2024

The Robert C. Tucker/Stephen F. Cohen Dissertation Prize, established in 2006 and sponsored by the KAT Charitable Foundation, is awarded annually for an outstanding English-language doctoral dissertation in Soviet or Post-Soviet politics and history in the tradition practiced by Professors Tucker and Cohen. The dissertation must be defended at an American or Canadian university in the previous calendar year. 

Honorable Mention: Hilary Rybeck Lynd, “Homelands: Together and Apart in the Soviet Union and South Africa” (UC Berkeley, 2023)  

The Committee would like to acknowledge with an honorable mention the fascinating dissertation by Hilary Lynd in which she examines South Africa and the Soviet Union as “laboratories of diversity”—that is, two heterogeneous societies seeking ways to manage ethnic and racial difference. Lynd centers her dissertation on thought-provoking and ambitious comparisons of two countries that are rarely considered together. Her core puzzle of how and why the internationalist, modernizing Bolshevik Party and the traditionalist, fiercely ethnonationalist Afrikaner National Party both constructed federal systems based, to an extent, on recognition or creation of ethnic differences and then both collapsed at the same moment in history gives grounds for an examination of the roles of politics, ideology, economics, and demography in governance of multiethnic territories. Lynd not only grapples with theorizing about race, nationalism, and colonialism, but also reveals a complex relationship between South Africans and Soviets including through the Institute of Africa and the Solidarity Committee. Lynd follows this relationship up through the political changes that swept both countries in 1989-1991 and assesses the new possibilities for contact and exchange that appeared after the USSR unexpectedly broke into its titular republics while the ANC ushered in a unitary South African state committed to individual equality. With lucid prose and an eye for detail, Lynd paints a rich portrait of two societies struggling with questions of citizenship, authenticity, and sovereignty. 

Winner: Paula Chan

Prize Committee: Kathleen Smith (chair), Melissa Chakars, and Alexis Peri