2022 PUSHKIN HOUSE BOOK PRIZE: SHORTLIST SUMMARIES
On the Edge: Life along the Russia-China Border by Frank Billé and Caroline Humphrey. Harvard University Press.
A pioneering examination of history, current affairs, and daily life along the Russia–China border, one of the world’s least understood and most politically charged frontiers. On the Russian side, in territory seized from China in the nineteenth century, defence is prioritised over the economy, leaving dilapidated villages slumbering amid the forests. For its part, the Chinese side is heavily settled and increasingly prosperous and dynamic. Moscow worries about the imbalance, and both governments discourage citizens from interacting. But cross-border connection is a fact of life.
Franck Billé is Program Director at the Tang Center for Silk Road Studies, University of California, Berkeley. Caroline Humphrey is Fellow of King’s College, University of Cambridge, and founder of the university’s Mongolia and Inner Asia Studies Unit.
Navalny: Putin's Nemesis, Russia's Future? by Jan Matti Dollbaum, Morvan Lallouet and Ben Noble. Hurst Publishers and Oxford University Press.
Alexei Navalny – the anti-corruption activist and leading figure of the Russian opposition – was poisoned in August 2020. Following recovery in Germany, he returned to Russia in January 2021 in the full glare of the world’s media. But who exactly is Navalny? To some, he is a democratic hero. To others, he is a traitor. To others still, he is a dangerous nationalist. Media portrayals of Navalny are often black and white – of Navalny versus Vladimir Putin, democrat versus dictator, good versus evil. The book challenges these simple framings, exploring the many nuances and shades of grey.
Jan Matti Dollbaum is a Postdoctoral researcher at Bremen University.
Morvan Lallouet is a PhD candidate at the University of Kent.
Ben Noble is Associate Professor of Russian Politics at University College London.
Weak Strongman: The Limits of Power in Putin's Russia by Timothy Frye. Princeton University Press.
Media and public discussion tends to understand Russian politics as a direct reflection of Vladimir Putin’s seeming omnipotence or Russia’s unique history and culture. Yet Russia is remarkably similar to other autocracies – and recognising this illuminates the inherent limits to Putin’s power. Weak Strongman challenges the conventional wisdom about Putin’s Russia, highlighting the difficult trade-offs that confront the Kremlin on issues ranging from election fraud and repression to propaganda and foreign policy. Timothy Frye reveals how much we overlook about today’s Russia when we focus solely on Putin or Russian exceptionalism.
Timothy Frye is the Marshall D. Shulman Professor of Post-Soviet Foreign Policy at Columbia University and a research director at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow.
Klimat: Russian in the Age of Climate Change by Thane Gustafson. Harvard University Press.
Russia will be one of the countries most affected by climate change. No major power is more economically dependent on the export of hydrocarbons; at the same time, two-thirds of Russia’s territory lies in the Arctic north, where melting permafrost is already imposing growing damage. Climate change also brings drought and floods to Russia’s south, threatening the country’s agricultural exports. Thane Gustafson predicts that, over the next thirty years, climate change will leave a dramatic imprint on Russia. The eventual post-Putin generation of Russian leaders will face enormous handicaps, as their country finds itself weaker than at any time in the preceding century.
Thane Gustafson is Professor of Government at Georgetown University.
Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of Post-Cold War Stalemate by Mary Sarotte. Yale University Press.
Based on secret records of White House-Kremlin contacts, Not One Inch shows how, in the 1990s, the United States overcame Russian resistance to expand NATO, ultimately bringing the alliance to a billion people. But it also reveals how Washington’s hardball tactics, combined with Moscow’s self-inflicted wounds, undermined a potentially lasting partnership during the decade culminating in Vladimir Putin’s rise to power. On the 30th anniversary of Soviet collapse, Sarotte shows how NATO expansion transformed the era between the Cold War and COVID-19.
Mary Sarotte is the Kravis Professor of Historical Studies at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.
