Historian Wins Prize for Best Book in Slavic Studies

University of Arkansas

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Distinguished Professor of History Trish Starks was awarded the Southern Conference on Slavic Studies prize for Best Book at their 60th anniversary meeting at UNC-Chapel Hill. The committee recognized Starks' book, Cigarettes and Soviets: Smoking in the USSR, as the best book in Slavic studies across all humanities and social science disciplines from 2023.

The prize committee — professors Edith Clowes, University of Virginia; Margaret Peacock, University of North Carolina; and Mayhill Fowler, Stetson University — noted they were "quite enthralled by this book" and that Starks "walks that fine line: between arguing for the specificity of smokes and smoking in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, and yet through that specific story of smoking, she is able to tell a more global story about public health."

Starks' book was previously recognized as a finalist for the prestigious Pushkin Prize for the best written book in Slavic studies. In her work, she argues that the Soviet Union was the first country to create a national anti-smoking campaign, entertain a smoking ban and found smoking cessation clinics. This intensity of action was because they were also the first to have a mass smoking problem, losing an estimated 50 million citizens to the habit over the course of the 20th century.