The ironies of the iron curtain: The cold war and the rise of Russian Studies in the United States

Cahiers du Monde Russe

Volumn 45, Issue 3-4, 2004, Pages

  Engerman, David C ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 33745279196     PISSN: 12526576     EISSN: 17775388     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.4000/monderusse.2659     Document Type: Article

References (123)

1. The quotations' sources are, in order: Stephen F. Cohen, Rethinking the Soviet experience: Politics and history since 1917 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985): 8;
2. Alexander Dallin, "Bias and blunders in American studies on the USSR," Slavic Review, 32 (September 1973): 567;
3. Stephen White, "Political science as ideology: The study of Soviet politics," in WJJM: Political questions - Essays in honour of W.J.M. MacKenzie (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1974): 260;
4. Bruce Cumings, "Boundary displacement: Area Studies and International Studies during and after the Cold War," in Universities and empire: Money and politics in the social sciences during the Cold War, ed. Christopher Simpson (New York: New Press, 1998): 163;
5. Immanuel Wallerstein, "The unintended consequences of Cold War Area Studies," in The Cold War and the university:Toward an intellectual history of the postwar years (New York: New Press, 1997): 210;
6. Ron Robin, The making of the Cold War enemy: Culture and politics in the military-intellectual complex (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001): 54-56;
7. Charles Thomas O'Connell, "Social structure and science: Soviet Studies at Harvard" (Ph.D. diss., UCLA, 1990): 11;
8. Alfred G. Meyer, "Coming to terms with the past. and with one's older colleagues," Russian Review, 45 (October 1986): 402;
9. Sigmund Diamond, Compromised campus: the collaboration of universities with the intelligence community, 1945-1955 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992): 54;
10. Alan Wolfe, The rise and fall of the Soviet threat: Domestic sources of the Cold War consensus (Washington: Institute for Policy Studies, 1979). While most of these sources refer to Soviet Studies in particular, others are to area studies programs more generally.
11. While the distinctions between "Russian Studies," "Slavic Studies," and "Soviet Studies" are relevant in some contexts, I will use the terms, along with Sovietology, interchangeably here. The founders of Sovietology's major journal (and later, professional association), conferring in the early 1950s, banished the word Soviet and insisted that the titles begin with "American"; hence American Slavic and Eastern European Review (later Slavic Review) and the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies (AAASS) - see Chauncey D. Harris, "Russian, Slavic and Soviet Studies in the United States: Some memories and notes," Russian History/Histoire Russe, 24 (Winter 1997): 444-445.
12. For aspects of Russian Studies before World War II, see Stephen Marshall Arum, "Early stages of Foreign Language and Area Studies in the US, 1915-1941" (Ed.D. diss., Columbia University Teachers College, 1975);
13. Terence Emmons, "Russia then and now in the pages of the American Historical Review and elsewhere: A few centennial notes," American Historical Review, 100 (October 1995): 1136-1149;
14. David C. Engerman, "New society, new scholars: Soviet Studies programmes in interwar America," Minerva, 37 (Spring 1999): 25-43;
15. and Eduard Mark, "October or Thermidor? Interpretations of Stalinism and the perception of Soviet foreign policy in the United States, 1927-1947," American Historical Review, 94 (October 1989): 937-962.
16. Bundy, "The battlefields of power and the searchlights of the Academy," in The Dimensions of diplomacy, ed. E.A.J. Johnson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1964): 2.
17. Barry Katz, Foreign intelligence: Research and intelligence in the OSS, 1942-1945 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989);
18. Betty Abrahamsen Dessants, "The American academic community and United States-Soviet relations: The research and analysis branch and its legacy, 1941-1947" (Ph.D. diss., University of California-Berkeley, 1995).
19. See for instance, Philip E. Mosely, "The growth of Russian Studies," in American Research on Russia, ed. Harold H. Fisher (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1959).
