusian: Hrodna), Minsk, Mogilyov, Vilnia (now Vilnius, Lith.), and Vitebsk. Until the formation of the Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1919, Belarusian history was largely tied to the course of events in the Russian Empire and revolutionary Russia. Napoleon I, emperor of France, crossed the region in his advance on Moscow in 1812 and again during his retreat. One of the heaviest battles of Napoleon’s Russian campaign took place as French troops retreated across the Byarezina River.
==Minsk-National capital, Belarus==


In the 19th century small-scale industries largely based on local supplies began to grow in Belarusian towns. Among them were timber working, glassmaking, and, along the rivers, boatbuilding. Following the emancipation of the serfs in the 1860s, the tempo of industrialization increased somewhat, particularly with the introduction of railways beginning in the 1880s. Nevertheless, the generally poor economic conditions resulted in considerable emigration, especially from rural areas. In the 50 years before the Russian Revolution of 1917, nearly 1.5 million people left the provinces within which present-day Belarus is located. Most of the emigrants went to the United States or Siberia, with more than 600,000 moving to the latter between 1896 and 1915.
'''Minsk,''' city, capital of Belarus, and administrative centre of Minsk oblast (region). The city lies along the Svisloch River. First mentioned in 1067, it became the seat of a principality in 1101. Minsk passed to Lithuania in the 14th century and later to Poland and was regained by Russia in the Second Partition of Poland, in 1793. The city has suffered many disasters, including frequent destruction by fire, sacking by the Crimean Tatars in 1505, occupation and damage by French troops in 1812, German occupation in 1918, Polish occupation in 1919–20, and almost total destruction in World War II, especially during the Soviet advance in 1944. Nevertheless, Minsk steadily increased in importance, first as a provincial centre after 1793 and later as an industrial centre after the building of the Moscow-Warsaw and Liepaja-Romny railways through Minsk in the 1870s. In 1919 it became the capital of the Belorussian republic.


The first attempt to establish a Marxist party in Russia took place in Minsk in 1898, when a small congress laid the foundation for the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party. During World War I (1914–18), heavy fighting between German troops and those of the Russian Empire took place in the province with considerable destruction. Following the Russian Revolution, in which a provisional government replaced the collapsed Russian monarchy only to be itself overthrown by Bolshevik revolutionaries, the new Soviet government of Russia signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Germany and its allies on March 3, 1918. Under the terms of this short-lived treaty, Russia gave up part of present-day Belarus, along with Ukrainian and Baltic lands, to Germany. With Germany’s subsequent defeat by Russia’s Western allies, the terms of Brest-Litovsk were abrogated.
The city’s large Jewish community was systematically massacred during the German occupation (1941–44) in World War II. Minsk itself was almost completely demolished in the course of the war, and it was subsequently rebuilt with abundant parks, wide boulevards, and many blocks of multistory apartment buildings. Minsk grew in population faster than any comparable Soviet city in the period 1959–89, its inhabitants more than tripling from 500,000 to nearly 1,600,000 during that time.


*The emergence of the Belorussian S.S.R.
Minsk remained the capital when Belarus gained independence in 1991. That same year the city became the administrative centre of the Commonwealth of Independent States. Although political protest was not uncommon in Minsk, the city remained free of the violence that had sometimes plagued Belarus’s neighbours. That changed in 2011, when a bomb exploded in one of Minsk’s busiest metro stations during the evening rush hour. More than a dozen people were killed, and some 200 were injured. Pres. Alyaksandr Lukashenka was quick to link the attack to opposition forces.
Belarusian nationalist and revolutionary stirrings had been evident at least since the Russian Revolution of 1905, when peasants joined the uprising against the monarchy. The creation of a Belarusian state proceeded with fits and starts amid the turmoil of World War I and the Russian Civil War, which succeeded the Revolution of l917. In 1918, while most of the region was occupied by the German army, an independent Belarusian Democratic Republic was declared. With the withdrawal of German troops after the war, however, the Bolsheviks announced the formation of the Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic on January 1, 1919. The republic’s territorial integrity was quickly breached; beginning in April that year, troops of newly reconstituted Poland advanced eastward to the Byarezina River, only to be thrown back again in 1920. Hostilities between Russia and Poland ended with the Treaty of Riga (signed March 18, 1921), which divided the area of Belarus between Poland and Soviet Russia along the lines of the First Partition of Poland.


