As the country stamps out its national heritage, Russian propaganda is taking over When Adelia found out that Honar, a shop in Minsk, was closing down, she knew it could mean only one thing: its turn had come. For more than a decade it had sold fashionable clothes adorned with folk designs, many in a traditional red-and-white cross-stitch. Adelia rushed to the shop, but already there was little left to buy. Like-minded Belarusians from across the capital had joined her in a small act of defiance.

Honar is a shop “for brave people,” says Adelia, “because wearing clothes with national motifs in Belarus requires courage.” (Speaking to journalists does too: Adelia is a pseudonym.) Massive protests erupted when Alexander Lukashenko stole an election in 2020. After they were brutally quelled, his multi-decade dictatorship doubled down on political repression. Demonstrators were tortured and locked up. Hundreds of thousands fled.

The Belarusian dictator has long skilfully manoeuvred between brotherliness with Vladimir Putin, Russia’s leader, and resistance to fuller integration. But 2020 marked a turning point: military support from Russia, a powerful neighbour and awkward ally, let Mr Lukashenko hang on. Now, as his bid to maintain power grows more desperate, he is cracking down on Belarusian culture—and ceding ever more influence to Russia.

Although plenty of Belarusians feel a strong sense of kinship with the wider Slavic world, and have economic or family ties to Russia, many are also wary of Mr Putin’s war in Ukraine. And for those suspicious of closer integration, Belarusian culture and language are seen as important guards against it; Russian has long been the country’s dominant language. Traditional arts, music and festivities provided a creative outlet, too, for the more free-spirited as other spaces for expression shrank.

Mr Lukashenko, ever the opportunist, has elevated traditional culture when it suited him. In the 2010s Belarusian national identity experienced a revival. Balázs Jarábik, who travelled the country for USAID and now runs a political-risk consultancy, remembers it “flourishing”. Civic-society groups organised folkloric song and dance festivals. Traditional embroidery became fashionable: Mr Lukashenko himself and other officials were shown wearing examples of it in state propaganda. He sometimes spoke publicly in Belarusian, too. “We know our roots, honor traditions,” he said in the language in 2019.

Then came the nationwide demonstrations. Symbols of Belarusian patriotism were taken up by the democracy movement, including the language and the white-red-white flag of a short-lived Belarusian republic in 1918. Displaying the flag was punished with fines and stints in prison, as were red-and-white colour combinations. But some subtler means of expressing Belarusian identity escaped the clampdown.

No longer. Over a few days in July, shops selling Belarusian clothes or food announced they would close down. Music and history festivals were cancelled. A few months earlier, publishers, translators and sellers of Belarusian-language books were detained or designated “extremist”. “The significance of these places was huge”, says Hanna Liubakova, a journalist in exile. “Not just because this was a nice hoodie or a great book, but [because] it’s the kind of place where you could see people who think in a similar way.”You could go to a shop like Honar just to speak to others in Belarusian, notes Adelia.

Though the shops and festivals are not officially banned, the regime has made its position clear. The shopkeepers were “brazen enemies of the people”, wrote a high-profile propagandist. “All these attempts to sell T-shirts, all these half-hints…we see all of it,” said Vadim Gigin, an MP and the country’s chief librarian. “We’ll sweep away all this nationalist contagion with a dirty broom.”Other measures are less subtle.

Since the protests in 2020, over 4,500 people have been imprisoned on political charges, estimates Viasna, an exiled human-rights organisation. The identity of recent detainees highlights Mr Lukashenko’s growing crackdown on Belarusian culture. 879 political prisoners were known to be in jail as of August.

The European Union has ratcheted up sanctions on Belarus. Under Donald Trump, America has gone in the opposite direction, lifting some in exchange for prisoner pardons. It has secured the release of around 500 in several rounds of negotiations over the past year, including Mr Chumakou, the musician, and Mr Kolas, the publisher, both of whom were freed and deported on September 16th. But there is no sign that Mr Trump’s deal-making is encouraging Mr Lukashenko to change course.

Viasna has documented new politically motivated detentions and convictions since the American-led releases, including of people involved in Belarusian culture. In April, after three rounds of releases, 52 employees were detained during a raid on an architectural firm that promotes Belarusian design.

