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

by Engerman, David C.

• ISBN13: 9780199832477
• ISBN10: 0199832471
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2011-10-01
• 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

Introduction: Knowing the Cold War Enemy

Part I: A Field in Formation

1. The Wartime Roots of Russian Studies Training
2. Social Science Serves the State in War and Cold War
3. Institution-Building on a National Scale

Part II: Growth and Dispersion

4. The Soviet Economy and the Measuring-Rod of Money
5. The Lost Opportunities of Slavic Literary Studies
6. Russian History as Past Politics
7. The Soviet Union as a Modern Society
8. Soviet Politics and the Dynamics of Totalitarianism

Part III: Crisis, Conflict, and Collapse

9. The Dual Crises of Russian Studies
10. Right Turn into Halls of Power
11. Left Turn in the Ivory Tower
12. Perestroika and the Collapse of Soviet Studies

Epilogue: Soviet Studies after the Soviet Union
Essay on Sources