"My Peers And I In Belarus Have Been Blessed With The Best Of Times"

10.11.2026, 16:22

Belarusians look back on the '90s.

Many of us have already forgotten the time when Belarus gained independence and became a free country. One of our compatriots decided to remind us of this and shared a story on the social media platform Threads about her youth.

“My peers and I in Belarus were lucky to have the best time for school and college,” she writes. “In elementary school, we could wear a jacket and jeans—there were no school uniforms. Later, in high school, they started introducing some rules, but they weren’t very strict.”

We celebrated Halloween in English class; overall, there wasn’t much nonsense in the curriculum. When we were 16–18, club culture was in full swing—it was just a lot of fun overall. While in college and university, we traveled to Odessa, Zatoka, Kyiv, and Lviv.

We could leave for Vilnius in the morning and be back by evening; through a student exchange program, we traveled to Germany, and some of my classmates went to the U.S. and Finland. At the German embassy back then, it was dead quiet—because everyone was getting their visas at the Lithuanian and Polish embassies; I think Polish and Lithuanian visas were available to just about anyone who wanted one, and the phrase “going shopping” in Poland was super popular.”

Many Belarusians also shared their memories of life in the 1990s. The website Charter97.org features some of these comments:
— We also used to travel to Europe. There was an exchange program between the U.S. and Belarus. Americans would come and teach. German programs. I remember a German guy who worked at the high school; he helped with grammar. There was all kinds of stuff. Freedom!
— It wasn’t everywhere, but at my school we had a class called “Belarusian Folk Culture”—can you believe it?
— And when I was in kindergarten, there was one Belarusian-speaking group, and my mom—who was a teacher there—staged a play with the kids in Belarusian. It’s still on a videotape somewhere.

— Yeah, it was great not having a school uniform. I used to wear an orange hoodie and jeans with handprints on them. Denim overalls, pants with rivets.

— There were no security barriers or police at the entrance, no security cameras throughout the school; we smoked in the restrooms and drank gin and tonics in the courtyards next to the school, and we skipped math class at the school stadium or in the computer club.

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