The Big Show in Bololand: The American Relief Expedition to Soviet Russia in the Famine of 1921, written by Hoover Research Fellow Bertrand Patenaude, was named by the Hoover Institution the winner of its 2003 Uncommon Book Award.
The award was announced by Hoover Institution director John Raisian on February 23 during the Hoover Institution's Board of Overseers Meeting in Washington, D.C.
The Big Show in Bololand is based on materials in the Hoover Institution archives and was published in 2002 by Stanford University Press. It portrays a crucial American relief expedition to Soviet Russia in 1921 to mitigate the impact of the famine that killed millions.
Information about the book is available on the Hoover Institution web site at http://www.hoover.org/pubaffairs/newsletter/02091/bololand.html and at the Stanford University Press web site at http://www.sup.org/cgi-bin/search/book_desc.cgi?book_id=4467%204493.
In November 2003, the book was cowinner of the prestigious 2003 Marshall Shulman Book Prize from the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies (AAASS), in conjunction with the Harriman Institute at Columbia University.
Bertrand M. Patenaude is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, and an expert in Russian and modern European history. He is researching a study of the 1992 Moscow trial of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, based on thousands of primary documents collected by the Russian prosecutors and available on microfilm at the Hoover Institution.
Patenaude also is the author of, with T. Emmons, War, Revolution, and Peace in Russia: The Passages of Frank Golder, 1914–1927 (Hoover Institution Press, 1992); The Russian Revolution and Stalin and Stalinism (Garland Publishing, 1992); and Soviet Scholarship under Gorbachev (Stanford University Press, 1988).
Patenaude has produced documentary films on Russia and the Soviet Union, serving as associate producer of three films that were broadcast nationwide. The Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) aired his production titled "A Journey to Russia" in its regularly scheduled Frontline program. PBS also broadcast the Patenaude-produced documentary "Inside the USSR" in its Inside Story telecast. NBC news broadcast Patenaude's critically acclaimed hour-long documentary titled "Stalin's Ghost" to a national audience. Patenaude is writing Utopia Revealed, a documentary film series on the history of communism that has been developed for PBS with the support of the Hoover Institution.
The W. Glenn Campbell and Rita Ricardo-Campbell Uncommon Book Award is presented annually to an author affiliated with the Hoover Institution whose work is selected by a panel of Hoover fellows. The award is given for a published book or other significant work on a public policy issue that, in the panel's determination, meets the highest standards of scholarship at the Hoover Institution.
The $10,000 honorarium that accompanies the Uncommon Book Award is underwritten by a gift from Hoover Institution senior fellow Rita Ricardo-Campbell and the late director emeritus Glenn Campbell. The award recognizes the work of a Hoover fellow, or other person associated with the Institution, whose writing and research reaches the highest standards of scholarship on public policy issues.
