2025

Established in 1983, the Wayne S. Vucinich Book Prize, sponsored by the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) and the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies at Stanford University, 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. 

Honorable Mention: Agnieszka Pasieka, Living Right: Far-Right Youth Activists in Contemporary Europe (Princeton University Press, 2024) 

Agnieszka Pasieka’s Living Right provides a skilled ethnographic and theoretical portrait of right-wing organizing in (and among) Poland, Hungary, and Italy. Using extensive fieldwork and interview data gathered over the course of several years and in many locations, Pasieka explores the yearning for connection—to ethnic and political pasts, to imagined nations, and to each other—that animates the far-right’s challenge to the European status quo. The book underscores what Pasieka sees as an ethics that is as much about transnational connection as it is about nationalist politics. Living Right is also an extraordinary ethnographic account that expertly weaves together the author’s frequent discomfort with her interlocutors’ views and her interlocutors’ frequent suspicion of her motives. Much more than a series of fieldwork anecdotes, this dance of discomfort and suspicion becomes central to the book’s analytical contributions, to its understanding of how far-right youth live and move and organize in Europe today. Many fields have needed an ethnography of these movements, and Pasieka has contributed a brilliant one. 

Winner: Benjamin Nathans

Winner: Masha Salazkina

Prize Committee: Douglas Rogers (chair), Sibelan Forrester, Tomila Lankina, and Willard Sunderland