Suchergebnisse

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Author's Note -- Introduction: From the Other Shore -- PART I: AUTOCRATIC RUSSIA, LETHARGIC RUSSIANS -- 1 An Empire of Climate -- 2 Endurance without Limit -- 3 Studying Our Nearest Oriental Neighbor -- PART II: REVOLUTIONARY RUSSIA, INSTINCTUAL RUSSIANS -- 4 Little above the Brute -- 5 Sheep without a Shepherd -- 6 Feeding the Mute Millions of Muzhiks -- PART III: MODERNIZING RUSSIA, BACKWARD RUSSIANS -- 7 New Society, New Scholars -- 8 The Romance of Economic Development -- 9 Starving Itself Great -- 10 Scratch a Soviet and You'll Find a Russian -- Epilogue: Russian Expertise in an Age of Social Science -- Sources -- Abbreviations -- Notes -- Acknowledgments -- Index

Introduction: Knowing the Cold War enemy -- pt. 1. A field in formation -- The wartime roots of Russian studies training -- Social science serves the state in war and Cold War -- Institution-building on a national scale -- pt. 2. Growth and dispersion -- The Soviet economy and the measuring-rod of money -- The lost opportunities of Slavic literary studies -- Russian history as past politics -- The Soviet Union as a modern society -- Soviet politics and the dynamics of totalitarianism -- pt. 3. Crisis, conflict, and collapse -- The dual crises of Russian studies -- Right turn into halls of power -- Left turn in the ivory tower -- Perestroika and the collapse of Soviet studies -- Epilogue: Soviet studies after the Soviet Union

Over the last decade or so, intellectual historians in and beyond the US field have deepened their engagement with the historical profession's "transnational turn." This welcome development should hardly be a surprise; after all the turn, which began for Americanists in the late 1990s, owed a good part of its erudition and its energy to some of the most distinguished intellectual historians of that time. Thomas Bender convened four conferences at NYU's La Pietra villa—itself part of some intellectual-history footnotes in the early twentieth century—and also made major scholarly and organizational contributions to the field. Two of the most frequently cited works that made the case for the "internationalization of US history"—avant la lettre—were by similarly preeminent intellectual historians Daniel Rodgers and James Kloppenberg. Other scholars, like David Hollinger, encouraged such work in their students before undertaking a more robustly transnational approach themselves. A wealth of scholarship in recent years has not just continued this tradition but expanded it, with intellectual historians individually and collectively pursuing their subjects across geographic borders as well as methodological boundaries. Two recent edited collections showcase work by scholars (mostly mid-career or younger) and contemplate the possibilities and the limits of different scales and methods of investigating the past in its broadest contexts.

Engerman's essay examines Soviet encounters with India in the 1950s and 1960s, tracing the effects of such encounters on both nations. Using Soviet and Indian published as well as archival material, it pays special attention to the effects on Soviet and Indian economic ideas. Of particular interest is the emergence, in Soviet scholarly and foreign-policy discussions, of the "noncapitalist path" to socialism. This category owed much to the encounters of Soviet experts like M. I. Rubinshtein with India in the mid-1950s. The emergence of a concept of the noncapitalist path, in turn, underwrote the Soviet approach to a variety of underdeveloped nations in the 1950s and 1960s — as promoted vigorously by Nikita Khrushchev and apparatchiks in the Soviet Central Committee.

In the 1940s and 1950s, as Soviet studies became a vibrant academic enterprise with significant links to the policy world, economic Sovietology occupied a special place. Those same years saw, also, the first major wave of decolonization and with it the rise of development economics. While many economists straddled both worlds, Harvard economic historian Alexander Gerschenkron occupied pride of place by virtue of his ideas, his reputation, and his students. Born in Odessa but with his economic education in Vienna, Gerschenkron brought to both enterprises a capacious and wide-ranging intellect and a determination to relate the economic history of his motherland to the contemporary problems of developing nations. His most famous essay, "Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective," was an important attempt to draw lessons from the Russian economic experience and apply them to the industrializing world. He and his students had great intellectual success in plotting the connections between the second world's past and the third world's future, but with that success, ironically, came isolation from their colleagues both in economics departments and Soviet studies centers.

John Dewey, like many other American intellectuals between the world wars, was fascinated by Soviet events. After visiting Russia in 1928 he wrote excitedly about the "Soviet experiment" and especially about Soviet educational theorists. In his early enthusiasm Dewey hoped that the US and the USSR could learn from each other, especially among the cosmopolitan group of progressive pedagogues he met on his trip. Observing the rise of Stalinism in the 1930s, though, his optimism dissipated; at the same time he came to emphasize historical and cultural differences between the US and the USSR. The result is apparent in Dewey's writings in the late 1930s (especially Freedom and Culture, 1939), as he began to evaluate the Soviet Union in terms that would have been anathema to him a decade earlier. He increasingly blamed Russia's cultural heritage for inhibiting Soviet development along the lines he had envisioned. Dewey's transformation suggests the importance of a cultural reading of American ideas about the USSR. Many American observers joined Dewey in seeing the USSR as the product of Russian culture, with its historical traditions and its own national character—and not just as the instantiation or betrayal of a political doctrine.