2012 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: Tracy McDonald
Title: Face to the Village: The Riazan Countryside under Soviet Rule, 1921-1930 (University of Toronto Press)

Writing Soviet peasants back into history, Tracy McDonald presents a new and vivid picture of rural life under NEP and of the uneasy relationship between state and villages that collectivization abruptly and purposefully ended. Drawing upon police, rural soviet, and judicial reports as well as newspaper accounts to illuminate the challenges and obstacles faced by the fledgling Communist government in its effort to bring socialism to the Soviet countryside, Face to the Village is a model of “microhistory” that brings to life the difficulties of imposing Bolshevik control in the vast Soviet hinterland. Its account of how both peasants and the authorities struggled with banditry and “hooliganism” reveal just how complex and unstable rural society could be. The book’s concluding account of the hitherto understudied rebellion against collectivization in the village of Pitelino is masterful.

McDonald offers a compelling analysis of the factors that impelled the Kremlin to embark on the tragic path of collectivization as a means of asserting Communist power and authority. Her work expands our understanding of the workings of local institutions that both protected the interests of the peasantry and served as the intermediary between the central authorities and the village. The book is a fascinating and important account of how village institutions operated in the 1920s and interacted with the central authorities in the crucial years leading up to collectivization.

Honorable Mention: Wendy Goldman and Barbara Alpern Engel