By: Patti McDonald
The Department of History at Michigan State University congratulates Professor Emeritus Dr. Lewis Siegelbaum on receiving the 2024 Distinguished Contributions Award from the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES).
Founded in 1970, the ASEEES Award acknowledges esteemed individuals who have significantly contributed to the field of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies through exceptional scholarship, mentorship, leadership, and/or service.
“I am overwhelmed with gratitude to all these people within the ASEEES organization, some of whom I have not seen or had contact with for quite some time and some of whom, on the other hand, are close friends and colleagues,” Siegelbaum said.
The ASEEES press release about the 2024 Distinguished Contributions Award recognizes Siegelbaum as “a social historian of extraordinary breadth, a supportive mentor to many cohorts of graduate students and early career scholars, a steadfastly generous colleague, and a firm believer in bringing history and historical analysis to a broader audience. Lewis Siegelbaum embodies the qualities celebrated by the ASEEES Distinguished Contributions Award. His sweeping set of publications, from monographs to memoirs and from conference volumes to collections of historical documents, reflects theoretical sophistication, lively empirical detail, and engagingly crafted prose. A highly productive scholar often operating at the cutting edge of developments in the field, Dr. Siegelbaum has carried out path-breaking work on wide-ranging topics from Stakhanovism to Soviet state responses to disability to the Soviet car industry and the complex relationship between communism and consumerism. His scholarship is frequently collaborative; his regular co-authorship and promotion of younger scholars’ work in edited volumes has enriched the scholarly landscape of Soviet history.”
Siegelbaum said he is humbled to be recognized by an organization he has belonged to since the beginning of his career in the early 1980s when he was living and working in Australia.
“I’ve been going to the annual conferences just about every year,” he said. “I’ve served on various committees. I was on the editorial board of the journal that the organization publishes called Slavic Review and award committees of various kinds. So, it’s something that’s been part of my academic life for a very long time.”
Siegelbaum came to MSU in 1983 and retired in 2018. In 2011, Siegelbaum was appointed the Jack and Margaret Sweet Endowed Professor of History. His classes centered on the fields of Russian and European history. His academic journey expanded from focusing on labor history to the history of consumerism and the material aspects of life under Soviet rule, shifting his focus from the Stalin era to the latter stages of Soviet history.
His extensive body of work includes: Stakhanovism and the Politics of Productivity in the USSR, 1935-1941 (Cambridge University Press, 1988); Soviet State and Society between Revolutions, 1918-1929 (Cambridge University Press, 1992); Workers of the Donbass Speak: Survival and Identity in the New Ukraine, 1989-1992, co-edited with Daniel J. Walkowitz (SUNY Press, 1995); Stalinism as a Way of Life: A Narrative in Documents, co-edited with Andrei Sokolov (Yale University Press, 2000); Cars for Comrades: The Life of the Soviet Automobile (Cornell University Press, 2008); Broad Is My Native Land, co-authored with Professor Emerita Leslie Page Moch (Cornell University Press, 2014); Stuck on Communism: Memoir of a Russian Historian (Northern Illinois University Press, 2019); and Making National Diasporas: Soviet Migration Regimes and Post-Soviet Consequences, co-authored with Leslie Page Moch (Cambridge University Press, 2023).
Siegelbaum’s book Cars for Comrades: The Life of the Soviet Automobile (Cornell, 2008) was awarded two prizes by the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies. Most recently, he published Reflections on Stalinism, co-edited with John Archibald Getty (Cornell University Press, 2024).
Beyond his scholarly articles, he also coauthored the website Seventeen Moments in Soviet History, which stands as the premier digital resource for teaching and studying Soviet history.
“This award is a lovely way of capping [my career]. I do not intend to stop doing what I have been doing all these years, but, you know, gradually, inevitably, after retirement, one does sort of pull back,” Siegelbaum said.
Despite his retirement in 2018, Siegelbaum continued to supervise dissertations until 2023. He said one of the most rewarding parts of his career was mentoring and guiding graduate students by supervising their dissertations.
“I just enjoyed it,” he said. “It was just so rewarding to see them growing, to be stimulated by them, and now to be able to follow their careers. I do not think there is a better feeling one can have, as a professor, to see one of your former students flourishing. And I am fortunate enough to have several who have.”
The last dissertation Siegelbaum supervised was for Lucy Austin, an alum of the Department of History who is now on a post-doctoral track at Harvard University.
“Initially, of course, they are learning a lot from you, and then you discover that you have things to learn from them, which is wonderful.”
He also mentioned how grateful he is to his colleagues for the support he has received throughout his career.
“I would also like to thank the library at MSU for assisting me all these years and the librarians who have helped get things on interlibrary loan. I would also like to thank previous chairs of the History Department who have done the work of promoting the applications and giving the resources once they became available. MSU was a really great place to spend most of my career, for those and other reasons, colleagues as well.”
Professor Emeritus Dr. Lewis Siegelbaum
