2019 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: Eleonory Gilburd
Title: To See Paris and Die: The Soviet Lives of Western Culture (Harvard University Press)

In the years immediately following Stalin’s death, international culture from film to literature to popular song burst forth across the Soviet Union. After decades in which any contact with foreigners or foreign culture was severely circumscribed—and even dangerous—suddenly Soviet citizens could read translations of foreign books, watch Italian films, and sing along with French popular songs. Eleonory Gilburd’s To See Paris and Die takes on this rich period of cultural encounter and exchange, concentrating mainly on the mid-1950s to the early 1970s. Gilburd brilliantly analyzes international exhibitions, festivals, and tourism, including the 1957 Moscow International Youth Festival as a watershed event in this process of allowing international ideas, arts, and even people to enter Soviet space. Always conflicted, partial, and contradictory, this process of cultural and intellectual opening was denounced by Soviet traditionalists as a source of sedition, political dangers, and espionage. Gilburd admirably shows how extreme enthusiasm for certain aspects of foreign—usually European and North American—culture among some groups of Soviet citizens provoked denunciations of decadent, overly sexualized, and insufficiently socialist aspects of these same books, films, art, and music. Bringing together different strands of cultural life, politics, and their everyday reception, this work offers scintillating insights into the social landscape of the post-Stalinist USSR.

Honorable Mentions: Sarah Cameron and Victoria Smolkin