The population of Belarus, its national composition and strength

The population of Belarus today, according to the statistics committee, was almost nine and a half million people. Among the CIS countries this is the fifth place after the Russian Federation, Ukraine, and also Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. Nevertheless, the population of Belarus exceeds the number of citizens of all Baltic countries (by 1.3 times), as well as residents of Finland or Denmark (twice). The figure is lower compared to Sweden, Austria and Bulgaria. The number of inhabitants of Belarus is approximately equal to the number of citizens in Greece, the Czech Republic, Portugal, Belgium, Yugoslavia and a number of other states.

The period lasting from the post-war years until the nineties of the last century was characterized by a tendency to a constant increase in the population of the country, as a result of which the population of Belarus increased markedly. However, in the last decades of the twentieth century, the rate of increase in the number of inhabitants of the country began to decrease noticeably.

The economic reforms of the perestroika era have affected many aspects of people's lives. The transition to market relations, the emergence of informal activities, the growth of private business, the growth of unemployment - all these factors have played a significant role in changing the conditions for the existence of citizens. This also affected the dynamics of the number, composition, as well as the process of reproduction of people living in the country.

From the year 1910, Belarus, whose population began to decline, entered the depopulation stage. The decrease in the number of citizens was due to the excess of the death rate over births. The result of this process is the constant movement of the country toward acquiring the status of a smaller state (in terms of numbers).

The population of Belarus has a multinational composition. Representatives of one hundred and thirty nationalities live in the state. The main number of citizens is Belarusians. Their share in the total population is eighty-one percent.

The greatest percentage of Belarusians lives in the Minsk and Grodno regions. At present, their number in the whole country is constantly increasing.

The percentage composition of other nationalities throughout the historical period has constantly changed. It was directly dependent on external and internal factors (migrations, wars, and so on). However, invariably the representatives of the second largest group of the population were Russian people. The proportion of this nation is eleven percent. Many of the landowners, peasants and bureaucrats began to live in Belarus after its accession to the Russian Empire. During the existence of Soviet power, this ethnic group surpassed the Polish and Jewish by its number, which corresponded to the geopolitics of the USSR. Currently, the residence of representatives of Russian nationality are mostly cities.

The population of Belarus in its northwestern regions is represented by a large proportion of Poles. It accounts for almost four percent of the total population of this region. An insignificant level of migration of citizens of Polish nationality was observed in the Middle Ages. To date, most of the representatives of this ethnic group live in the Grodno region. They do not have any significant differences from Belarusians in terms of domestic and cultural features.