"The Belorussians are still a puzzle to me - a mass of people, spread over a large expanse of land, who have been constantly opressed, who speak a language that could be described as a cross between Polish and Russian with a grammar systematized only in the twentieth century, and whose feeling of national identity was the latest product of Europe's nationalist movements. But their case brings us up against the fluidity of all definitions; such a mass can easily be transformed from subject to object in foreign hands..." (Czesław Miłosz: Native Realm, 1981)