In Memory of Memory by Maria Stepanova. Translated by Sasha Dugdale. Fitzcarraldo Editions.
With the death of her aunt, Maria Stepanova is left to sift through an apartment full of faded photographs, old postcards, letters, diaries and heaps of souvenirs: a withered repository of a century of life in Russia. Carefully reassembled with calm, steady hands, these shards tell the story of how a seemingly ordinary Jewish family somehow managed to survive the myriad persecutions and repressions of the last century. Dipping into various forms – essay, fiction, memoir, travelogue and historical documents – Stepanova assembles a vast panorama of ideas and personalities and offers an entirely new and bold exploration of cultural and personal memory.
Maria Stepanova is a poet, essayist, journalist and author and founder and editor-in-chief of the online independent crowd-sourced journal Colta.ru.
Stalin's Architect: Power and Survival in Moscow by Deyan Sudjic. MIT Press.
The story of Boris Iofan – designer of the iconic but unbuilt Palace of the Soviets – whose buildings came to define the language of Soviet architecture. What would an architect do for the chance to build the tallest building in the world? What would he sacrifice to stay alive in the midst of Stalin's murderous purges? Generously illustrated, with a wide range of previously unpublished material, this book is an exploration of architecture as an instrument of statecraft. It is an insight into the key moments of 20th-century politics and culture from a unique perspective.
Deyan Sudjic is former Director of the Design Museum in London and architecture critic for The Observer.
The Empress and the English Doctor: How Catherine the Great Defied a Deadly Virus by Lucy Ward. Bloomsbury.
A killer disease … an all-powerful Empress … an extraordinary encounter … the astonishing true story. No disease sparked as much dread in the eighteenth century as smallpox. But a method offered hope in preventing serious infection: inoculation, the practice of inserting smallpox pustules into an open wound. Only one problem remained: convincing people to take the treatment. A pamphleteering war raged in Europe about the risks and benefits of inoculation and public resistance ran high. Catherine the Great broke the deadlock by requesting that a young Essex doctor, Thomas Dimsdale, inoculate her.
Lucy Ward is a writer and former journalist for The Guardian and Independent.
Playing with Fire: The Story of Maria Yudina, Pianist in Stalin's Russia by Elizabeth Wilson. Yale University Press.
Maria Yudina, an incredibly popular pianist, lived on the fringes of Soviet society and had close friendships with such towering figures as Boris Pasternak, Pavel Florensky, and Mikhail Bakhtin. Legend has it that she was Stalin’s favorite pianist. She was at the height of her fame during WWII. By the last years of her life, she had been dismissed for ideological reasons from the three institutions where she taught. And yet according to Shostakovich, Yudina remained “a special case […] the ocean was only knee-deep for her.” Elizabeth Wilson sets Yudina’s extraordinary life within the context of her times, where her musical career is measured against the intense intellectual and religious ferment of the post-revolutionary period and the ensuing years of Soviet repression.
Elizabeth Wilson is a performer, teacher, and writer. She studied cello at the Moscow Conservatoire with Mstislav Rostropovich.
Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union by Vladislav Zubok. Yale University Press.
In 1945 the Soviet Union controlled half of Europe and was a founding member of the United Nations. By 1991, it had an army four-million strong with five-thousand nuclear-tipped missiles and was the second biggest producer of oil in the world. But soon afterward the union sank into an economic crisis and was torn apart by nationalist separatism. Vladislav Zubok offers a major reinterpretation of the final years of the USSR, refuting the notion that the breakup of the Soviet order was inevitable. He argues Gorbachev’s misguided reforms, intended to modernise and democratise the Soviet Union, deprived the government of resources and empowered separatism. Collapse sheds new light on Russian democratic populism, the Baltic struggle for independence, the crisis of Soviet finances – and the fragility of authoritarian state power.
Vladislav Zubok is professor of international history at the London School of Economics and Political Science.