Weiser Center for Europe and Eurasia Article Prize

2024 Recipient

Isaac McKean Scarborough

"Like Cooking Plov with Hoja Nasreddin: Recalculating Financial Transfers to Tajikistan, 1971–1989," Europe-Asia Studies 75:6

The Weiser Center for Europe and Eurasia Article Prize, established in 2024 and sponsored by the Weiser Center for Europe and Eurasia (WCEE) at the University of Michigan, is awarded annually for an outstanding English-language research article in the social sciences by a junior scholar published in a peer-reviewed journal in the previous calendar year. 

Winner: Isaac McKean Scarborough, “Like Cooking Plov with Hoja Nasreddin: Recalculating Financial Transfers to Tajikistan, 1971–1989,” Europe-Asia Studies 75:6 (2023)     

Isaac Scarborough reexamines a longstanding question about Soviet finances: To what degree did the Soviet Union, and particularly Russia, subsidize the Central Asian republics? Received wisdom suggests that the Soviet core subsidized its periphery at great expense and that this fiscal drain represented an important force contributing to the Soviet Union’s downfall. To test this, Scarborough uses tax and revenue data to construct an estimate of the annual financial outflow from the Tajik SSR, addressing this question quantitatively. The data reveal a surprising and important result. In fact, the money transferred to the Tajik SSR approximately balanced the revenue from Tajik cotton, reframing our understanding of the relationship between core and periphery in the USSR at multiple registers. Both perceptive and creative, Scarborough delivers his argument with precision and transparency, explaining its questions, methods, data, and salience with such clarity that its results can be engaged by a wide audience. 

Prize Committee: Amanda Gregg (chair), Bruce Grant, and Mitchell Orenstein