Your comment is absurdly wrong. Old Belarussian/Ukrainian is the circa-Early Middle Ages language of Kievan Rus that is the ancestor of modern Belarussian, Ukra

Your comment is absurdly wrong. Old Belarussian/Ukrainian is the circa-Early Middle Ages language of Kievan Rus that is the ancestor of modern Belarussian, Ukrainian, and Russian languages. What destroyed the use of Belarussian literary language in Lithuania/Belarus was the union with Poland - Polish gradually replaced Belarussian as a literary language. My grandmother was born in the 1920s in Western Belarus - Belarussian only became an official language and started being used in higher education again after Western Belarus was annexed to the Belarussian SSR after the end of WWII. In her town most people spoke Belarussian and few were literate in Polish. This was the case for most of Western Belarus, but the literary Belarussian language was only taught at the primary school level (in those towns that were fortunate enough to have schools), and there were very few Belarussian books published (to place this in context, some of the first books printed in a Slavic language were in Belarussian in the early 16th century). The literacy policies of Belarussian SSR is what revived the Belarussian language. What has happened after the fall of the Soviet Union is Lukashenko's government pursuing a policy of suppressing Belarussian as an official language in favor of Russian. Recently this has started to become a bigger issue of dissatisfaction in the country.