2025 Recipient

Polly Zavadivker

A Nation of Refugees: Russia’s Jews in World War I

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

Winner: Polly Zavadivker, A Nation of Refugees: Russia’s Jews in World War I (Oxford University Press, 2024)  

Polly Zavadivker’s A Nation of Refugees is a sweeping study of Russian state violence against Jewish civilians during the First World War. Zavadivker examines the devastating policies of the Russian army, whose forced deportations and pogroms displaced up to one million Jews. She juxtaposes these acts of state-sanctioned brutality with testimonies and letters that reveal the anguish, resilience, and endurance of the Jewish victims themselves. Drawing on a range of sources—archival documents, the Russian and Yiddish press, and personal accounts—A Nation of Refugees demonstrates how this refugee crisis reshaped Jewish communal institutions, catalyzed new humanitarian networks, and altered the trajectory of twentieth-century Jewish history. Zavadivker’s work is both a humane portrait of suffering and a scholarly analysis of the political and military forces that produced it. It stands as a seminal contribution to Russian and East European history, Jewish studies, and the history of humanitarianism. 

Winner: Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky

Honorable Mention: Masha Kirasirova

Prize Committee: Krista Goff (chair), David Hoffmann, and Kristin Roth-Ey