20. The training imperative was, of course, not limited to area studies programs. A very suggestive article by David Kaiser argues that the intellectual content of postwar physics was shaped by the conceptualization of Physics Departments' "products" as physicists, not physical knowledge. See David Kaiser, "Cold War requisitions, scientific manpower, and the production of American physicists after World War II," Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences, 33 (2002): 131-159.
21. Oleg A. Maslenikov, "Slavic Studies in America, 1939-1946," Slavonic and East European Studies, 25 (April 1947): 531-532.
22. The Navy program trained, among others, psychologist Raymond Bauer, historian Martin Malia, and literature scholar Hugh McLean. On the Oriental Language School, see A. E. Hindmarsh, The Navy School of Oriental Languages: History, organization, and administration (c. May 1945): appendixes 36-37 - in University of Colorado Archives.
23. See also William Nelson Fenton for the Commission on Implications of Armed Services Educational Programs, Area Studies in American universities (Washington: American Council on Education, 1947).
24. See, for instance, Paul F. Angiolillo, Armed forces' foreign language teaching: Critical evaluation and implications (New York: S.F. Vanni, 1947);
25. Alonzo G. Grace, Educational lessons from wartime training: The general report of the Commission on Implications of Armed Services Educational Programs (Washington: American Council on Education, 1948);
26. and Robert John Matthew, Language and area studies in the armed services: Their future significance (Washington: American Council on Education, 1947);
27. G. T. Robinson, "The Russian Institute," appendix to "The report of the Committee on the Proposed Graduate School of Foreign Affairs" (27 November 1944), Columbia University Central Files [hereafter CUCF] (Columbiana Collection), Personal Subseries: Schuyler Wallace.
28. G. T. Robinson, "A program of advanced training and research in Russian Studies" (24 April 1947), in CUCF, Personal Subseries: Philip Mosely.
29. Albert Parry, America learns Russian: A history of the teaching of the Russian language in the United States (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1967): 83-86, 124;
30. William B. Edgerton, "The history of Slavistic scholarship in the United States," in Beiträge zur Geschichte der Slawistik in nichtslawischen Ländern, ed. Josef Hamm and Günther Wytrzens (Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences, 1985): 494-495.
31. Report of the President of Harvard Collese, 1945-46 (Cambridae, Mass.: Harvard College, 1946): 37.
32. Senior administrators insisted on calling the new unit a "center" rather than an "institute" because it would seem less permanent. Like predictions about the Soviet Union's imminent demise, this was long unfulfilled; the RRC's successor, the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, is still going strong. Paul Buck Oral History, Carnegie Corporation Project (Oral History Research Office, Columbia University): 53-54. Special thanks to Mickey Keller for first relating this item to me.
33. Virginia Yans-McLaughlin, "Science, democracy and ethics: Mobilizing culture and personality for World War II," in Malinowski, Rivers, Benedict and others: Essays on culture and personality, ed. George W. Stocking (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986).
34. For a critical view, see Christopher Shannon, "A world made safe for differences: Ruth Benedict's 'The chrysanthemum and the sword,'" American Quarterly, 47 (December 1995): 659-680.
35. For a more generous assessment, see Alex Inkeles, "Clyde Kluckhohn's contribution to studies of Russia and the Soviet Union," in Culture and life: Essays in memory of Clyde Kluckhohn, ed. Walter W. Taylor, et al. (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1973).
36. Derived from Jesse J. Dossick, Doctoral research on Russia and the Soviet Union (New York: New York University Press, 1960).
37. Jacob Ornstein, "The development and status of Slavic and East European Studies in America since World War II," American Slavic and East European Review, 16 (October 1957): 375.
38. For an even more precise contemporary dating of the rise of the interest, see Maurice W. Rosenbaum, "Slavonic Studies in America," Journal of Higher Education, 14 (January 1944): 9, 58.
39. Josef Brozek, "Slavic Studies in America," Journal of Higher Education, 14 (June 1943): 293.
40. J. A. Posin, "Russian Studies in American colleges," Russian Review, 7 (Spring 1948): 64.
