This year, when Mikalay started school in Belarus, he discovered that his teachers and administrators no longer called him that. They now called him Nikolai, its Russian equivalent.
Moreover, classes at his school, one of the best in the country, are now taught in Russian, rather than Belarusian, the language he has spoken for most of his life.
Belarusians like Mikalay are experiencing a new wave of Russification as Moscow extends its economic, political and cultural dominance.
Russia under the tsars and the Soviet Union imposed its language, symbols and cultural institutions on Belarus. But with the demise of the USSR in 1991, the country began to assert its identity and Belarusian briefly became the official language, with the white-red-white national flag replacing a version of the red hammer and sickle, according to the AP.
But everything changed in 1994, after Alexander Lukashenko, a former Soviet collective farm official, came to power. The authoritarian leader made Russian an official language, alongside Belarusian, and removed nationalist symbols.
Today, Lukashenko, who has ruled the country for more than three decades, has allowed Russia to dominate every aspect of life in Belarus, a country of 9.5 million people. Belarusian, which uses the Cyrillic alphabet like Russian, is barely audible on the streets of Minsk and other major cities.
Official business is conducted in Russian, which dominates most media. Lukashenko speaks only Russian, and government officials often do not use their native language.
Belarus was part of the Russian Empire for centuries and became one of the 15 Soviet republics after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Everyday use of the Belarusian language declined and persisted only in the west and north of the country and in rural areas.
In 1994, about 40% of students were taught in Belarusian; today this figure has fallen to less than 9%.
Although Belarusian, like Russian, is an East Slavic language, its vocabulary is considerably different.
