In July 1994, an estimated 10,404,862 people (fifty persons per
square kilometer) lived in Belarus, with additional populations of
ethnic Belarusians living in Poland, Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan,
Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. Ethnic Belarusians in the West (living
primarily in Britain, Germany, France, Belgium, the United States,
Canada, and Argentina) numbered more than 1 million.
In 1994 the annual population growth rate was estimated at 0.32
percent, resulting from a birth rate of 13.1 births per 1,000
population, a death rate of 11.2 deaths per 1,000 population, and a net
migration rate of 1.3 persons per 1,000 population. The estimated 1994
average life expectancy at birth in Belarus was 66.2 years for males and
75.8 years for females. The annual population growth rate is expected to
decrease slowly well into the next century as a result of fears of birth
defects caused by Chornobyl' and the difficult economic situation.
Population growth in Belarus has declined because of a rapid drop in
fertility rates (an estimated 1.88 children per woman in 1994) and
because of a sharp increase in infant and child mortality, which had
been in decline before the Chornobyl' accident in 1986. Improvements in
the infant mortality rate, which was estimated at 18.9 per 1,000 live
births in 1994, were further blocked by poor maternal health, poor
prenatal care, and frequent use of abortion as a means of birth control.
Belarus has instituted a pronatal policy to counteract women's
reluctance to have children, but difficult economic conditions and fear
of birth defects caused by environmental pollution continue to be major
causes of the decline in the birthrate.
Falling birthrates have also contributed to the graying of the
population. This will affect the country in a number of ways, including
the allocation of funds from its budget. With fewer workers supporting
more pensioners, the administration will be paying more in pensions than
it collects in taxes.
The population's sex structure was most profoundly affected by World
War II. The large loss of male lives during the war ensured not only
that there would be a surplus of women, but that this surplus would
persist for at least another generation.
A law passed in September 1992 gave the entire population of Belarus
an automatic right to citizenship. This included all the ethnic Russians
who had moved there over the years, not the least of whom were military
personnel, officials, and policy makers. However, many declined to
acquire Belarusian citizenship, so that Belarus was sometimes
represented or administered by ethnic Russians who are residents, but
not citizens of Belarus, as, for example, by its diplomats abroad.
In 1992 Belarus's largest cities were Minsk, the capital, with 1.7
million inhabitants; Homyel', with 517,000; Vitsyebsk, with 373,000;
Mahilyow, with 364,000; Hrodna, with 291,000; and Brest, with 284,000.
The republic included more than 100 cities and towns, twelve of which
had a population of 100,000 or more. Of the total population, 68 percent
lived in cities and 32 percent lived in rural areas in 1994. These
figures resemble those for the former Soviet Union as a whole.
<>Ethnic Composition
The 1989 census of the Soviet Union, its last, showed a mainly Slavic
population in Belorussia: Belorussians (77.8 percent), Russians (13.2
percent), Poles (4.1 percent), Ukrainians (2.9 percent), and others (2.0
percent). Other ethnic groups include Lithuanians, Latvians, and Tatars.
A large number of Russians immigrated to Belarus immediately after World
War II to make up for the local labor shortage, caused in part by
Stalin's mass deportations, and to take part in rebuilding the country.
Others came as part of Stalin's program of Russification.
There has been little conflict with the major non-Belarusian group,
the Russians, who account for about 13 percent of the population. The
Russification campaign in what is now Belarus used a mixture of subtle
and not-so-subtle coercion. The campaign was widely successful, to the
extent that Russian became the language of choice for much of the
population. One-third of the respondents in a 1992 poll said they
consider Russian and Belarusian history to be one and the same. A large
number of organized Russian cultural bodies and publications exist in
Belarus.
Ethnic Poles, who account for some 4 percent of the population, live
in the western part of the country, near the Polish border. They retain
their traditions and their Roman Catholic religion, which has been the
cause of friction with Orthodox Belarusians, who also see a decidedly
political bent to these cultural activities.
Ukrainians account for approximately 3 percent of the population.
Belarusians and Ukrainians have been on friendly terms and have faced
similar problems in trying to maintain their ethnic and cultural
identities in the face of Russification by Moscow.
