Due to its dominance in media, education, and other areas of public life, Russian is de facto the most widely spoken language in the country, a result of the Soviet period in its history and post-Soviet era development.
[1] Afterwards, the enslavement of the country began - even during the reign of Catherine the Great, about half a million previously free Belarusian peasants became the serfs of Russian nobles.
Russification was also reflected in architecture - the destruction of sacred buildings from the times of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania began, including Greek Catholic printing houses loyal to the Belarusian language.
On the site of the destroyed buildings, the so-called Muravyov-churches were built, which received their name from the then governor of the “North-Western Region” Mikhail Muravyov, known for his crimes against Belarusians and the suppression of Kalinovsky’s rebellion during the January Uprising (1863-1864).
According to the Belarus Census (2009), 41.5% of the Belarusian population declared Russian as their mother language whereas Belarusian is the mother tongue of 53.2% of the population, and 70.2% declared Russian "the language spoken at home" (the second language-related question of the Census).