2019 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: Sarah Cameron
Title: The Hungry Steppe: Famine, Violence and the Making of Soviet Kazakhstan (Cornell University Press)

Sarah Cameron analyzes how famine, natural and man-made, remade Kazakhstan and reveals the inner workings of Stalinist transformation. Cameron confronts directly the regime’s culpability in over a million deaths—Kazakhs suffered, proportionately, more than any other Soviet nation—but also works to understand how, even if in a perverse sense, this disaster became productive. The causes and effects of famine created new networks, opened doors to mobility within and outside of the partystate apparatus, and offered new ways to see a Kazakh nation and state. Cameron masterfully blends top-down and bottom-up approaches through meticulous archival work. She brings the Kazakh famine and transformation into a global perspective on modernization, skillfully incorporating imperial, environmental, and ecological approaches. Her lucid prose draws readers into victims’ suffering as they are forces to make horrible choices to survive—for another day, another week—or die. The Hungry Steppe is also opening important, poignant, discussions among historians, regional politicians and families of those who suffered through this famine, which has remained almost hidden from history, and is already being translated into both Russian and Kazakh.

Honorable Mention: Natalia Nowakowska