The Belorussian S.S.R. was one of four founding republics of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, established on December 30, 1922. The Belorussian S.S.R. grew to the east in 1924, when Soviet authorities transferred the regions of Polotsk, Vitebsk, Orsha, and Mogilyov—which had large Belarusian populations—from the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic to the Belorussian S.S.R. Gomel and Rechitsa (Belarusian: Rechytsa) followed in 1926.
The present-day city, sprawling over gently hilly relief, is almost entirely of new construction; most of the principal buildings in the centre are in the ponderous architectural style of the early Soviet period. The Mariinsky Cathedral and the church of the Bernadine monastery survive as relics of the past.


Beginning under the regime of Joseph Stalin, nationalism was discouraged in the Soviet Union, and the Belorussian S.S.R., like the other constituent republics, was closely controlled. With the commencement of the first Five-Year Plan in 1928, new industries were established in Minsk and other leading towns. In the 1930s purges took the lives of many dissidents, intellectuals, and others in the Belorussian S.S.R.
Minsk is the major industrial centre of Belarus. The economy is based on machine building, particularly the manufacture of trucks and tractors. Other products include electric motors, bearings, machine tools, radio and television equipment, refrigerators, watches, textiles, and foodstuffs. The city is also a major educational, cultural, and printing centre, with the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus, a university founded in 1921, and numerous other institutions of higher education. In 2006 the National Library of Belarus expanded to a visually striking diamond-shaped building that quickly became one of the city’s most prominent landmarks. Minsk has a music conservatory, a palace of winter sports, and a number of theatres, including the Belarus State Theatre of Opera and Ballet. Pop. (2014 est.) 1,921,807.
 
*World War II
Following the German attack on Poland in 1939 and the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Nonaggression Pact between Stalin’s Soviet Union and Adolf Hitler’s Germany, which divided eastern Europe into German and Soviet spheres of influence, the U.S.S.R. attacked Poland from the east. Soviet troops occupied the area up to the Bug River and including the Białystok region, home to a substantial Belarusian population. Western Belarusian territory that had been surrendered to Poland in the Treaty of Riga was reinstated as part of the Belorussian S.S.R.
 
The German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 overran the Belorussian S.S.R., although the garrison of the Brest fortress made a prolonged and courageous stand. During the German retreat in 1944, there was heavy fighting in many areas of the republic, with major battles near Vitebsk, Borisov (Belarusian: Barysaw), and Minsk. German occupation and retreat produced widespread devastation and loss of life: the death toll has been estimated at about one-fourth of the population of Soviet Belarus. At the end of the war a treaty between the U.S.S.R. and Poland returned western Belarus to Soviet hands. The Polish population was forcibly deported en masse to Poland. With the establishment of the United Nations in 1945, the Belorussian S.S.R. was given a seat in the General Assembly in its own right despite its status as a constituent republic of the U.S.S.R.
 
The first postwar Five-Year Plan was devoted to the reconstruction of war damage, an aim that it largely achieved. Thereafter, further industrialization took place, with an increasingly rapid growth of the major towns. The population of Minsk reached a million by the early 1970s. Many small towns and the population of a number of rural areas correspondingly declined.
 
The accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power station in Ukraine in 1986 contaminated about one-fifth of neighbouring Belarus with long-lived radioactive materials. The contamination necessitated the evacuation of several areas in Belarus, some of which had not been repopulated more than 20 years after the accident. Moreover, the accident led to an increased incidence of cancer among Belarusians, particularly thyroid cancer in children. The expenditure of government funds required to address the accident’s environmental and health consequences continued into the 21st century. (For more information about the Soviet period [1922–91], see Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.)
 
