Antoni Porayski-Pomsta awarded the BASEES Prize for Best Scholarly Article by a Postgraduate Student

Antoni Porayski-Pomsta, “Through Violence to Eternal Kingdom: Revolutionary Avengers, Suburban Violence, and the Crisis of Imperial Governance in Post-1905 Russian Poland”, Journal of Social History, Volume 58(3) (2025), 470–492, has been selected as the winner of this year’s BASEES Postgraduate Prize:

Antoni Porayski-Pomsta delivered a fascinating, meticulously researched and informative article spotlighting the rarely studied issue of violence in the post-1905 Russian Poland. Porayski-Pomsta’s article has all the hallmarks of great scholarship. The author has an in-depth grasp of a very rich scholarship. He navigates with ease between new studies on the early 20th-century Russian Empire and more theoretical studies of violence, both old and new. Importantly, the inclusion of this vast scholarship does not drown out Porayski-Pomsta’s own voice. Rather, it helps the author to shed new light on the primary sources he uses. It helps him illuminate the conditions of life in the industrial suburbs of the Empire while at the same time interpreting the voices of the Avengers, the violent heroes of this article, in a nuanced way.

The judges were impressed by the maturity of the analysis and the sheer volume of work that informed it, and were in agreement that this is a prize-winning text.