As with many other Belarusian institutions, the internal security forces were inherited more or less intact when the Soviet Union was dissolved, and the name of the country's security service remains the KGB. The local assets of these institutions were transferred to the new government and continued functioning with basically the same policies and, very often, the same personnel.

The former communist, pro-Russian hard-liners still in charge of many of Belarus's institutions are determined to stay in power. One of their methods is censorship. They call newspaper editors in for "chats" about government policy and the subsidies that keep many periodicals afloat. They also enforced the media restrictions on coverage of the May 1995 parliamentary elections, which kept newspapers from publishing interviews with the candidates and stories about the campaign in general.

Data as of June 1995