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Reference: MD20\200031

Project Title: Petr Masherau: From Partisan to Party Leader in Soviet Belarus

Awarded: £99,668.00

The Mid-Career Fellowship will enable me to write a biography of Petr Masherau, the charismatic leader of Soviet Belarus from 1965 to 1980. Masherau presided over a period of unprecedented prosperity and stability in the republic, and his sudden death in a car crash in 1980 brought forth an outpouring of national grief as well as rumours of Moscow’s involvement. His memory proved remarkably enduring. My project offers the first scholarly biography of Masherau and, through his life and leadership, the first detailed exploration of late-socialist Belarus, an important borderland republic of the Soviet Union. Focusing on this under-researched ethnic periphery, my study illuminates how it responded to Moscow’s twin projects of building socialism and maintaining an empire. My book will contribute a completely new case study to the scholarship on colonialism, national identity, ethnic minorities, and modernity that would enhance our understanding of a strategically important region today.

 

 

 

PI researcher: Dr Natalya Chernyshova