Most of the surviving graves and burial sites are located in Western Belarus, particularly in the present-day Grodno region. Military Cemeteries, Burial Sites and Graves ↑ The inscription is in both Belarusian and Russian: “On this square during the First World War the headquarters of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief of the Russian Army was stationed”.
On the marble base are bronze images of buildings and a bell with a portrait of the last Russian tsar, Nicholas II. Vorobiev is well-known in Belarus due to the number of his urban sculptures and plaques, established in many areas of the republic. In August 2017, a memorial plaque by the local sculptor Andrei Vorobiev in honor of the headquarters of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief of the Russian army, Nicholas II, Emperor of Russia (1868-1918) was installed at the Plošča Slavy (Square of Glory) in the city of Mogilev. In recent years, as mentioned below, new monuments have been erected in the town of Smorgon. Most of them were located in the western regions of the republic, where the main battles in 1915-1917 took place. In August 2014, there were at least thirty small monuments and memorials on World War I battle and military burial sites. For the centenary, the plan stipulated the reconstruction of several war burial sites and graves and publication of a volume in honor of the anniversary of the end of World War I in 2018. On 4 June 2014, the Council of Ministers of the Republic of Belarus approved the “State program for 2015-2020 on the perpetuation of the memory of defenders of the fatherland and the preservation of memory of victims of wars”. Various state institutions engaged in the preparation of events dedicated to the 100 th anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War, among them the Ministry of Culture, the Ministry of Education, the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus, the Ministry of Transport, the Ministry of Defense, the regional executive committees, the Minsk City Executive Committee and other organizations. On 21 March 2014, the first meeting of the Belarusian First World War Centennial Committee was held in Minsk under the direction of the Council of Ministers of Belarus. The Memory in Belarus”, representatives of state institutions, ministries, the diplomatic corps, and mass media agreed that the republic needed its own museum of the First World War, with national status. In June 2013, at the round table “The First World War. In 1994, 20 this act was supplemented by the presidential decrees on the “Improvement of activities to perpetuate the memory of defenders of the fatherland and victims of wars”. On 21 December 1992, the Council of Ministers of the Republic of Belarus adopted the decree “On perpetuating the memory of defenders of the fatherland and victims of wars”. In early 1991, the Belarusian Republican Public Organizing Committee was established to preserve the memory of “defenders of the fatherland” who died in the First World War. In independent Belarus, the state started to pay more tribute to the memory of World War I. In national Belarusian memory, it was known as “Nikolai’s war” (with reference to the last Russian Tsar, Nicholas II), and overshadowed by other terrible events of the tragic 20 th century. In Belarus as in other Soviet republics, World War I was regarded, in official discourse, as an imperialist global conflict. The narrative of this war in Soviet Belarus became part of the events, military conflicts, and political and social disturbances that followed, such as the Russian Civil War, German and Polish occupations in 1918-1919, Polish-Soviet War in 1920, forced collectivization and repression under Joseph Stalin (1878-1953), hostilities of the Second World War, the Chernobyl disaster and collapse of the Soviet Union. In the 20 th century, the memory of the First World War faded from Belarusian memory, for the same reasons as in other neighboring states in Eastern Europe. Belarusians were mobilized for the Russian Imperial Army, and about 1.4 million residents had to seek refuge in the Russian interior and other places. The war left deep marks on Belarus its territory was divided between the belligerent armies. Belarus, as part of the Russian Empire, was directly involved in the First World War.