Recent Winners

2022 - Faith Hillis, Utopia's Discontents: Russian Émigrés and the Quest for Freedom, 1830s-1930s (Oxford University Press).

2021 - Ana Hedberg Olenina, Psychomotor Aesthetics: Movement and Affect in Modern Literature and Film (Oxford University Press).

Honorable Mention:

Ronald Grigor Suny, Stalin: Passage to Revolution (Princeton University Press).

2020 - Eliot Borenstein, Plots against Russia: Conspiracy and Fantasy after Socialism (Cornell University Press).

Honorable Mention:

Joan Neuberger, This Thing of Darkness: Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible in Stalin’s Russia (Cornell University Press).

2019 - Eleonory GilburdTo See Paris and Die: The Soviet Lives of Western Culture (Harvard University Press).

Honorable Mention:

Sarah Cameron, The Hungry Steppe: Famine, Violence, and the Making of Soviet Kazakhstan (Cornell University Press).

Victoria Smolkin, A Sacred Space is Never Empty: A History of Soviet Atheism (Princeton University Press).

2018- Natalia Roudakova, Losing Pravda: Ethics and the Press in Post-Truth Russia (Cambridge University Press).

Honorable Mention:

Ana Antic, Therapeutic Fascism: Experiencing the Violence of the Nazi New Order (Oxford University Press).

2017 - Benjamin PetersHow Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet (MIT Press).

2016 - Ronald Grigor Suny, “They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else”: A History of the Armenian Genocide (Princeton University Press).

Honorable Mentions:

Michael Kunichika, “Our Native Antiquity”: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Culture of Russian Modernism (Academic Studies Press)
Douglas Rogers, The Depths of Russia: Oil, Power, and Culture after Socialism (Cornell University Press)

2015 - Ekaterina Pravilova, A Public Empire: Property and the Quest for the Common Good in Imperial Russia (Princeton University Press) 

Honorable Mentions:

Alan Barenberg, Gulag Town, Company Town: Forced Labor and Its Legacy in Vorkuta (Yale University Press)
Karen Dawisha, Putin’s Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia? (Simon & Schuster)

2014 - Kate BrownPlutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (Oxford University Press)

Honorable Mentions:

Valerie KivelsonDesperate Magic: The Moral Economy of Witchcraft in Seventeenth-Century Russia (Cornell University Press)
Derek SayerPrague, Capital of the Twentieth Century (Princeton University Press)

2013 - Jeremy Hicks, First Films of the Holocaust: Soviet Cinema and the Genocide of the Jews, 1938-1946 (University of Pittsburgh Press)

2012 - Catherine Evtuhov, Portrait of a Russian Province: Economy, Society and Civilization in Nineteenth-Century Nizhnii Novgorod (University of Pittsburgh Press)

Honorable Mentions:

Katerina Clark, Moscow, the Fourth Rome: Stalinism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Evolution of Soviet Culture, 1931-1941 (Harvard University Press)
Gail Kligman and Katherine Verdery, Peasants under Siege: The Collectivization of Romanian Agriculture, 1949-1962 (Princeton University Press)

2011 - Matthew Jesse Jackson for The Experimental Group: Ilya Kabakov, Moscow Conceptualism, Soviet Avant Gardes (University of Chicago Press)

Short-Listed:

Paulina Bren, The Greengrocer and his TV: The Culture of Communism after the 1968 Prague Spring (Cornell University Press)
Gabriella Safran, Wandering Soul:  The Dybbuk's Creator, S. An-sky (Harvard University Press)
Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands:  Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (Basic Books)
Christina Vatulescu, Police Aesthetics:  Literature, Film and the Secret Police in Soviet Times (Stanford University Press

2010 - Miriam Dobson for Khrushchev's Cold Summer: Gulag Returnees, Crime, and the Fate of Reform after Stalin (Cornell University Press)

2009 - Laurie Manchester for Holy Fathers, Secular Sons: Clergy, Intelligentsia and the Modern Self in Revolutionary Russia (Northern Illinois University Press)

Honorable Mention: Peter Andreas for Blue Helmets and Black Markets: The Business of Survival in the Siege of Sarajevo (Cornell University Press)

2008 - Adeeb Khalid for Islam after Communism: Religion and Politics in Central Asia (University of California Press)

Honorable Mentions:

Chad Bryant, Prague in Black: Nazi Rule and Czech Nationalism (Harvard University Press)
John RandolphA House in the Garden: The Bakunin Family and the Romance of Russian Idealism (Cornell University Press)

2007 - Alexei Yurchak for Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton University Press)

Honorable Mentions:

