Historian Wins Prize for Best Book in Slavic Studies

Russian Cigarette Advertisement.

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. 

This story also appeared in the University of Arkansas News publication.

​