2024

The W. Bruce Lincoln Book Prize, established in 2004 and sponsored by Mary Lincoln in memory of W. Bruce Lincoln, is awarded annually for an author’s first published monograph or scholarly synthesis that is of exceptional merit and lasting significance for the understanding of Russia’s past, published in the previous calendar year.  

Honorable Mention: Una Bergmane, Politics of Uncertainty: The United States, the Baltic Question, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union (Oxford University Press, 2023)

Una Bergmane’s powerful account of the collapse of the Soviet Union centers the last three republics that were forced to join the USSR and the first three to break off: Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. The book offers a fresh perspective on the role that pervasive uncertainty and competing priorities played in diplomatic decisions of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Bergmane shows how the Baltic republics’ maneuvering among Mikhail Gorbachev’s promises for perestroika, the United States’ efforts to win the Cold War, negotiations over the fate of a divided Germany, and their own desires for independence contributed mightily to the outcomes of the Soviet collapse.  

Honorable Mention: Nicole Eaton, German Blood, Slavic Soil: How Nazi Königsberg Became Soviet Kaliningrad (Cornell University Press, 2023)

In this book, Nicole Eaton crafts a masterful study of a territory that had been fully ruled by both Nazis and Stalinists in peacetime and war. Showing how German Königsberg became Soviet Kaliningrad, Eaton casts new light on older historiographical conversations comparing the two regimes and makes sense of the city’s shift in identity. Her exhaustive and impressive research leaves few stones unturned and allows her to present a compelling account of ethnic and political transformation in the aftermath of war. 

Winner: Fabian Baumann

Prize Committee: Andy Bruno (chair), Krista Goff, and Kristin Roth-Ey