2007 Graduate Student Essay Contest Prize
The Graduate Student Essay Contest Prize is awarded for an outstanding essay by a graduate student in Slavic studies.
Colleen M. Moore
The 2008 Graduate Student Essay Contest Prize was awarded to Colleen M. Moore for the essay “The Popular Response to War and Mobilization in Russia in 1914,” which also received the First Prize in the Graduate Paper Daniel Armstrong Memorial Essay Contest at Indiana University.
The prize-winning paper for this year is a re-examination of Russian popular attitudes toward Russia’s decision to go to war in July and August 1914. This engagingly written essay analyzes a substantial body of primary sources, among them national and provincial Russian newspapers, soldiers’ letters and memoirs, and compositions written by schoolchildren. Colleen Moore makes use of those materials to argue that the lower classes had a clear sense of the reasons their government entered the war and urged it on with overtly nationalist feelings. They were less enthusiastic about their own enlistment, but unlike other scholars she concludes that their looting of liquor stores was not a form of anti-war protest. Moore’s paper offers a bold and imaginative challenge to the historiography of World War I in Russia.
