Togzhan Kassenova

The Marshall D. Shulman Book Prize, established in 1987 and sponsored by the Harriman Institute at Columbia University, is awarded annually for an outstanding monograph dealing with the international relations, foreign policy, or foreign-policy decision-making of any of the states of the former Soviet Union or Eastern Europe published in the previous calendar year. The prize is dedicated to the encouragement of high-quality studies of the international behavior of the countries of the former Communist Bloc.

Co-Winner: Togzhan Kassenova
Title: Atomic Steppe: How Kazakhstan Gave Up the Bomb (Stanford University Press)

With the dramatic collapse of the Soviet Union, a newly independent Kazakhstan found itself with more than a thousand nuclear weapons, which would have made it the world’s fourth largest nuclear power. How did this come about and why did Kazakhstan give up these weapons in the 1990s? Answering this question with an authoritative voice and profound sensitivity, Togzhan Kassenova takes us on an incredible journey across forty years. Atomic Steppe goes back to Soviet-era nuclear tests and young Kazakhs’ first encounters with limbless animals, takes us around atomic lakes and across contaminated villages, and shows us inside highly secretive labs and post-communist negotiation rooms, from Semipalatinsk to Nevada. Skillfully combining archival sources with memoirs and interviews, the book is exemplary in making a complex picture accessible and vivid. Sensitive to broader geopolitical stakes, it nevertheless insists on the need to place Kazakhs and their relationship to nuclear power at the center. Moving beyond strict policy approaches, it spotlights a diverse range of actors, from poet-protesters and nuclear engineers to the diplomats scrambling in the aftermath of the Soviet collapse. Illustrated with powerful images and intimate testimonies, Atomic Steppe concludes with a moving epilogue that brings to the foreground people—and their day-to-day lives—in how we tell the timely history of nuclear power and denuclearization.

Co-Winner: Alessandro Iandolo