Robert CrewsFor Prophet and Tsar: Islam and Empire in Russia and Central Asia (Harvard University Press)
Jochen HellbeckRevolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary Under Stalin (Harvard University Press)
Valerie Kivelson, Cartographies of Tsardom: The Land and its Meanings in Seventeenth-Century Russia (Cornell University Press)
Ethan Pollock, Stalin and the Soviet Science Wars (Princeton University Press)
Marci Shore, Caviar and Ashes: A Warsaw Generation's Life and Death in Marxism, 1918-1968 (Yale University Press)

2006 - Francine Hirsch for Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union (Cornell University Press)

Honorable mention: Christina Kiaer, Imagine No Possessions: The Socialist Objects of Russian Constructivism (MIT Press)

2005 - Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century (Princeton University Press)

Honorable Mention: Kate Brown, A Biography of No Place: From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland (Harvard University Press)

2004 - William Taubman, Khrushchev: The Man and His Era (W.W. Norton)

Honorable Mention: Katherine VerderyThe Vanishing Hectare: Property and Value in Postsocialist Transylvania (Cornell University Press)

2003 - Benjamin Nathans, Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia (University of California Press)

Honorable Mention: Slava Gerovitch From Newspeak to Cyberspeak: A History of Soviet Cybernetics (MIT Press)

2002 - Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Cornell University Press)

Honorable Mention: Michael McFaulRussia's Unfinished Revolution: Political Change from Gorbachev to Putin (Cornell University Press)

2001 - Alaina Lemon, Between Two Fires: Gypsy Performance and Romani Memory from Pushkin to Post-Socialism (Duke University Press)

2000 - Peter Gatrell, A Whole Empire Walking: Refugees in Russia during World War I (Indiana University Press)

Honorable Mention: Nikolay Boogomolov & John E. MalmstadMikhail Kuzmin: A Life in Art (Harvard University Press)

1999 - David D. Laitin, Identity in Formation: The Russian Speaking Populations in the Near Abroad (Cornell University Press)

1998 - Stephen E. Hanson, Time and Revolution: Marxism and the Design of Soviet Institutions (University of North Carolina Press)

1997 - Tomas Venclova, Aleksander Wat: Life and Art of an Iconoclast (Yale University Press)

1996 - Katerina Clark, Petersburg: Crucible of Cultural Revolution (Harvard University Press); and Andrzej Walicki, Marxism and the Leap to the Kindgom of Freedom: The Rise and Fall of the Communist Utopia (Stanford University Press)

1995 - David Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy, 1939-1956 (Yale University Press)

Honorable Mention: Monika GreenleafPushkin and the Romantic Fashion: Fragment, Elegy, Orient, Irony (Stanford University)

1994 - Gale Stokes, The Walls Came Tumbling Down: The Collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe (Oxford University Press)

Honorable Mention: Donna OrwinTolstoy's Art and Thought, 1847-1880 (Princeton University Press)

1993 - Laura Engelstein, The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for Modernity in Fin de Siècle Russia (Cornell University Press)

Abraham Ascher, The Russian Revolution of 1905: Authority Restored (Stanford University Press)

1992 - John P. LeDonne, Absolutism and Ruling Class: The Formation of the Russian Political Order, 1700-1825 (Oxford University Press)

1991 - Istvan Deak, Beyond Nationalism: A Social and Political History of the Habsburg Officer Corps, 1848-1918 (Oxford University Press)

1990 - Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (Oxford University Press)

1989 - Piotr S. Wandycz, The Twilight of French Eastern Alliances 1926-1936: French-Czechoslovak-Polish Relations from Locarno to the Remilitarization of the Rhineland (Princeton University Press)

1988 - Allan K. Wildman, The End of the Russian Imperial Army: The Road to Soviet Power and Peace, volume 2 (Princeton University Press)

1987 - William Edward Brown, History of Russian Literature of the Romantic Period (Ardis Publishers)

1986 - Jeffrey Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read: Literacy and Popular Culture, 1861-1917 (Princeton University Press)

1985 - Ivo Banac, The National Question in Yugoslavia: Origins, History, Politics (Cornell University Press)

Honorable Mention: Alexander VucinichEmpire of Knowledge: The Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1917-1970) (University of California Press)

1984 - Terence Emmons, The Formation of Political Parties and the First National Elections in Russia (Harvard University Press)

Honorable mentions:
Victoria Bonnell, Roots of Rebellion: Workers' Politics and Organizations in St Petersburg and Moscow, 1900--1914 (University of California Press)
Robert O. CrummeyAristocrats and Servitors: The Boyar lite in Russia, 1613-1689 (Princeton University Press)
Gregory L. FreezeThe Parish Clergy in Nineteenth Century Russia (Princeton University Press)

1983 - John R. Lampe and Marvin R. Jackson, Balkan Economic History, 1550-1950: From Imperial Borderlands to Developing Nations (Indiana University Press)

Honorable Mentions:
Richard Hellie
Slavery in Russia (University of Chicago Press)
Edward J. BrownRussian Literature Since the Revolution (Harvard University Press)