2021 Recipient

The W. Bruce Lincoln Book Prize, established in 2004 and sponsored by Mary Lincoln, is awarded annually for an author’s first published monograph or scholarly synthesis that is of exceptional merit and lasting significance for the understanding of Russia’s past, published in the previous year.

Co-Winner: Greg Afinogenov
Title: Spies and Scholars: Chinese Secrets and Imperial Russia’s Quest for World Power (Harvard University Press).

In this erudite history, Greg Afinogenov traces the history of Russo-China relations from the seventeenth century to the annexation of the Amur region by Russia in the mid-nineteenth century through the lens of knowledge production. In a borderland region where Russia’s military means to project power was quite limited, intelligence about the environment and the Chinese speakers who inhabited it assumed a special significance. Using the conceptual framework of “knowledge regime,” which highlights the contingency of network theory while accounting for the role of state institutions, Afinogenov guides us through a rich ecosystem of knowledge production in which some intelligence was promoted while other secrets died on the vine. Alongside the intelligence reports that diplomats transmitted and the hybrid texts produced by seventeenth-century “authors,” Afinogenov shows us how institutions such as the Russian Ecclesiastical Mission and private economic entrepreneurs generated knowledge that often reflected their own agendas and priorities. By retracing the careers of lowly clerks, students, priests, diplomats, nobles, military men, spies, and grifters through various institutions, Spies and Scholars demonstrates that the creation of knowledge occurred within a variety of social hierarchies and institutions. Personalities and institutional logics are often in tension in this history that charts the ultimate ascendancy of academic over bureaucratic knowledge. Afinogenov effectively remaps our understanding of intelligence (produced by bureaucratic institutions of state) and knowledge (which came to reside in academic institutions) in a compellingly conceptualized, crisply narrated history that ought to join a list of seminal works on empire in the Russian context. His simultaneous command of small details, local events and the global context of geopolitical competition make it a rewarding read and impressive scholarly achievement.

Co-Winner: Pey-yi Chu