Past Winners of the Reginald Zelnik Book Prize in History

2023 - Alexander Martin, From the Holy Roman Empire to the Land of the Tsars: One Family's Odyssey, 1768-1870 (Oxford University Press).

Honorable Mention: Andy Bruno, Tunguska: A Siberian Mystery and Its Environmental Legacy (Cambridge University Press).

Honorable Mention: Marina Mogilner, A Race for the Future: Scientific Visions of Modern Russian Jewishness (Harvard University Press).

2022 - Vladislav Zubok, Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union (Yale University Press)

Andrew KornbluthThe August Trials: The Holocaust and Postwar Justice in Poland (Harvard University Press)

2021 - Krista A. GoffNested Nationalism: Making and Unmaking Nations in the Soviet Union (Cornell University Press).

Anita Kurimay, Queer Budapest, 1873-1961 (University of Chicago Press).

2020 - Kate Brown, Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future (W.W. Norton & Co.)

Brendan McGeever, Anti-Semitism and the Russian Revolution (Cambridge University Press)

Honorable Mention:

Isolde Thyrêt, Saint-Making in Early Modern Russia: Religious Tradition and Innovation in the Cult of Nil Stolobenskii (New Academia)

2019 - Sarah CameronThe Hungry Steppe: Famine, Violence and the Making of Soviet Kazakhstan (Cornell University Press)

Honorable Mention: 

Natalia Nowakowska, King Sigismund of Poland and Martin Luther: The Reformation before Confessionalization (Oxford University Press)

2018-Lynne Viola, Stalinist Perpetrators on Trial: Scenes from the Great Terror in Soviet Ukraine (Oxford University Press)

Honorable Mention:

Alexis Peri, Diaries from the Siege of Leningrad (Harvard University Press)

2017- Aileen M. Kelly, The Discovery of Chance: The Life and Thought of Alexander Herzen (Harvard University Press)

      Honorable Mention:

Mark Bassin, The Gumilev Mystique: Biopolitics, Eurasianism, and the                Construction of Community in Modern Russia (Cornell University Press)

2016 - Adeeb Khalid, Making Uzbekistan: Nation, Empire, and Revolution in the Early USSR (Cornell University Press)

Honorable Mention: 

Eileen Kane, Russian Hajj: Empire and the Pilgrimage to Mecca (Cornell University Press)

2015 - Agnes Nilufer Kefeli, Becoming Muslim in Imperial Russia: Conversion, Apostasy, and Literacy (Cornell University Press)

Honorable Mention: 

Willard Sunderland, The Baron's Cloak: A History of the Russian Empire in War and Revolution (Cornell University Press)

2014 - Stephen K. BataldenRussian Bible Wars: Modern Scriptural Translation and Cultural Authority (Cambridge University Press)

Honorable Mention: 

James Mace WardPriest, Politician, Collaborator: Jozef Tiso and the Making of Fascist Slovakia (Cornell University Press)

2013 - Scott Ury, Barricades and Banners: The Revolution of 1905 and the Transformation of Warsaw Jewry (Stanford University Press)

Honorable Mentions: 

Jonathan BoltonWorlds of Dissent: Charter 77, The Plastic People of the Universe, and Czech Culture under Communism (Harvard University Press)
Christina Ezrahi, Swans of the Kremlin: Ballet and Power in Soviet Russia (University of Pittsburgh Press)

2012 - Tracy McDonald, Face to the Village: The Riazan Countryside Under Soviet Rule, 1921-1930 (University of Toronto Press)

Honorable Mentions:

Wendy Z. GoldmanInventing the Enemy: Denunciation and Terror in Stalin’s Russia (Cambridge University Press)
Barbara Alpern Engel, Breaking the Ties That Bound: The Politics of Marital Strife in Late Imperial Russia (Cornell University Press)

2011 - Matthew Lenoe, The Kirov Murder and Soviet History (Yale University Press)

Honorable Mention: 

Rochelle Goldberg RuthchildEquality and Revolution: Women's Rights in the Russian Empire, 1905-1917 (University of Pittsburgh Press)

2010 - Robert EdelmanSpartak Moscow: A History of the People's Team in the Workers' State (Cornell University Press)

Honorable Mentions:

Howard LouthanConverting Bohemia: Force and Persuasion in the Catholic Reformation (Cambridge University Press)
Christine Ruane, The Empire's New Clothes: A History of the Russian Fashion Industry, 1700-1917 (Yale University Press)

2009 - Elena ShulmanStalinism on the Frontier of Empire: Women and State Formation in the Soviet Far East, (Cambridge University Press)

Honorable Mention: 

Lewis H. Siegelbaum, Cars for Comrades: The Life of the Soviet Automobile (Cornell University Press)