Special Book Award PolitProsvet presents runners-up of 2025
- 25 Sep 2025
On September 25 the special book award PolitProsvet has made public the shortlist of titles competing in the finals of 2025. For the fourth time, the jury board presided over by Ekaterina Shulman* has selected five books dedicated to the most urgent issues of today’s social and political discourse.
In 2025, shortlisted for Politprosvet are the following titles:
- Olesya Gerasomenko. Do Not CLose Your Eyes. The Reporter at War and in Emigration. Berlin: Freedom Letters, 2025.
- Grigory Golosov. Authorities in Epaulettes: Military Regimes in Today’s World. Moscow: Alpina Publisher, 2025.
- Crew Against Torture. The Anatomy of Decay. How and Why Human Rights Lost Value in Contemporary Russia / Nizhny Novgorod: Crew Against Torture, 2024.
- Ksenia Luchenko. Good Intentions: the Russian Orthodox Church and the Authorities from Gorbachev to Putin. Almaty: The Echo of a Book / StraightForward, 2025.
- Nikita Smagin. Iran For All. Paradoxes of Life In an Autocracy Under Sanctions. Moscow: Individuum, 2025.
The shortlist was put together by the following jury board:
Head of the jury board Ekaterina Shulman, PhD, political scientist, professor at Freie Universitat, Berlin.
Dmitry Kolezev, independent reporter and blogger, author of Kolezev telegram channel and Dmitry Kolezev YouTube channel, former director of It’s My City periodical and chief editor of Republic
Arkady Ostrovsky, journalist, translator, historian of theater, observer at The Economist, laureate of the Orwell Prize.
Nikolay Plotnikov, philosopher and culture studies expert, professor or Russian cultural and intellectual history at the Lotman Institute for the Studies of Russian Culture at Ruhr University, Bochum.
Earlier, on September 18, the Enlightener and the Enlightener.Translation awards announced their finalists: the 15 best non-fiction books of the year. The winners of the Dmitry Zimin Enlightener Group will become known November 20.
