2018 Recipient

The Reginald Zelnik Book Prize in History, established in 2009 and sponsored by the Institute of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, is awarded annually for an outstanding monograph published on Russia, Eastern Europe, or Eurasia in the field of history in the previous calendar year.

Winner: Lynne Viola
Title: Stalinist Perpetrators on Trial: Scenes from the Great Terror in Soviet Ukraine (Oxford University Press)

Stalinist Perpetrators on Trial: Scenes from the Great Terror in Soviet Ukraine by Lynne Viola is an outstanding piece of historical scholarship. The book focuses on the secret trials of NKVD officers who carried out the purges in Ukraine in the late 1930s. What makes this such a surreal story is that the NKVD officers on trial were the very same officials who extracted false confessions from their victims and now found the very same tactics used against them. All of the men on trial were charged with violating socialist legality, and Viola does a masterful job of explaining why this charge was used against these men at this point in time and how they tried to defend themselves. Using the NKVD files from these trials, she is able to reconstruct in detail what went on in the NKVD prisons as the perpetrators themselves became the targets of state violence. Her narrative is all that more compelling because she allows the NKVD officers to speak for themselves, revealing the horror of what went on during those interrogations and the venality of the men and women involved.

Demonstrating her prodigious skills as an historian, she sifts through the often contradictory evidence to provide an astonishingly detailed picture of the inner workings of the secret police. Viola’s thoughtful analysis of the purge of NKVD provides important insights not only into the history of the Great Terror and the Soviet Union, but also into the global history of state violence.

Honorable Mention: Alexis Peri