2015 Recipient

Established in 1983, the Wayne S. Vucinich Book Prize, sponsored by the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) and the Stanford University Center for Russian and East European Studies, is awarded annually for the most important contribution to Russian, Eurasian, and East European studies in any discipline of the humanities or social sciences published in English in the United States in the previous calendar year.

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

In her outstanding new book, Ekaterina Pravilova forces us to rethink how systems of public property or res public, private property, and state property evolved during Russia’s long nineteenth century. She demonstrates that, contrary to perceived wisdom, the Russian empire did not suffer unduly from a poorly developed system of private property. Instead, autocratic patrimonial rule solidified the rights of private property owners to such an extent that it took generations of activists, bureaucrats, intellectuals, and lawyers in the post-emancipation era to create both the conception and the materiality of a public property and a public domain that was different both from the Tsar’s property, state property, and individual private property. In her erudite comparative analysis, positioned at the intersection of legal theory and social history, Pravilova demonstrates that the concept of public property served as a discursive playing field for competing parties, including the tsar, state institutions, and state and non-state experts representing the ill-defined public, in managing both natural and cultural resources, such as water and forests, literary estates, and art markets. Pravilova has brought to the fore a remarkable history of how systems of property, nature, capital, state, and the commons were constituted in the nineteenth century and how this influenced Bolshevik thinking after the revolution. Her interdisciplinary analysis brilliantly complements current research into the category of the “commons” in American political economy and legal theory. Pravilova’s work is particularly relevant in the face of ongoing climate change as various stakeholders are challenging the neoliberal privatization of natural resources throughout the world.

Honorable Mentions: Alan Barenberg and Karen Dawisha