1 Rouble National Academy of Sciences of Belarus

Issued to mark the 80th anniversary of the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus, founded in 1929 under Soviet direction as the Belarusian Academy of Sciences. The institution was gutted during the Stalinist purges of the 1930s, when a significant portion of its founding membership was arrested, executed, or disappeared into the Gulag — a history the commemorative issue does not acknowledge.