*The emergence of independent Belarus
Following Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s initiation of more moderate policies in the mid-1980s, the Belorussian S.S.R. acted somewhat less vigorously than other Soviet republics to break away from the Soviet Union, although there was a steady growth in national separatist feeling. Amid the crisis of central authority in the U.S.S.R. in the early 1990s, the Belorussian S.S.R. declared sovereignty (July 27, 1990) and independence (August 25, 1991). With the collapse of Communist Party rule and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the wake of the failed coup against Gorbachev, the Belorussian S.S.R. changed its name to the Republic of Belarus and joined the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), a free association of sovereign states that were formerly part of the Soviet Union.
 
Legislative elections in Belarus in 1990 had resulted in a communist-dominated Supreme Soviet that delayed the implementation of a market economy and vacillated for some three years before adopting a new constitution in March 1994. That document created the office of president, to which the pro-Russian Alyaksandr Lukashenka was elected in July 1994. Legislative elections followed in 1995, but, owing to the strictures of the Belarusian electoral system (to be seated, candidates had to capture 50 percent of the vote of a turnout of 50 percent of eligible voters), four rounds of voting were required before a quorum was reached in December 1995 (even then, more than 60 seats remained vacant). Many members of the legislature were independents; indeed, the largest voting block was not a political party per se but a group that supported Lukashenka, who increasingly sought to dominate the Supreme Soviet. In a referendum in November 1996—the legitimacy of which was widely disputed—Lukashenka won approval for a constitutional change that granted him near-absolute power and extended his five-year term. The parliamentary opposition sought to impeach Lukashenka and to eliminate the office of president, but the opposition’s efforts were countered by Lukashenka’s signing of the revised constitution, which closed the Supreme Soviet and created a new legislative body (from which the opposition was excluded) with greatly reduced powers.
 
In contrast to much of central and eastern Europe at the time, Lukashenka set Belarus on a course of isolation from the West, maintaining the economics of market socialism. Support for the government’s efforts to establish close ties with Russia was widespread but not without opposition. In 1997–99 Belarus entered the Union State, a political and economic union with Russia that had initially been negotiated with Russian Pres. Boris Yeltsin but was recast by his successor, Vladimir Putin, who lessened the burden his country had initially agreed to bear in the partnership. Although disputes arose between the two countries over the union’s impact on issues such as defense and natural resources, they agreed on the goal of a common currency, an idea first broached in the early 1990s. With Belarus firmly hitched to Russia’s fortunes, its economy responded accordingly—for example, stumbling in 1998 as a result of Russia’s financial collapse. Though Russia had long been Belarus’s main trading partner, the volume of their trade expanded in the early 21st century as Belarus experienced modest industrial growth.
 
Many international observers were critical of the Belarusian government and of the essentially authoritarian role Lukashenka adopted beginning in 1996. Relations with the European Union (EU) were particularly strained. Widely considered the most repressive regime in Europe, Belarus staged undemocratic elections, suppressed political opposition, and silenced the press. Leaders of the political opposition often agitated from exile, while antigovernment figures who arose within Belarus were occasionally beaten, jailed, or “disappeared”—seized by the authorities and never heard from again.
 
*Belarus in the 21st century
The 2001 presidential elections were not recognized as free and fair by Western observers, and in October 2004 Lukashenka sponsored another successful referendum that allowed the president to serve for more than two terms. In 2006 the United Democratic Forces, a group of opposition parties and nongovernmental associations, backed pro-democracy candidate Alyaksandr Milinkevich in the presidential race, but Lukashenka was reelected with nearly 83 percent of the vote, according to the official count. Denouncing the results, opposition groups within Belarus as well as international observers accused the president of wielding his exceptional powers during the campaign to manipulate the media and intimidate his opponents; indeed, it was reported that some members of the opposition campaign teams had been detained and beaten. Protesters camped out in a public square in Minsk for several days following the election, but this and other demonstrations were broken up by the police. Another opposition presidential candidate, Alyaksandr Kazulin, was arrested at one such demonstration and imprisoned. In the September 2008 parliamentary elections the government reported a high voter turnout, with about three-fourths of eligible voters participating, but the opposition delegates did not win any seats. International monitors declared that the election could not be considered free and fair, and protests again were staged in the centre of Minsk.
 