Taciana Niadbaj who runs PEN, a banned literary organisation, says the regime is replacing the country’s cultural space “with one that is politically loyal and increasingly integrated into Russia’s”. In the past few years state-run theatres have hired Russian directors and actors, and staged fewer Belarusian-language plays. Museum exhibits emphasise historic links with Russia, according to Ms Niadbaj. Official concerts headline Russian musicians favoured by Mr Putin’s regime.

Mr Lukashenko’s deepening dependence on the Kremlin has been clear in other ways. In 2014 he had criticised Russia’s annexation of Crimea and refused to acknowledge it; by 2022 he was willing to let Mr Putin use Belarusian territory for a full invasion of Ukraine. In the next two years the share of Belarusian exports that went to Russia rose from 40% to 60%, according to analysis by Dzmitry Kruk, an economist working in exile.

This reliance is now showing up in Belarus’s educational curriculum. Using research by iSANS, a think-tank based in Warsaw, The Economist has analysed comparisons of textbooks recently distributed in Belarusian schools with earlier editions.

2021 2025 A textbook for 16- and 17-year olds, published in 2021, included both positive and negative details about Russia since 1991. It noted domestic problems, such as corruption and organised crime.

“Serious problems include the monopolisation of several resource sectors and the energy system, the deterioration of capital assets, insufficient adoption of new technologies, widespread corruption within the state apparatus and organised crime in the economic sphere, and slow growth in living standards.”These no longer appear in a new textbook for the same ages published in 2025. Instead it has nothing but praise for Mr Putin’s rule, whether on pension reform or foreign policy. The Kremlin’s narratives about the war in Ukraine appear for the first time.

“On February 24th [Russia] began conducting a Special Military Operation (SMO) in Ukraine. Its proclaimed goals were the protection of the population of the DPR and LPR, denazification and demilitarisation of Ukraine.”

“However, the military confrontation between Russia and Ukraine continued, as Western states deliberately thwarted a diplomatic resolution to the conflict, nullifying the peacekeeping efforts of Russia, Belarus, the countries of the ‘Global South’, and other entities interested in peace in Ukraine.”The new textbook also recasts the 2020 protests to fit Mr Putin’s world view. In 2021 school textbooks such as this one simply noted that Mr Lukashenko had won the presidential election of 2020. They made no mention of the protests.

“The sixth presidential elections in the country were held on August 9th 2020. According to the Central Election Commission, out of five candidates, the incumbent President received the support of 80.1% of the voters.”The new textbook acknowledges the protests, but frames them just as Mr Putin might: they were a Western-orchestrated revolution aimed at regime change.

“But the uprising was not successful. Protest activity was gradually pushed outside the borders of the Republic of Belarus. As a result, Western countries began to exert political and economic pressure on our country.”It details how Western sanctions deepened Belarus’s ties to Russia.

“Under these conditions, the Republic of Belarus strengthened integration with the Russian Federation within the framework of the treaty on the creation of the Union State.”The changes in schools go beyond the curriculum. By monitoring Telegram and other online sources, analysts at iSANS have documented “a clear scaling-up” of events promoting unity between Russia and Belarus this year.

Commemoration of a National Day of Unity “has transformed from a secondary date into one of the central ideological events of the school year”, says iSANS.

Today our kindergarten held a series of events dedicated to the friendship between our two brotherly countries For the children, we organised: Thematic lessons about the culture and traditions of both countries; Drawing contests with the theme “Hand in hand: Minsk — Moscow” iSANS has also documented an increase in the number of military-patriotic clubs at schools.

Many co-operate with sister groups in Russia. Belarus’s ministry of education aims to create a club in every vocational and technical college this academic year. In recent years, clubs have been set up in pre-schools for the first time.

While she was in prison Maria Kalesnikava, a protest leader freed last year, recalls seeing nursery-age children in military uniform on state television for the first time. It was terrifying, she says, to see the spread of Russian military propaganda. “The future of Belarus depends to a large extent on whether young Belarusians understand their own country as an independent state with its own history and culture, or through the prism of the Soviet past and Russian historical interpretations,” says Ms Kalesnikava.

Outside state-run schools too, “everything new in the public space is in Russian,” says Adelia. “Yet I know for sure that Belarus lives.”A few weeks after Honar shut down, she bought a box of books from one of the banned Belarusian-language publishers, which had been hidden in the basement of a shop. She told the shop it was a win-win: “I’d save the books, and they wouldn’t get in trouble”. She has quietly sold a few of them on. The proceeds will go to a pro-democracy cause. ■