European-Union

this book has really helped me in my research about the political situtation in russia. it will benefit any other student who has to do a research report on this topic.

Garb does an excellent job of placing art produced by female artists within the context of the institutional history of the Union des Femmes Peintres et Sculpteurs. She explains how this organization relates to the work women artists produced and that the Union provided a much needed exhibition venue for women artists. Especially interesting is Garb's work on female nudes that women exhibited in the Salon des Femmes and the types of nudes that women artists produced for this specific context.

Excellent collection of essays which deal with the chaos and order dealing with turbulence of the early five year plan. For all scholars of the period these essays are must. The approach is that of working a history from below. Missing from the essays however is a chronology or keyword reference for less knowledgable readers. Most interesting is Lewin's essay on class which avoids much of the vulgar Marxist and narrow Weberian definitions of class. Highlighting the political and cultural definitions of class and the process in which they are transformed from the proletariat into Soviet workers. Otherwise, a class in power into a statistical catagory. And the transformations wrought from the new peasant "immigrants" set against the established worker.

This book reveals the emergance of Sots Art (soviet pop), a popular underground movement during Perestoyka. Through their art these artists show the hypocracies and the false sense of reality brought on during the soviet era inRussia. Many of these works are currently on dispaly at the Weisman Art Gallery in Minneapolis, MN. This book should bre a definate purchase for pop art fanatics.

Chris LaTondresse

This book really shook my foundations concerning the Eruropean Community and it's way of setting a person inside the E.C.'s borders. The author truly knows his case in this matter and I'm extremely happy and satisfyed that he has been willing to share his knowledge, studies and visions with us ordinary people. I simply want to thank the author for this book.

Ben Rosamond's book describes the current (and past) political science approaches regarding the EU. A strange animal indeed: not a federality or a state, but takes some of the members' soveirgnity; sometimes its an international organisation, sometimes it isn't.

It is an important book to read BEFORE any other about the EU, so you'll understand to which "side" in the approaches debate other writers belongs.

Ely's elegant prose drew this reader, who knows little of Russia, into a new landscape and illuminated the ways it was seen (and not seen) by its nineteenth century inhabitants. Although I was familiar with references to the Russian landscape in literature, I knew nothing of the Russian landscape painters of the nineteenth century. Ely introduces this fascinating subject and guides one through the work of such painters as Shishkin and Vasil'ev (with fine illustrations) to an appreciation of the way they saw and painted their native land. He then links this to a developing sense of national identity in the Russia of this period.
I was particularly interested in what this suggests about the role of a nation's landscape in its national myth, in the role it plays as a source of common pride in one's country and the ways we choose to portray specific features of our landscape to ourselves.
A good read from start to finish.

This book is like a bible to anyone interested in this particular area. Olga Soffer knows the material well. The book is easy to work through and provides numerous raw data tables making it simple to get straight to the facts.

The book has many drawings and black & white photos throughout. Each of the 29 sites studied has a comprehensive report that details the history of the sites excavation; stratigraphy; artifacts recovered; site plan (if available); and details of the site today.

Most people outside Russia perceive it as a Slavic, Christian nation. That is a wrong way of looking at it. Russia is a symbiosis of Slavic/Christian and Turkic/Muslim elements. David L. Ransel's fascinating book reflects this dual nature of Russia and gives an insight into its complex inner soul. A wealth of details and astute observations make this book a pleasure to read.

Most recent books about Russia concentrate on its urban aspects or on its general political or economic aspects. Unlike them, Village Mothers presents a picture of its rural life. Russia has been a largely rural, agricultural country for many centuries. Its industrialization started only a few decade ago. That's why it is important to understand the village life in Russia. David Ransel's book helps to do just that.

CITATION FOR WAYNE S. VUCINICH BOOK PRIZE for an outstanding monograph in Russian, Eurasian, or East European studies in any discipline of the humanities co-funded by AAASS and the Center for Russian and East European Studies at Stanford University awarded by the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies (AAASS)

This study offers a history of the refugee population from the western borderlands that swamped the administration and inhabitants of central Russia during the Great War. Adducing an impressive array of archival funds and contemporary accounts about and by the refugees themselves, Gatrell traces the story of the people displaced, by German and Russian forces alike, from the ethnically and religiously diverse territories of western Russia. He also considers the perspective of those charged with accommodating them: overburdened bureaucrats, charitable societies, and everyday townspeople and peasants in whose midst the refugees settled. Gatrell draws on theoretical perspectives, ranging from the work of Michel Foucault to recent studies of refugees in the late twentieth century, to examine the various ways in which refugeedom evolved as a set of discourses incorporating gender and nationhood, among other categories. The resulting study lends yet more depth and nuance to our understanding of the autocracy's unraveling, as well as to our understanding of the successor states that emerged from its wreckage. Equally, Gatrell makes a signal contribution to a growing literature on a phenomenon that has became tragically pervasive in the twentieth century, from Russia to India to Rwanda to the Balkans. This highly original account combines exemplary empirical research with the judicious application of diverse methods to explore the far-reaching ramifications of "a whole empire walking."

HONOURABLE MENTION John E. Malmstad, Professor of Slavic Languages, Harvard University and Nikolay Bogomolov, Professor of Russian Literature, University of Moscow for: Mikhail Kuzmin: A Life in Art published by Harvard University Press

This collaborative study is a result of a sustained interest in one of the seminal figures of Russian Modernism, Mikhail Kuzmin, that spans the last twenty-five year period in Russian Studies. The slow progress of research and publications, first of John Malmstad (1977), followed by subsequent collaboration with Nikolai Bogomolov (1996, 1999), reflects the widening possibilities in the research of pre-revolutionary modernism that has become possible since perestroika and the gradual availability of archival materials.

The collaboration of two major scholars of Russian modernism has finally produced an authoritative biography of Mikhail Kuzmin, one of the most versatile artists of the so-called Silver Age, whose homosexuality (for long unmentionable in either Russian or western scholarship) made the story of his life particularly challenging. It also made the story dependent on the writer's personal diaries, unavailable until the eighties. Indeed, the painstakingly gathered new information enables the authors of this magisterial study to fill in many lacunae in the chronology of Kuzmin's life and work, and also to document more precisely his complex relationships to prominent contemporary writers and artists of his time. The book is an invaluable contribution to the greater context of pre-revolutionary modernism and avant-garde in Russsian culture, whose history still remains to be written. And since Kuzmin died in 1936, the biography spans the years following the revolution and the Stalinist era, shedding new light on cultural politics of this turbulent period.

(The award was presented on November 11, 2000 at the AAASS 32nd National Convention in Denver, Colorado).