Shortlist Announced for the PolitProsvet Special Award

• 25 Sep 2026



• Today, the shortlist for PolitProsvet, a special award of the Enlightener Prize, was announced. Five books exploring pressing issues and developments in Russia’s social and political life have reached the final:

  1. Timur Atnashev. Bureaucracy, or Order Without a Master. St. Petersburg: European University at St. Petersburg Press, 2025.
  2. Konstantin Gaaze. Where Do Dictatorships Drift? Russian Autocracy and the Invasion of Ukraine. Riga: Meduza, 2025.
  3. Andrei Zakharov. Russian Cyberpunk: How the Kremlin and the Oligarchs Are Building a "Digital Gulag"—and Who Is Resisting It. Berlin: Echo Books / StraightForward, 2025.
  4. Elena Lukyanova. The Fundamental Law: Constitutional Theory and Russian Practice. Riga: Free University Press, 2026.
  5. Alexandra Prokopenko. Accomplices: Why the Russian Elite Chose War. Berlin: Echo Books / StraightForward, 2025.

  The finalists for the PolitProsvet Special Award were selected by a jury chaired by Ekaterina Schulmann, a political scientist with a PhD in Political Science and a lecturer at Freie Universität Berlin. The jury members were:
  Dmitry Kolezev — independent journalist and blogger, author of the Kolezev Telegram channel and the Dmitry Kolezev YouTube channel, formerly head of It’s My City and editor-in-chief of Republic.
  Ivan Krastev — political scientist, Chairman of the Centre for Liberal Strategies in Sofia, and Permanent Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) in Vienna.
  Nikolai Plotnikov — philosopher and cultural scholar, Professor of Russian Cultural and Intellectual History at the Yuri Lotman Institute for Russian Culture at Ruhr University Bochum.

  Earlier, on 21 September, the shortlists for the Enlightener Prize and the Enlightener. Translation Prize were announced, recognising the best popular science books written in Russian and the best works in translation.
  The winners of the Enlightener Prize group will be announced on 19 November.