Jews have been present in Belarus since medieval times, but by the
late eighteenth century were restricted to the Pale of Settlement and
later to cities and towns within the Pale. Before World War II, Jews
were the second largest ethnic group in Belorussia and accounted for
more than 50 percent of the population in cities and towns. The 1989
Soviet census showed that Jews accounted for only 1.1 percent of the
population, the result of genocide during World War II and subsequent
emigration.
Belarus.
Language
"Language is not only a means of communication, but also the
soul of a nation, the foundation and the most important part of its
culture." So begins the January 1990 Law About Languages in the
Belorussian SSR, which made Belarusian the sole official language of the
republic.
The Belarusian language is an East Slavic tongue closely related to
Russian and Ukrainian, with many loanwords from Polish (a West Slavic
language) and more recently from Russian. The standard literary
language, first codified in 1918, is based on the dialect spoken in the
central part of the country and is written in the Cyrillic alphabet.
Under Polish influence, a parallel Latin alphabet (lacinka) was
used by some writers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and is
still used today by some Roman Catholics in Belarus and abroad.
One early proponent of the Belorussian language, poet Frantsishak
Bahushyevich (1840-1900), the father of modern Belorussian literature
and a participant in the 1863 uprising, was inspired by the fact that
many 200- and 300-year-old documents written in Belorussian could be
read and understood easily in modern times. The theme of the native
language as a repository of national identity and an expression of
aspiration to nationhood has been the leitmotif of Belorussian
literature and polemics beginning in the late nineteenth century.
Although the tsarist government regarded the Belorussians as well as
the Ukrainians as another branch of Russians, not as a separate nation,
the Belorussian language was registered in the first systematic census
of the Russian Empire in 1897. In the early 1920s, Belorussian language
and culture flourished, and the language was promoted as the official
medium of the communist party and the government as well as of
scholarly, scientific, and educational establishments. Most primary and
secondary schools switched to instruction in Belorussian, and
institutions of higher education gradually made the switch as well. The
Belorussian State University was founded in 1921, the Institute of
Belorussian Culture was founded in 1922, and a number of other
institutions of higher learning also opened. The interests of other
minorities in the republic were taken into account in a July 1924 decree
that confirmed equal rights for the four principal languages of the
republic: Belorussian, Polish, Russian, and Yiddish.
With the advent of perestroika, national activists launched
a campaign of restoring the Belorussian language to the place it had
enjoyed during the 1920s. To urge the government to make Belorussian the
official language of the republic, the Belarusian Language Society was
established in June 1989 with poet-scholar Nil Hilyevich as president.
Belorussia's CPSU leadership, consisting almost exclusively of
Russified technocrats, ignored all the government resolutions and
decisions on languages. However, it could not ignore the general
language trend throughout the non-Russian republics of the Soviet Union,
particularly in the neighboring Baltic states and Ukraine, where
national movements were stronger and exerted an influence on events in
the Belorussian SSR. After months of meetings, rallies, conferences, and
heated debates in the press, on January 26, 1990, the Supreme Soviet
voted to make Belarusian the official language of the state, effective
September 1, 1990. The law included provisions for protecting the
languages of minorities and allowed up to ten years to make the
transition from Russian to Belarusian.
Despite the provisions, implementation of the law has encountered
both active and passive resistance: many people still want their
children to be educated in the Russian language rather than in
Belarusian, and some government officials agree to give interviews only
in Russian. According to data assembled in 1992 by the Sociology Center
of the Belarusian State University, some 60 percent of those polled
prefer to use Russian in their daily life, 75 percent favor bilingualism
in state institutions, and only 17 percent favor having the government
declare Belarusian the sole official language. One Western source
reported that in the early 1990s, only 11 percent of the population,
most of whom lived in the countryside, were fluent in Belarusian.
Since late 1992, there had been a growing demand that the Russian
language be given the same official status as Belarusian. The results of
the four-question referendum of May 1995, which included a question on
whether Russian should be an official language, put an end to any
uncertainty; the populace voted "yes."
