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 co-winner of the 2003 Marshall Shulman Book Prize.
The award was made by the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies (AAASS), in conjunction with the Harriman Institute at Columbia University, on November 22 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. At that time, AAASS presented its annual awards for Distinguished Contributions to Slavic Studies and five book prizes.
The AAASS is the leading private, nonprofit organization dedicated to the advancement of knowledge about Russia, Central Eurasia, and Eastern and Central Europe.
The Big Show in Bololand is based on materials in the Hoover Institution archives and was published by Stanford University Press. It portrays an American relief expedition to Soviet Russia in 1921 to mitigate the impact of the famine that killed millions. The award committee praised Patenaude's work for being "an outstanding example of lively and engaging prose, impressive historical research, and persuasive analysis of the diplomatic underpinnings and consequences of the rescue mission."
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.
Also winning the Marshall Shulman Book Prize was Ted Hopf, associate professor of political science at the Ohio State University for his monograph on the international behavior of the countries of the former Communist bloc, Social Construction of International Politics: Identities & Foreign Policies, Moscow, 1955 & 1999, published by Cornell University Press.
Founded in 1948, the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, a nonprofit, nonpolitical, scholarly society, brings together over 3,000 scholars interested in the culture, history, and languages of the region's peoples, and economic and political systems, and gives coherence to a field that covers a multitude of academic disciplines and diverse interests.
