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Belarus PHYSICAL ENVIRONMENT
Topography and Drainage
Belarus, a generally flat country (the average
elevation is
162 meters above sea level) without natural borders,
occupies an
area of 207,600 square kilometers, or slightly smaller
than the
state of Kansas. Its neighbors are Russia to the east and
northeast, Latvia to the north, Lithuania to the
northwest,
Poland to the west, and Ukraine to the south.
Belarus's mostly level terrain is broken up by the
Belarusian
Range (Byelaruskaya Hrada), a swath of elevated territory,
composed of individual highlands, that runs diagonally
through
the country from west-southwest to east-northeast. Its
highest
point is the 346-meter Mount Dzyarzhynskaya
(Dzerzhinskaya, in
Russian), named for Feliks Dzerzhinskiy, head of Russia's
security apparatus under Stalin. Northern Belarus has a
picturesque, hilly landscape with many lakes and gently
sloping
ridges created by glacial debris. In the south, about
one-third
of the republic's territory around the Prypyats'
(Pripyat', in
Russian) River is taken up by the low-lying swampy plain
of the
Belarusian Woodland, or Palyessye (Poles'ye in Russian).
Belarus's 3,000 streams and 4,000 lakes are major
features of
the landscape and are used for floating timber, shipping,
and
power generation. Major rivers are the west-flowing
Zakhodnyaya
Dzvina (Zapadnaya Dvina in Russian) and Nyoman (Neman in
Russian)
rivers, and the south-flowing Dnyapro (Dnepr in Russian)
with its
tributaries, Byarezina (Berezina in Russian), Sozh, and
Prypyats'
rivers. The Prypyats' River has served as a bridge between
the
Dnyapro flowing to Ukraine and the Vistula in Poland since
the
period of Kievan Rus'. Lake Narach (Naroch', in Russian),
the
country's largest lake, covers eighty square kilometers.
Nearly one-third of the country is covered with
pushchy (sing., pushcha), large unpopulated
tracts
of forests. In the north, conifers predominate in forests
that
also include birch and alder; farther south, other
deciduous
trees grow. The Belavezhskaya (Belovezhskaya, in Russian)
Pushcha
in the far west is the oldest and most magnificent of the
forests; a reservation here shelters animals and birds
that
became extinct elsewhere long ago. The reservation spills
across
the border into Poland; both countries jointly administer
it.
Data as of June 1995
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