Authors
Natalya Chernyshova1; 1 University of Winchester, UK Discussion
Brezhnev’s infirmity in the second half of his tenure and the conservatism of his government’s policies have coloured the subsequent perceptions of late Soviet politics as a milieu inhabited by stodgy, senile, and emotionless men, droning off their monotonous speeches from a podium and failing to appeal to their audiences. The Cold War imagery of Soviet politicians in the West also presented them as charmless and distant, if not entirely as inept as the stagnation label implied. Obviously, this is not how Soviet political leaders saw themselves or wished to be presented. This paper considers a very different public persona – charming, energetic, mobile, and approachable – of the First Secretary of the Belarusian Communist Party, Petr Masherau (1965-1980). Scrutinising Masherau’s personal manner in encounters with ordinary people, his dress style, his relationship with subordinates and colleagues in the party-state apparatus, his appearance in mass media, as well as his overall approach to leadership, this paper asks how this public image was cultivated and with what consequences. To what extent did Masherau represent the Soviet ideal of a political leader and what this might tell us about Soviet political culture as it evolved in the post-Stalin decades? 
