2025

The W. Bruce Lincoln Book Prize, established in 2004 and sponsored by Mary Lincoln in memory of W. Bruce 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 calendar year.  

Honorable Mention: Masha Kirasirova, The Eastern International: Arabs, Central Asians, and Jews in the Soviet Union’s Anticolonial Empire (Oxford University Press, 2024) 

Masha Kirasirova’s The Eastern International is an imaginative, ambitious exploration of “the East” (Vostok) as a central concept of Soviet geopolitics across the entire lifespan of the USSR. Kirasirova draws upon wide-ranging research in both Arabic- and Russian-language sources to provide a nuanced understanding of the varied intellectual, political, institutional, and personal forces that drove the development of the formation she calls “the Eastern International” and lent to it an enduring power.  One of the most compelling features of her work is its close attention to powerful role of “intermediaries”—individuals who brokered relationships between a domestic “Soviet East” and “the East” of the extra-Soviet world in a range of fields—and of their transnational networks. The Eastern International unravels how Soviet formations might “appear explicitly anticolonial and yet strangely colonial at the same time.” The result is a refreshing study that hauls the history and politics of the Soviet Union’s “anticolonial empire” out of the zone of exception and straight into the global history of the twentieth century. 

Winner: Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky

Winner: Polly Zavadivker

Prize Committee: Krista Goff (chair), David Hoffmann, and Kristin Roth-Ey