Trio of book honors for BC 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 class—so 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 she’s received—from the United States Holocaust Museum, the Harriman Institute, Fulbright-Hays, and the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, among others—have provided plenty of professional validation.
Her 2023 book, German Blood, Slavic Soil: How Nazi Königsberg Became Soviet Kaliningrad—an examination of the Baltic Sea port city’s ordeal through brutal 20th-century geopolitics—was 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 author’s first published monograph or scholarly synthesis that is of exceptional merit and lasting significance for the understanding of Russia’s 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.
“Reggie took an interest in my application, even though my background was in German studies,” said Eaton, who joined the Boston College faculty in 2015. “He 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.”
In German Blood, Slavic Soil, Eaton examines how one city endured life under the 20th century’s most violent revolutionary regimes, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. As Königsberg, it served as the easternmost point of Hitler’s Third Reich and the launch point for the Nazis’ genocidal war in the East. Decimated by the war and occupied by the Soviets, the 700-year-old city—renamed Kaliningrad—then became the western edge of Stalin’s 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 Königsberg, the Soviets made an effort to integrate the city’s German population into the Soviet empire—an effort that proved tragically short lived.
For Eaton, the story of Königsberg/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.
“My book is different from many urban histories in that it engages with two historiographies, Russian and German,” she explained. “I felt that the story of this city would be a way to examine transnational history in one place, in one context. I’ve always been drawn to the complexities of belonging, of identity and how societies understand who gets to belong and who doesn’t.
“The 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 race—they imagined socialism to be the antidote to race-based nationalism.”
The Soviets set out to rebuild the ruins of Königsberg into socialist Kaliningrad, and they at first tried to incorporate their former German enemies into the socialist system they were building. 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.
“The Soviet Union’s declaration during the war had been, ‘We’re fighting fascism in the name of socialism.’ But the new Soviet population in Kaliningrad after the war came to think of ‘fascist’ or ‘Nazi’ as the same as ‘German,’” noted Eaton, “and ‘socialist’ came to mean the same as ‘Russian.’
“This 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 fascism—this time against supposed Ukrainian Nazis.”
As part of her research for German Blood, Slavic Soil, Eaton lived for a year in Kaliningrad. Today, the region is once again a semi-closed zone because of NATO sanctions and Russian security restrictions. 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 Königsberg’s ruins.
“What’s fascinating is to see, literally, the layers of history in Kaliningrad,” said Eaton. “There 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 Kaliningrad’s German prehistory. The rhythms of that former life still shape the present.
“Berlin, by contrast, is very ‘museumized’: Its public history is organized in a scripted way to convey a particular story of the Third Reich and the Cold War. Kaliningrad’s visible traces of history seem, by contrast, more raw and unscripted—but at the same time, more evocative of the messiness of lived experience.”