Belarus - Religion
Before 1917 Belorussia had 2,466 religious communities, including
1,650 Orthodox, 127 Roman Catholic, 657 Jewish, thirtytwo Protestant,
and several Muslim communities. Under the communists (who were
officially atheists), the activities of these communities were severely
restricted. Many religious communities were destroyed and their leaders
exiled or executed; the remaining communities were sometimes co-opted by
the government for its own ends, as in the effort to instill patriotism
during World War II.
In 1993 one Belarusian publication reported the numbers of religious
communities as follows: Orthodox, 787; Roman Catholic, 305; Pentecostal,
170; Baptist, 141; Old Believer, twenty-six; Seventh-Day Adventist,
seventeen; Apostolic Christian, nine; Uniate, eight; New Apostolic,
eight; Muslim, eight; Jewish, seven; and other, fifteen.
Although the Orthodox Church was devastated during World War II and
continued to decline until the early 1980s because of government
policies, it underwent a small revival with the onset of perestroika
and the celebration in 1988 of the 1,000- year anniversary of
Christianity in Russia. In 1990 Belorussia was designated an exarchate
of the Russian Orthodox Church, creating the Belarusian Orthodox Church.
In the early 1990s, 60 percent of the population identified themselves
as Orthodox. The church had one seminary, three convents, and one
monastery. A Belarusian theological academy was to be opened in 1995.
Soviet policies toward the Roman Catholic Church were strongly
influenced by the Catholics' recognition of an outside authority, the
pope, as head of the church, as well as by the close historical ties of
the church in Belorussia with Poland. In 1989 the five official Roman
Catholic dioceses, which had existed since World War II and had been
without a bishop, were reorganized into five dioceses (covering 455
parishes) and the archdiocese of Minsk and Mahilyow. In the early 1990s,
figures for the Catholic population in Belarus ranged from 8 percent to
20 percent; one estimate identified 25 percent of the Catholics as
ethnic Poles. The church had one seminary in Belarus.
The revival of religion in Belarus in the postcommunist era brought
about a revival of the old historical conflict between Orthodoxy and
Roman Catholicism. This religious complexity is compounded by the two
denominations' links to institutions outside the republic. The
Belarusian Orthodox Church is headed by an ethnic Russian, Metropolitan
Filaret, who heads an exarchate of the Moscow Patriarchy of the Russian
Orthodox Church. The Roman Catholic archdiocese of Belarus is headed by
an ethnic Pole, Archbishop Kazimir Sviontak, who has close ties to the
church in Poland. However, despite these ties, Archbishop Sviontak, who
had been a prisoner in the Soviet camps and a pastor in Pinsk for many
years, has prohibited the display of Polish national symbols in Catholic
churches in Belarus.
Fledgling Belarusian religious movements are having difficulties
asserting themselves within these two major religious institutions
because of the historical practice of preaching in Russian in the
Orthodox churches and in Polish in the Catholic churches. Attempts to
introduce the Belarusian language into religious life, including the
liturgy, also have not met with wide success because of the cultural
predominance of Russians and Poles in their respective churches, as well
as the low usage of the Belarusian language in everyday life.
To a certain extent, the 1991 declaration of Belarus's independence
and the 1990 law making Belarusian the official language of the republic
have generated a new attitude toward the Orthodox and Roman Catholic
churches. Some religiously uncommitted young people have turned to the
Uniate Church in reaction to the resistance of the Orthodox and Roman
Catholic hierarchies to accepting the Belarusian language as a medium of
communication with their flock. Overall, however, national activists
have had little success in trying to generate new interest in the Uniate
Church.
The Uniate Church, a branch of which existed in Belarus from 1596 to
1839 and had some three-quarters of the Belarusian population as members
when it was abolished, is reputed to have used Belorussian in its
liturgy and pastoral work. When the church was reestablished in Belarus
in the early 1990s, its adherents advertised it as a
"national" church. The modest growth of the Uniate Church was
accompanied by heated public debates of both a theological and a
political character. Because the original allegiance of the Uniate
Church was clearly to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the
reestablished church is viewed by some in the Orthodox Church in Belarus
with suspicion, as being a vehicle of both Warsaw and the Vatican.
