No matter how Belarusian officials try to put a brave face on it, the exodus of IT from the country is a fact. And for many years the IT sector was the nation’s calling card and a fairly substantial share of GDP.
Just the other day I had to discuss yet again what will happen to this industry now, and when it might recover. Unfortunately, my forecast is bleak: Belarus will never again be an IT country. Or at least not for decades. I could be wrong—I’m no great economist—but I’ll try here to lay out the considerations on which I base this view.
But first—a bit of history.
Belarus didn’t become strong in IT out of thin air. In Soviet times, Minsk was an assembly shop, including for computing hardware. It was in Belarus that the large “Minsk” computers were made, and later the ES personal computers, which people chased after even when I was a teenager, because they were IBM-compatible machines you could buy for home use and, for better or worse, enjoy the benefits of a personal computer.
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