Know Your Enemy The Rise and Fall of America's Soviet Experts

by Engerman, David C.

• ISBN13: 9780195324860
• ISBN10: 0195324862
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-11-20
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

As World War II ended, few Americans in government or universities knew much about the Soviet Union. As David Engerman shows in this book, a network of scholars, soldiers, spies, and philanthropists created an enterprise known as Soviet Studies to fill in this dangerous gap in American knowledge. This group brought together some of the nation's best minds from the left, right, and center, colorful and controversial individuals ranging from George Kennan to Margaret Mead to Zbigniew Brzezinski, not to mention historians Sheila Fitzpatrick and Richard Pipes. Together they created the knowledge that helped fight the Cold War and define Cold War thought. Soviet Studies became a vibrant intellectual enterprise, studying not just the Soviet threat, but Soviet society and culture at a time when many said that these were contradictions in terms, as well as Russian history and literature. And this broad network, Engerman argues, forever changed the relationship between the government and academe, connecting the Pentagon with the ivory tower in ways that still matter today.

Author Biography

David C. Engerman is the author of Modernization from the Other Shore, named a best book on Russia by Foreign Affairs. He is an Associate Professor of History at Brandeis University.

Table of Contents

Abbreviations	p. ix
Introduction: Knowing the Cold War Enemy	p. 1
A Field in Formation
The Wartime Roots of Russian Studies Training	p. 13
Social Science Serves the State in War and Cold War	p. 43
Institution Building on a National Scale	p. 71
Growth and Dispersion
The Soviet Economy and the Measuring Rod of Money	p. 97
The Lost Opportunities of Slavic Literary Studies	p. 129
Russian History as Past Politics	p. 153
The Soviet Union as a Modern Society	p. 180
Soviet Politics and the Dynamics of Totalitarianism	p. 206
Crisis, Conflict,and Collapse
The Dual Crises of Russian Studies	p. 235
Right Turn into the Halls of Power	p. 261
Left Turn in the Ivory Tower	p. 286
Perestroika and the Collapse of Soviet Studies	p. 309
Epilogue: Soviet Studies after the Soviet Union	p. 333
Essay on Sources	p. 341
Notes	p. 349
Acknowledgments	p. 433
List of Illustration Credits	p. 437
Index	p. 439
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