November 22, 2004
Director of Media Relations
413/542-8417

AMHERST, Mass.-William C. Taubman, the Bertrand Snell Professor of Political Science at Amherst College, will receive the Wayne S. Vucinich Book Prize for the most important contribution to Russian, Eurasian and East European studies in any discipline of the humanities or social sciences, for Khrushchev: The Man and His Era (2003), the first comprehensive biography of the Soviet Communist leader, and the first of any Soviet leader to reflect the full range of sources that have become available since the U.S.S.R. collapsed. The American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, the leading private, nonprofit organization dedicated to the advancement of knowledge about Russia, Central Eurasia, and Eastern and Central Europe, will present the award to Taubman at its 36th national convention in Boston, Mass., on Thursday, Dec. 6.

Khrushchev: The Man and His Era, which earlier received the Pulitzer Prize for biography, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Robert H. Ferrell Book Prize of the Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations, tells the story of Khrushchev's personal triumphs and tragedy and those of his country. Drawing on newly opened archives in Russia and Ukraine, Taubman traveled to places where Khrushchev lived and worked, and interviewed Khrushchev family members, friends and colleagues, to write a biography that combines historical narrative and political and psychological analysis.

Taubman, a member of the Amherst faculty since 1967, was educated at Harvard and Columbia Universities. An associate of the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard, chair of the Advisory Committee of the Cold War International History Project at the Wilson Center in Washington, D.C. and a former International Affairs Fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations with the Department of State, Taubman is the author of many books. He wrote Moscow Spring (1989) with his wife, Jane Taubman, a professor of Russian at Amherst College, Stalin's American Policy (1982), Governing Soviet Cities (1973) and The View from Lenin Hills (1967). He has contributed to The New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times, among many other newspapers, magazines and journals.

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