Summary: <br> <a href="https://twitter.com/AlynSmith" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener external" data-wpel-link="external">Alyn Smith</a> is the <a href="https://www.snp.org/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener external" data-wpel-link="external">SNP</a> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alyn_Smith" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener external" data-wpel-link="external">member</a> of the Westminster parliament for the Scottish constituency of Stirling. Since we spoke, <a href="https://www.thenational.scot/news/18661755.second-independence-poll-shows-majority-support-yes-vote/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener external" data-wpel-link="external">two opinion polls have been published</a> showing the pro-independence side stretching their lead, excluding undecideds, by up to 10 clear percentage points ahead, 55 to 45.<br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> *****<br> <br> <br> <br> You should be paying attention to Belarus. Well, that’s my opinion anyway, I think that it’s worth more attention than it’s getting.<br> <br> <br> <br> A bit of background, Belarus, then named Belorussia, was one of the republics of the USSR, and the hint is in the name, it’s much closer, culturally and linguistically to Russia than most of the other Soviet republics were.<br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> There is a Belorussian language, but its status is much like Irish in Ireland, or maybe more accurately like Welsh in Wales, it’s spoken by some people, mostly intellectual and counter-cultural type people in the cities, and in the villages in some areas they speak an odd mixture of it and Russian, but the Russian language is by far dominant, particularly in the government and workplaces.<br> <br> <br> <br> Unlike some of the republics, Belarus never had any real existence before Soviet times; much of its territory is the land seized from Poland by the Soviet Union when Hitler and Stalin made the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact. They’ll hate me for saying this but apart from the alphabet, Belorussian is almost the same language as Polish, just that in catholic areas they learnt writing from the church so wrote in Latin script, and in orthodox areas they learnt writing from the church so wrote in Cyrillic script.<br> <br> <br> <br> Fast forward to 1990, the Soviet Union fell apart, and Belorussia really didn’t want to leave, they were theoretically the only member of the Soviet Union after even the Russian Federation left. That was because there was no democratic revolution, as in much of the rest of eastern Europe, the local communist bosses stayed in charge, just with a bit less ideology and a lot more corruption.<br> <br> <br> <br> This suited Putin very well indeed; Russia doesn’t really see Belarus as a separate country. You can travel between the two countries without an international passport and their economies are highly integrated, Belarus is a very agricultural country with some basic communist-style industries like making fertiliser and tractors. It’s about twice the area and population of Ireland. And it’s dirt poor, although there has been a flourishing of IT start-ups in the capital Minsk.<br> <br> <br> <br> Belarus has become more important to Russia as a food source since the imposition of EU sanctions. They’ve developed their own production of things like Belarusian mozzarella and parmesan cheese, although the joke in Moscow was that it was really the Belarusian printing industry that boomed, since it was obvious that many of these products, at least initially, were illegally exported from the EU, with Belarusian labels stuck over the originals.<br> <br> <br> <br> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Lukashenko" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">Alexander Lukashenko</a> has been the unchallenged president since he created the office for himself in 1994. On 9 August it came time for him to perform a bit of dreary theatre of democracy, a sham election, not a performance that anyone inside or outside the country would find convincing.<br> <br> <br> <br>
