2024 Recipient

Ekaterina Pravilova

The Ruble: A Political History

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

Winner: Ekaterina Pravilova, The Ruble: A Political History (Oxford University Press, 2023)

They say “money talks,” but few have managed to make it speak more eloquently than Ekaterina Pravilova in her magisterial new book, The Ruble: A Political History. In this deeply researched and sweeping account, Pravilova traverses the previously unexplored terrain of ruble politics—a terrain on which liberals and conservatives fought over the core issues of Russian history including the boundaries of national identity, the limits of autocratic power, and the nature of Russia’s relations with the West from Catherine the Great until Vladimir Lenin. In vivid prose, she depicts how currency liberalization of various kinds promised to promote economic development, but also threatened to redefine and constrain the power of the Tsar leading conservatives to block much-needed modernization of fiscal institutions. In her account, the ruble becomes a source of autocratic control over society and an instrument of geopolitical competition rather than primarily an instrument of exchange. Along the way, Pravilova illuminates how peasants, gentry, and merchants big and small perceived and used the ruble, while also providing detailed and lively portraits of the protagonists who fought to shape Russia’s political institutions via debates on the role and physical appearance of the ruble. Drawing on rich archival work and insightful comparisons of currency politics in Europe, Pravilova’s “political biography” of the ruble is a landmark study that is very worthy of the Hewett prize.  

Prize Committee: Timothy Frye (chair), Cynthia Buckley, and Susanne Wengle