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

Sarah Cameron’s book, The Hungry Steppe: Famine, Violence, and the Making of Soviet Kazakhstan, is a pioneering and exceptionally well-written study of the disastrous forced collectivization of the nomadic peoples of Soviet Kazakhstan 1930-1933. This operation resulted in the destruction of age-old nomadic practices that worked well in the arid ecosystem of the steppe; it modernized and industrialized agriculture in a way that badly overtaxed the environment. Cameron asks how the ensuing famine, which killed about 25% of the ethnic Kazakh population, could stay hidden for so long, in contrast, for example, to the Ukrainian Holodomor. Using both Kazakh and Russian sources, she argues that the lack of foreign witnesses and the mere disappearance of nomads meant that the deaths 1.5 million people remained shrouded in silence. In addition, she succeeds in showing the tragic truth that the Soviet state drove a wedge into Kazakh society, turning some Kazakhs against their nomadic fellows. While she addresses the “special victim” aspects of the horrific Ukrainian story, Cameron’s argument shows an even more disastrous and horrifying centrally planned policy of rooting out old forms of agriculture and animal husbandry that were perceived to be in conflict with a grotesquely simplistic reading of Marxist-Leninist historical determinism.

Honorable Mention: Elizabeth McGuire