Wilson looks at Belarusian history as a series of false starts in the medieval and pre-modern periods, and at the many rival versions of Belarusian identity, culminating with the Soviet Belarusian project and the establishment of Belarus’s current borders during World War II. He also addresses Belarus’s on-off relationship with Russia, its simultaneous attempts to play a game of balance in the no-man’s-land between Russia and the West, and how, paradoxically, Belarus is at last becoming a true nation under the rule of Europe’s “last dictator.”