BASEES announces winners of Women's Forum Prizes

BASEES Women's Forum Book Prize for 2019

Jury: Professor Simon Dixon and Dr Muireann Maguire

Winner: Ruth Coates, Deification in Russian Religious Thought: Between the Revolutions, 1905-1917 (Oxford University Press, 2019) 

While our understanding of the Russian religious renaissance has been vastly amplified over the last generation, unfamiliar vocabulary and still more unfamiliar modes of expression have conspired to keep even the most fundamental Orthodox ideas beyond the reach of all but a dedicated band of specialists. By exploring a variety of eschatological solutions to one of the most important questions that Christians face – how to transform death into everlasting life – Deification in Russian Religious Thought addresses a broader readership.  As Ruth Coates shows with exemplary clarity and grace, apocalyptic challenges were especially acute in the revolutionary era between 1905 and 1917. Beginning with Merezhkovsky’s Tsar and Revolution (1907), 'the text that engages most overtly with Russia’s contemporary political realities', she goes on to consider works by Berdiaev and Sergei Bulgakov before discussing Florensky’s Pillar and Ground of the Truth (1914), 'the most recognizably Orthodox treatment' of her subject. Specialists will admire the precision and poise of the analysis. But this is a book whose importance extends to all those with an interest in modernism, Marxism and millenarianism.  As a distinguished and discriminating study of the place of religious ideas in the culture of Russia’s Silver Age, it deserves the widest possible reception.

Honourable Mention: Polly Jones, Revolution Rekindled. The Writers and Readers of Late Soviet Biography (Oxford University Press, 2019)  

This authoritative book compels attention for three substantial achievements. It is a case study of an important phenomenon in the Soviet publishing industry (the ‘Fiery Revolutionaries’ series of biographies introduced in 1968 to ‘rekindle’ post-Thaw readers’ socialist enthusiasm); a study of late Soviet reading habits; and an analysis of how Soviet publishing actually functioned. The tightly organized chapters are informed by numerous interviews with former industry insiders as well as impressively thorough archival research, making extensive use of committee minutes and other official documents to illuminate late-Soviet decision-making mechanisms. Polly Jones’ book upsets various ideological assumptions and reveals unexpected paradoxes: for example, the fact that this relatively experimental, at times daringly liberal book series was one of the first publishing initiatives to founder during the market transformation of the 1990s.

BASEES Women's Forum Article/Chapter Prize for 2019

Jury: Professor Mary Buckley and Professor Katharine Hodgson

Winner: Jelena Golubović. 2019. “‘One Day I Will Tell This to My Daughter’: Serb Women, Silence, and the Politics of Victimhood in Sarajevo.” Anthropological Quarterly 92 (4): 1173-1199.

This excellent analysis is based on fieldwork in Sarajevo and reflects upon the results of interviews with Serb women who stayed in the city during the siege of 1992-1995.  It sets out to explore the literature and realities of the moral economy of victimhood which can encourage recognition of certain victims but in so doing fails to recognise others.  Golubovic convincingly challenges the dichotomy between victims and perpetrators and ways of interpreting the world in terms of ‘either/or’ It is an outstanding contribution to the literature for addressing layers of complexity in a lucid and persuasive way. The evidence gathered in fieldwork is well integrated into her argument and effectively demonstrates the tangled nature of the situation that she explores.  The ethical dimension also merits recognition.

Honourable Mention: Eglė Rindzevičiūtė, “Systems Analysis as Infrastructural Knowledge: Scientific Expertise and Dissensus under State Socialism,” History of Political Economy, 51 (S1) (2019), 204-227. 

This fascinating discussion of hugely wide scope highlights how important systems scientists in the USSR derived an authority and legitimacy from material successes in designing infrastructures.  Information about them was often unexplored due to secrecy surrounding their work.  Systems scholars, however, became vital mediators between computer technology and decision-making in infrastructural design.  Scientists could resist projects and play a role in internal scientific dissent.  Rindzevičiūtė’s examination of their role in Soviet aid programmes in Cuba and Vietnam leads the author to contend that systems analysts could, in fact, practise a politics of dissensus by disagreeing with the utility of large-scale projects and by favouring more pragmatic ‘modelable’ policies to fit local conditions.