2025 Recipient

Anne O’Donnell

Power and Possession in the Russian Revolution

The Ed A Hewett Book Prize, established in 1994 and sponsored by the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies at the University of Michigan, is awarded annually for an outstanding monograph on the political economy of Russia, Eurasia and/or Eastern Europe, published in the previous calendar year. 

Winner: Anne O’Donnell, Power and Possession in the Russian Revolution (Princeton University Press, 2024) 

Anne O’Donnell’s Power and Possession is a path-breaking study of the complex ways in which urban property—apartments and the myriad movable objects within them—changed hands during the Russian Revolution. As the texture of human lives and destinies are made up of ownership and connections to such quotidian things, O’Donnell’s book sheds new light on the radical transformation brought about by the Revolution. Drawing on a wide array of fascinating and varied archival sources, the book shows what dispossession and reassignment of property actually looked like: massive bureaucratic maneuvering, supposedly scientific but ultimately arbitrary methods of assessing value, and the chaos involved in putting an ideal—the abolition of private property—into practice. In vivid and compelling prose, the book connects granular evidence with broader claims about the nature of state power and revolutionary change, thereby illuminating how the state’s practices made the “Revolution” meaningful, rather than the other way around. 

Honorable Mention: Nataliya Kibita

Prize Committee: Susanne Wengle (chair), Fritz Bartel, and Erik Herron