MKAD (Minsk)
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| Мінская кальцавая аўтамабільная дарога, МКАД | |
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| Route information | |
| Length: | 56 km (35 mi) |
| Location | |
| Major cities: | Minsk |
| Highway system | |
| Roads in Belarus | |
MKAD is the name of the beltway that goes around Minsk, Belarus. The name is an abbreviation that means Minsk Beltway (Belarusian: Мінская кальцавая аўтамабільная дарога, Russian: Минская кольцевая автомобильная дорога). The 56.2 km road straddles the Minsk city limits.
The road was built between 1956 and 1963. In the beginning the road had just one lane in each direction and the width of the roadway was 7.5 meters. Reconstruction began in 1980. The result was 26.8 km with four lanes with the remaining section, 29.4 km, having two lanes.
At the end of the 1990s, the road was used by 16,000-18,000 automobiles daily and had level crossings, traffic lights and bus stops. Thus, on August 7, 2001, President Alexander Lukashenko ordered its reconstruction, with the completion due by November 2002.
The decision was met with controversy as the route passed through Kurapaty, north of Minsk, site of a mass grave of victims of the Soviet secret police, the NKVD, during the Great Purge of 1937-1941. Estimates of those murdered there range into the hundreds of thousands, but the site has not been properly investigated or bodies exhumed. Protesters accused Lukashenko, who does not recognize the Kurapaty case and never mentions it in public, of planning to destroy the site and build over the graves of its victims in a deliberate attempt to cover over a Soviet crime against humanity. In 2001, protesters from the Belarusian Popular Front, Zubr and smaller organizations, occupied the site and sat out a bitter winter in tents. Despite international attention, they were unable to stop the construction.
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Wikipedia