Professor’s book earns prize

Staff report

new wilmington, pa.

Russell Martin, Westminster College professor of history, was honored with the 2014 W. Bruce Lincoln Book Prize for “A Bride for the Tsar: Bride-Shows and Marriage Politics in Early Modern Russia” (2012, Northern Illinois University Press).

The prize is awarded every two years by the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies for a “published monograph or scholarly synthesis that is of exceptional merit and lasting significance for the understanding of Russia’s past.” The prize will be presented to Martin at the association’s annual conference in San Antonio in November.

“I am deeply moved and gratified by this recognition,” Martin said. “There are many people to thank, including so many colleagues and administrators at Westminster who have supported my research over the years.”

The book is a study of the 16th-and 17th-century custom of picking a bride for the tsar by means of a parade of eligible young women gathered from across Russia.

Prior historians had thought of the custom as the quintessential expression of Russian autocratic, unlimited monarchy: The tsar was so powerful he could marry whomever he wanted, regardless of whether the bride was the daughter of a prince or a peasant.

Martin’s book, however, shows just the opposite: that power in Russia was not autocratic but shared between the tsar and his highest-ranking servitors (the boyars), even to the extent that the boyars had a decisive role in picking whom the tsar married by controlling what candidates got included in the bride-show.

Martin, who has been with Westminster since 1996, earned an undergraduate degree from the University of Pittsburgh and a master’s degree and Ph.D. from Harvard University.

Martin appeared on A&E Biography in a broadcast on Ivan the Terrible as an expert on the controversial ruler. The Neville Island, Pa., native continues to translate from Russian to English the official Web page of Her Imperial Highness, Grand Duchess Maria Vladimirovna, the heiress to the vacant Russian throne, and he serves as an adviser to her Chancellery in Moscow for communications and foreign media.

His translations are available at www.imperialhouse.ru. Martin was awarded the Russian Imperial Order of St. Anna, second class, by the grand duchess for his work on behalf of the House of Romanov.