Trio of book honors for 51²č¹Ż historian Nicole Eaton
As an undergraduate, Associate Professor of History Nicole Eaton started out majoring in biology, but always found herself looking forward to her history classāso much, in fact, that she wound up making history her academic focus, and then her vocation.
Eaton never regretted that decision, and a trio of recent honors along with the fellowships and grants sheās receivedāfrom the United States Holocaust Museum, the Harriman Institute, Fulbright-Hays, and the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, among othersāhave provided plenty of professional validation.
Her 2023 book, German Blood, Slavic Soil: How Nazi Kƶnigsberg Became Soviet Kaliningradāan examination of the Baltic Sea port cityās ordeal through brutal 20th-century geopoliticsāwas the winner of the Reginald Zelnik Book Prize in History, presented annually by the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies for an outstanding monograph published on Russia, Eastern Europe, or Eurasia in the field of history. ASEEES also awarded her an honorable mention for the W. Bruce Lincoln Book Prize, which recognizes an authorās first published monograph or scholarly synthesis that is of exceptional merit and lasting significance for the understanding of Russiaās past.
In addition, Eaton received an honorable mention for the German Studies Association DAAD/GSA Prize for the Best Book in History and Social Science.
The Reginald Zelnik Prize was particularly gratifying for Eaton: Its namesake, a distinguished scholar of Russian labor and social history, was her mentor at the University of California-Berkeley; he was killed in a traffic accident while Eaton was working on her doctoral degree.
āReggie took an interest in my application, even though my background was in German studies,ā said Eaton, who joined the Boston College faculty in 2015. āHe encouraged me to start learning Russian and hired me to serve as a teaching assistant for his Russian history course. As a first-generation college student, I really appreciated that support, so to have won the award named for him means a lot to me.ā
In German Blood, Slavic Soil, Eaton examines how one city endured life under the 20th centuryās most violent revolutionary regimes, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. As Kƶnigsberg, it served as the easternmost point of Hitlerās Third Reich and the launch point for the Nazisā genocidal war in the East. Decimated by the war and occupied by the Soviets, the 700-year-old cityārenamed Kaliningradāthen became the western edge of Stalinās empire.
Eaton goes beyond military history, using eyewitness accounts and other contemporary sources to show how German and Soviet/Russian attitudes toward, and beliefs about, one another shaped everyday life in the city. She also relates how, despite their brutal conquest of Kƶnigsberg, the Soviets made an effort to integrate the cityās German population into the Soviet empireāan effort that proved tragically short lived.
For Eaton, the story of Kƶnigsberg/Kaliningrad, compelling in and of itself, also provided a means to study wider questions around identity and place, and how these may be complicated by regional or international politics.
āMy book is different from many urban histories in that it engages with two historiographies, Russian and German,ā she explained. āI felt that the story of this city would be a way to examine transnational history in one place, in one context. Iāve always been drawn to the complexities of belonging, of identity and how societies understand who gets to belong and who doesnāt.
āThe Nazis defined the boundaries of the German community around the so-called Aryan racial type, in opposition to people such as Jews and Slavs, whom they thought of as racially inferior. The Soviets, meanwhile, defined belonging in terms of class rather than by raceāthey imagined socialism to be the antidote to race-based nationalism.ā
The Soviets set out to rebuild the ruins of Kƶnigsberg into socialist Kaliningrad, and they at first tried to incorporate their former German enemies into the socialist system they were building.Ā But by 1947, overwhelmed by the wartime devastation and the high rate of death of disease in the region, the Soviets scapegoated the Germans as irredeemable fascists who were preventing Kaliningrad from being rebuilt. They expelled the surviving German population by late 1948, after nearly 40 percent of the Germans had died.
Ā āThe Soviet Unionās declaration during the war had been, āWeāre fighting fascism in the name of socialism.ā But the new Soviet population in Kaliningrad after the war came to think of āfascistā or āNaziā as the same as āGerman,āā noted Eaton, āand āsocialistā came to mean the same as āRussian.ā
āThis conflation of Russian ethnic identity with socialism continues to affect Russian self-understanding today. When Putin invaded Ukraine in 2022, he presented the nationalist defense of ethnic Russians as a virtuous second battle against fascismāthis time against supposed Ukrainian Nazis.ā
As part of her research for German Blood, Slavic Soil, Eaton lived for a year in Kaliningrad.Ā Today, the region is once again a semi-closed zone because of NATO sanctions and Russian security restrictions.Ā When Eaton lived there before the war in Ukraine broke out, she appreciated the rich and vibrant cultural life of the city that grew out of Kƶnigsbergās ruins.
āWhatās fascinating is to see, literally, the layers of history in Kaliningrad,ā said Eaton. āThere are vestiges of the German era all over the city: Some buildings still have traces of German ornamentation or pre-war architectural styles. Even the cast iron manhole covers and the cobblestone streets evoke Kaliningradās German prehistory. The rhythms of that former life still shape the present.
āBerlin, by contrast, is very āmuseumizedā: Its public history is organized in a scripted way to convey a particular story of the Third Reich and the Cold War. Kaliningradās visible traces of history seem, by contrast, more raw and unscriptedābut at the same time, more evocative of the messiness of lived experience.āĀ