2008 Recipient

The Beth Holmgren Graduate Student Essay Prize, established in 1990 and named in honor of Professor Holmgren in 2021, is awarded for an outstanding essay by a graduate student in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies.

Winner: Colleen M. Moore, Indiana University
Title: “The Popular Response to War and Mobilization in Russia in 1914″

The prize-winning paper for this year is a re-examination of Russian popular attitudes toward Russia’s decision to go to war in July and August 1914. This engagingly written essay analyzes a substantial body of primary sources, among them national and provincial Russian newspapers, soldiers’ letters and memoirs, and compositions written by schoolchildren. Colleen Moore makes use of those materials to argue that the lower classes had a clear sense of the reasons their government entered the war and urged it on with overtly nationalist feelings. They were less enthusiastic about their own enlistment, but unlike other scholars she concludes that their looting of liquor stores was not a form of anti-war protest. Moore’s paper offers a bold and imaginative challenge to the historiography of World War I in Russia.