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Abstract
The 2020 presidential election in Belarus was different from previous elections in the independence period. Three candidates emerged from the economic and political elite, and several factors reduced the popularity of the incumbent president Aliaksandr Lukashenka, particularly his so-called Parasite Laws of 2016, his dismissal of Covid-19 as a psychosis, and the destruction of crosses at the Kurapaty memorial site. Though several candidates were barred from running, the campaign of Svjatlana Cichanoŭskaja emerged as a serious challenge, with popular mass rallies and support from the other two major campaign teams. Yet the announced results gave Lukashenka over 80%. The response was the largest mass demonstrations seen in Belarus since the late 1980s, to which the government responded with repressions and arrests. The paper discusses the various analyses of the election results and whether the "national awakening" can herald real political change.

The long-ruling president has manipulated World War II history and downplayed the lasting effects of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. His similarly dismissive approach to the pandemic provided a spark for an unprecedented election challenge and popular resistance.

This paper returns to a topic the author dealt with in a more basic form some years ago. But it also makes an attempt to conceptualize the development of independent Belarus through its population migration to urban centers and especially its capital city, a development that dates exclusively from the post-1945 period, but that paradoxically has prevented this republic from experiencing the sort of modernization processes evident elsewhere in Europe. It takes as its starting point the pioneering work by the German historian Thomas Bohn (Bon/Bohn 2013) titledThe Minsk Phenomenonand develops it further by linking it to demographic issues, current health concerns, and problems in industrial development.

The paper examines the role of the German‐Soviet war in nation‐building in Alyaksandr Lukashenka's Belarus through the medium of contemporary popular narratives (media, movies, documentaries), monuments, and historical sites. After highlighting some examples in the former two categories, it focuses specifically on myth‐making at three key historic sites – the Brest Hero Fortress, the Liniya Stalina museum, and the Khatyn historic complex – outlining the correlation between the official interpretation of wartime events at these sites and construction of modern‐day Belarusian civic nationalism and nation building; the forging of links between veterans and youth for the evolution of memory into post‐memory; and the elimination all vestiges of what is termed "historical revisionism".