Meanwhile, beginning in 2002, Belarus’s relations with Russia had deteriorated, partly over the desire of Gazprom, the Russian state-owned natural gas company, to raise the price of gas exported to Belarus to world levels. Another source of discord was Russia’s military conflict with Georgia in 2008, as Lukashenka failed to follow Russia’s lead in recognizing the independence of the breakaway Georgian republics of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Nevertheless, Belarus remained in the Russian orbit through its membership in Russian-backed regional organizations, including the Collective Security Treaty Organization and the Eurasian Economic Community, as well as—to a lesser extent—the Union State and the CIS.
 
*David R. Marples
Lukashenka improved relations with the EU in 2008 when he agreed to the release of several political prisoners, including Kazulin, and appeared to adopt a more tolerant attitude toward the nongovernmental media. He also supported economic reforms, including the privatization of some state companies and the encouragement of foreign investment. The EU subsequently suspended a restriction that since 2006 had banned the president and most of his entourage from entering the EU. In 2009 Belarus joined the EU’s Eastern Partnership Program, which promotes ties between the EU and a number of countries in eastern Europe and the Caucasus region. However, by early 2010 the Belarusian government’s continuation of various repressive policies had renewed concerns in some EU capitals.
 
Lukashenka easily won another term as president in elections held in late 2010, but again there were protests by opposition supporters in Minsk on the fairness of the voting, as well as objections by EU and U.S. observers. As in 2006, large numbers of demonstrators were arrested or detained by authorities, as were most of the opposition candidates for president.
 
In April 2011 a bomb exploded on a crowded metro platform in Minsk, killing 12 and injuring more than 100. The blast heightened tensions in the country, which was struggling with a soaring budget deficit and an ongoing foreign exchange crisis. Sharply declining foreign currency reserves led to a devaluation of the Belarusian rubel, which shed more than 60 percent of its value against the U.S. dollar during 2011. The plummeting rubel triggered a wave of inflation, which peaked at almost 110 percent in January 2012. The Belarusian central bank responded by raising interest rates to 45 percent, the highest in the world at the time. A $3 billion bailout program, begun in 2011 and primarily financed by Russia, helped to stabilize the economy.
 
The economic crisis did little to weaken Lukashenka’s regime, and opposition parties boycotted parliamentary elections held in September 2012. The elections, which Western observers characterized as unfair and lacking transparency, saw politicians allied with Lukashenka returned to every one of the parliament’s 110 seats.
 
==Expanded Presidential Power Leads to Oppression and Corruption==
Belarus declared its sovereignty in July 1990 and its independence in Aug. 1991. It became a cofounder of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) in Dec. 1991. In Jan. 1994, the country's parliament ousted its reform-minded leader, Stanislav Shushkevich, in protest against his support for market economics. He was replaced by Alyaksandr Lukashenka, who, over the next two years, greatly expanded the powers of the presidency. Lukashenka sought to renew ties with Russia, and, with much fanfare, Belarus and Russia signed a treaty in April 1997 aimed at significantly increasing cooperation between the two states, stopping just short of union. The Russian financial crisis that began in fall 1998 severely affected Belarus's Soviet-style planned economy.
 
The EU and the U.S. have denounced the increasingly oppressive political atmosphere and human rights violations in Belarus under the Soviet-style authoritarianism of President Lukashenka. In 1999, the year Lukashenka was to step down, he rigged a national referendum allowing him to cancel the elections and remain president. Lukashenka's government has been accused of running a death squad that has killed dozens, including opposition party members and underworld figures. After harassing the opposition and curtailing their campaign activities, Lukashenka won reelection in the Sept. 9, 2001, presidential race. In 2004, the Council of Europe strongly criticized the Belarus government for blocking investigation into the disappearance of four dissidents in 1999 and 2000.
 
Presidential elections in March 2006 reelected Lukashenka with 83% of the vote. Supporters of opposition candidates took to the streets of Minsk to protest the results. The police cracked down on the demonstrations and arrested dozens. The U.S. and other Western nations declared the election fraudulent, and the EU imposed economic sanctions on Lukashenka and a number of his ministers.
 
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