Before World War II, the number of Protestants in Belarus was quite
low in comparison with other Christians, but they have shown remarkable
growth since then. In 1990 there were more than 350 Protestant
communities in the country.
The first Jewish communities appeared in Belorussia at the end of the
fourteenth century and continued to increase until the genocide of World
War II. Mainly urban residents, the country's nearly 1.3 million Jews in
1914 accounted for 50 to 60 percent of the population in cities and
towns. The Soviet census of 1989 counted some 142,000 Jews, or 1.1
percent of the population, many of whom have since emigrated. Although
Belorussia's boundaries changed from 1914 to 1922, a significant portion
of the decrease was the result of the war. However, with the new
religious freedom, Jewish life in Belarus is experiencing a rebirth. In
late 1992, there were nearly seventy Jewish organizations active in
Belarus, half of which were republic-wide.
Muslims in Belarus are represented by small communities of ethnic
Tatars. Some of these Tatars are descendants of emigrants and prisoners
of war who settled here after the eleventh century.
Belarus - Culture
Belarusian culture is the product of a millennium of development
under the impact of a number of diverse factors. These include the
physical environment; the ethnographic background of Belarusians (the
merger of Slavic newcomers with Baltic natives); the paganism of the
early settlers and their hosts; Byzantine Christianity as a link to the
Orthodox religion and its literary tradition; the country's lack of
natural borders; the flow of rivers toward both the Black Sea and the
Baltic Sea; and the variety of religions in the region (Catholicism,
Orthodoxy, Judaism, and Islam).
An early Western influence on Belarusian culture was Magdeburg
Law--charters that granted municipal self-rule and were based on the
laws of German cities. These charters were granted in the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries by grand dukes and kings to a number of cities,
including Brest, Hrodna, Slutsk, and Minsk. The tradition of
self-government not only facilitated contacts with Western Europe but
also nurtured self-reliance, entrepreneurship, and a sense of civic
responsibility.
In 1517-19 Frantsishak Skaryna (ca. 1490-1552) translated the Bible
into the vernacular (Old Belorussian). Under the communist regime,
Skaryna's work was vastly undervalued, but in independent Belarus he
became an inspiration for the emerging national consciousness as much
for his advocacy of the Belorussian language as for his humanistic
ideas.
From the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries, when the ideas of
humanism, the Renaissance, and the Reformation were alive in Western
Europe, these ideas were debated in Belorussia as well because of trade
relations there and because of the enrollment of noblemen's and
burghers' sons in Western universities. The Reformation and
Counter-Reformation also contributed greatly to the flourishing of
polemical writings as well as to the spread of printing houses and
schools.
During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when Poland and
Russia were making deep political and cultural inroads in Belorussia by
assimilating the nobility into their respective cultures, the rulers
succeeded in associating "Belorussian" culture primarily with
peasant ways, folklore, ethnic dress, and ethnic customs, with an
overlay of Christianity. This was the point of departure for some
national activists who attempted to attain statehood for their nation in
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The development of Belorussian literature, spreading the idea of
nationhood for the Belorussians, was epitomized by the literary works of
Yanka Kupala (1882-1942) and Yakub Kolas (1882- 1956). The works of
these poets, along with several other outstanding writers, became the
classics of modern Belorussian literature by writing widely on rural
themes (the countryside was where the writers heard the Belorussian
language) and by modernizing the Belorussian literary language, which
had been little used since the sixteenth century. Postindependence
authors in the 1990s continued to use rural themes widely.
Unlike literature's focus on rural life, other fields of
culture--painting, sculpture, music, film, and theater--centered on
urban reality, universal concerns, and universal values.
Belarus - EDUCATION, HEALTH, AND WELFARE
Education
In Belarus education is compulsory for ten years, from ages seven to
seventeen. Primary school, generally starting at age seven and lasting
for five years, is followed by an additional five years of secondary
school. These schools fall into three categories: general, teacher
training, and vocational. Institutions of higher education include three
universities, four polytechnical institutes, and a number of colleges
specializing in agricultural or technical sciences.
