2010 Recipient

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

Winner: Rebecca Manley
Title: To the Tashkent Station: Evacuation and Survival in the Soviet Union at War (Cornell University Press)

Movingly written and exhaustively researched, Rebecca Manley’s To the Tashkent Station portrays a legendary but poorly understood aspect of the Soviet war experience: the massive evacuation of more than sixteen million Soviet citizens from the combat zones deep into the Soviet interior, and their eventual return. Situating the story in the Stalinist context of mass mobilization and police controls, Manley deftly weaves a narrative that leads the reader from the offices of institutional policy makers to the inner worlds of Soviet men and women from all walks of life who bore the devastating impact of mobilization, evacuation, and return. A stimulating analysis of the workings of the Soviet state during the Second World War, as well as its cultural and moral order, Manley’s book moves from political to social to experiential themes with ease, and sustains its analysis with unfailing rigor. The result is a compelling, deeply informative, and synthetic study—a model historical work.