2012 Recipient

The Ed A Hewett Book Prize, established in 1994 and sponsored by the University of Michigan Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies, is awarded annually for an outstanding monograph on the political economy of Russia, Eurasia and/or Eastern Europe, published in the previous year.

Winner: Carol Leonard
Title: Agrarian Reform in Russia: The Road from Serfdom (Cambridge University Press)

Carol Leonard’s ambitious monograph explores the political economy of agrarian reform in Russia over the 150-year period bracketed by the emancipation of the serfs and the recent era of market liberalization. Both broad and deep in coverage, it is the sort of effort that could only have been undertaken by a scholar fully comfortable with archival texts and modern economic theory. Leonard gives equal attention to three periods: the era of imperial reforms from emancipation to Stolypin, the years of Soviet rule from the NEP experiment through collectivization to Gorbachev, and the two most recent post-Soviet decades. In so doing, she identifies common patterns in the motivation for and response to changes in agrarian policy. Across the generations, officials concerned with the country’s relatively poor agricultural performance pushed through reforms whose scale and impact was often limited by the opposition of vested interests. The effects of reforms have thus often not been immediate but have only become apparent over longer periods of time. Leonard’s book will stand for generations to come as an important reference for scholars of Russia’s historical trajectory.

Honorable Mention: Yoshiko Herrera