Wayne S. Vucinich Book Prize

2006 Recipient

Francine Hirsch

Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union

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: Francine Hirsch
Title: Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union (Cornell University Press)

In this detailed and ground-breaking study, Francine Hirsch offers readers remarkable insight into the debates and practices that informed the formation of the multi-national Soviet state. In a departure from traditional attentions to political leaders and ideologies, Hirsch shifts the terms of debate to those scholars, policy-specialists, and activists whose direct participation in the struggles to identify, delimit, and promote the peoples of the fledgling USSR had profound impacts on communities across the country. From her analysis of the constitution of early Soviet borders (some of the best work done on nationality policy in the 1920s) to her path-breaking study of the politics and consequences of census-taking, Hirsch hardly leaves a single canonic argument unaddressed. Hirsch calls attention to the Soviet Union’s appropriations of European colonial thought, while a distinctive emphasis on a proletarian pluralism nonetheless emerges in close attention to everyday practicalities of events such as the mounting of museum exhibitions and public performances. More than just a social history of the formation of the Soviet Union, the book is simultaneously a history of science in the clearest sense of the term and a wide-ranging interdisciplinary investigation into an early socialist governmentality that welcomed scientists of all stripes into its service. Empire of Nations is a superb contribution to the history of the Soviet Union and to Slavic Studies more generally.

Honorable Mention: Christina Kiaer