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Professor of Political Science Gerald Easter has won two awards for his book, Capital, Coercion, and Postcommunist States, which examines divergent approaches to taxation among former East Bloc countries, and the subsequent political and economic impacts these had. Easter’s book was selected for the Ed A. Hewett Book Prize, awarded for an outstanding publication on the political economy of the former Soviet Union and East Central Europe and their transitional successors, and the Davis Center Book Prize in Political and Social Studies as the best monograph on Russia, Eurasia, or Eastern Europe in anthropology, political science, sociology or geography. Both awards are from the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. Easter traces the inspiration for the book to a period in the 1990s when he lived in Russia – not long after the disintegration of the Soviet Union — and witnessed a fiscal crisis there that triggered bank runs and effectively wiped out people’s life savings. Read an interview with Easter in the Boston College Chronicle.