In early 1992, some 60 percent of eligible children attended
preschool institutions in Belarus. During the 1993-94 school year,
Belarus had 1.5 million children in 5,187 primary and secondary schools,
175,400 students in thirty-three institutions of higher education, and
129,200 students in 148 technical colleges. The literacy rate was 100
percent, and the population was fairly well educated.
During the communist era, education was mainly conducted in the
Russian language; by 1987 there were no Belorussian-language schools in
any of the republic's urban areas. When Belarusian was adopted as the
country's official language in 1990, children were to be taught in
Belarusian as early as primary school; Russian language, history, and
literature were to be replaced with Belarusian language, history, and
literature. However, Russian remains the main language of instruction in
both secondary schools and institutions of higher education.
Belarus - Health
Belarus's health care system is in poor shape and fails to meet the
needs of the population, as is common for the former republics of the
Soviet Union. The communist era's neglect of this sphere, poorly trained
staff, and substandard technology have resulted in a system in which
basic medical services are sorely lacking, contributing to the poor
health of the population. The added strains of caring for victims of the
Chornobyl' accident have overwhelmed the system. In 1994 there were 127
hospital beds and forty-two doctors per 10,000 inhabitants. The country
had 131,000 hospital beds at 868 hospitals. The most common causes of
death were cardiovascular disease, cancer, accidents, and respiratory
disease.
The Republic Center on AIDS was created in 1990 to coordinate all
activities for prevention of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and
control of acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS). There is
mandatory HIV testing of all hospital inpatients and extensive testing
of high-risk populations, such as homosexuals, prostitutes, and
prisoners. By the end of 1991, seventy cases of HIV-positive individuals
were identified, forty of whom were foreigners. However, because HIV
testing kits (as well as other medical supplies) had been supplied by
Moscow before the breakup of the Soviet Union, there was doubt as to
whether testing could continue at the same level.
Belarus - Welfare
Belarus's social safety net, largely a continuation of what existed
in the former Soviet Union, is based on a guarantee of employment and a
number of allowances and benefits for particular needs. Benefits were
indexed to inflation in January 1991 (benefits are adjusted at the same
rate as the minimum wage), and the system was expanded in 1991-92,
partly to alleviate the social costs of switching to a market economy.
The safety net had been a growing concern to the government because in
the early 1990s it accounted for a large share of general government
expenditures. Benefits were funded either directly by the budget or by
two major social funds.
The government's greatest social expenditures are for pensions. The
relatively low retirement age (fifty-five for women and sixty for men)
and the country's demographic structure account for the large number of
pensioners. In January 1992, the minimum pension was raised to 350
rubles (for the value of the Belarusian
ruble per month, the same as the minimum wage. The
Pension Law of January 1993 based pensions on income earned at the time
of retirement and on length of employment; the pensions of those who did
not contribute to the Pension Fund during their years of employment are
linked to the minimum wage. In January 1994, Belarus had nearly 2
million oldage pensioners and 600,000 persons receiving other types of
pensions.
Legislation passed in late 1992 permits families to receive
allowances for children above age three only if they meet certain
eligibility requirements based on income. Previously, families with
children up to sixteen years of age (eighteen years of age for those in
secondary schools) had automatically received allowances based on the
minimum wage. The program has been hampered by problems in testing for
eligibility, however, because of difficulties in assessing income and
because of tax evasion by the self-employed.
Unemployment compensation is provided for six months. Benefits are
related to earnings for those who work for more than a year and also
work continuously for the twelve weeks before separation. For those who
work less than a year, benefits are tied to the minimum wage. Because
the eligibility criteria for unemployment benefits are quite stringent,
half of the registered unemployed are without benefits. In February
1995, some 52 percent of the unemployed received unemployment
compensation. In early 1995, women accounted for more than 62 percent of
the unemployed.
The government provides a number of other benefits, including
lump-sum grants upon the birth of each child; temporary disability
allowances; trips to sanatoria, spas, health homes, vacation resorts,
and other facilities; and benefits for victims of the Chornobyl'
disaster.
Belarus - Housing
