2024 Levin Article Prize Winner Announced

Congratulations, Erin Hutchinson!

We are delighted to announce that Professor Erin Hutchinson of the University of Colorado Boulder is the recipient of the 2024 Levin Article Prize!

Dr. Hutchinson's “Gathering the Nation in the Village: Intellectuals and the Cultural Politics of Nationality in the Late Soviet Period," which appeared in the January 2023 issue of The Russian Review, was selected for its convincing presentation of a new and more nuanced approach to “nationalities policy”—which the author reformulates as “nationalities process”—in the Brezhnev era. Drawing on original archival research, Hutchinson introduces three Soviet intellectuals who collected and preserved pre-Soviet local cultural artifacts in order to maintain national identities against state-imposed narratives in the 1960s. The committee was particularly impressed by the author’s treatment of three Soviet Republics, giving Gagauz and Ukrainian histories an equal stance to Russian ones and indicating how Russian hegemony drove state response to these different local projects. Geographically diverse and spanning a wide timeline, while never losing effectiveness or thoroughness, Hutchinson’s article provides greater insight into state-individual relations and complicates the idea of the homo sovieticus.

Dr. Erin Hutchinson is an Assistant Professor at the Department of History, University of Colorado Boulder. Dr. Hutchinson studies the cultural and political history of the Soviet Union, with a particular focus on the topics of nationality and empire. She graduated with a B.A. in History and Global Studies from Arizona State University, an M.A. in Regional Studies: Russia, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia from Harvard University, and a Ph.D. in History from Harvard University. Her book project, Writing the Nation after Stalin: How Soviet Cultural Politics Produced Nationalism, explores how intellectuals of rural origins sought to transform cultural understandings of the nation in the Soviet Union after the death of Stalin.

Named in honor of Eve Levin, who served as the journal's editor from 1996 to 2020, the Levin Article Prize is awarded to the article published in The Russian Review in the previous calendar year judged to be the best by an independent committee of advanced graduate students in Russian and Eurasian studies drawn from institutions across the United States.

The journal is grateful to Andy Kapinos, Filipp Kruchenov, Kathleen L. Mitchell-Fox, Olivia Naum, Marianna Petiaskina, and Ioana Zamfir for serving on the prize committee, and especially to Fiona Bell for serving as chair.

If you are a scholar interested in being considered for the prize in the future, send us your manuscripts—all articles published in the journal in the previous calendar year will be considered for the award!