41. V. Nabokov, Pnin (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1957): 10-11.
42. Vernadsky's own role in shaping American interpretations of Russian history is complex, but is in any case different from Karpovich's. Vernadsky borrowed a great deal from the Eurasianist movement among Russian émigrés in the interwar period, suggesting that Russia represented a distinct region with its own unique culture. For varying views, see V.N. Kozliakov, "'Eto tol'ko personifikatsiia ne nashego ponimaniia istoricheskogo protsessa': Georgii Vladimirovich Vernadskii (1887-1973)," in G. V. Vernadskii, Russkaia istoriografiia (Moscow, Agraf, 1998);
43. and Charles J. Halperin, "Russia and the steppe: George Vernadsky and Eurasianism," Forschungen zur Osteuropäischen Geschichte, 36 (1985): 55-194.
44. Samuel H. Baron, "Recollections of a life in Russian history," Russian History/Histoire Russe, 17 (Spring 1990): 35.
45. N.N. Bolkhovitinov, "Rol' russkikh istorikov v stanovlenii rusistiki SShA," Voprosy istorii, 4 (2001): 10.
46. Cyril E. Black and John M. Thompson, "Graduate study of Russia," in American teaching about Russia, ed. C. E. Black and J. M. Thompson (Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1957): 65.
47. A useful history of the exchanges, written by a scholar active in the organization of programs, is Robert F. Byrnes, Soviet-American academic exchanges, 1958-1975 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976);
48. one recent account argues that the exchanges contributed to the end of the Cold War: Yale Richmond, Cultural exchange and the Cold War: Raising the Iron Curtain (State College: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003).
49. For a compendium of exchange experiences over the decades, see Adventures in Russian historical research: Reminiscences of American scholars from the Cold War to the present (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2003).
50. Lauren G. Leighton, "Thirty years of SEEJ," Slavic and East European Journal, 31 (1987): 2.
51. See also Victoria Bonnell and George W. Breslauer, "Soviet and post-Soviet area studies," in The politics of knowledge: Area Studies and the disciplines, ed. David L. Szanton (Berkeley: UCIAS Publications, 2002).
52. Almost half of the presidents of the AAASS have been historians, thus continuing a longstanding trend in area studies. When the American Council of Learned Societies and the Social Science Research Council established the Joint Committee on Slavic Studies in 1948, three of its eight members (including the chair) were historians - Gordon B. Turner, "The Joint Committee on Slavic Studies, 1948-1971: A summary view," ACLS Newsletter, 23 (Spring 1972): 9.
53. For an overview of 1950s universalism, see David Hollinger, "How wide the circle of we? American intellectuals and the problem of ethnos since World War II," American Historical Review, 98 (April 1993): 317-337.
54. For universalism in social-scientific work on the USSR, see David C. Engerman, Modernization from the other shore: American intellectuals and the romance of Russian development (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003): epilogue.
55. Biographical details from Philip E. Mosely, "Michael Karpovich, 1888-1959," Russian Review, 19 (January 1960): 56-60;
56. and George Vernadsky, Russian historiography: A history, ed. Sergei Pushkarev, trans. Nickolas Lupin (Belmont, Mass.: Nordland, 1978): 366-368.
57. M. Karpovich, Imperial Russia, 1801-1917 (New York: Henry Holt, 1932): 8, 14.
58. Witt Bowden, Michael Karpovich, and Abbott Payson Usher, An economic history of Europe since 1750 (New York: American Books, 1937): 289, 301.
59. A brief and insightful overview of Karpovich's historical thinking is provided in Martin E. Malia, "Michael Karpovich, 1888-1959," Russian Review, 19 (January 1960): 60-71 (quoted p.60).
60. M. Karpovich, A lecture on Russian history, Russian text annotated by Horace G. Lunt (The Hague: Mouton, 1962): 8-10.
61. M. Karpovich, "The historical background of Soviet thought control," in The Soviet Union: Background, ideology, reality, ed. Waldemar Gurian (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1951): 16-17.
62. For biographical details on Gerschenkron, see Lewis A. Coser, Refugee scholars in America: Their impact and their experiences (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984): 154-163
63. and especially a very personal biography by his grandson: Nicholas Dawidoff, The fly swatter: How my grandfather made his way in the world (New York: Pantheon, 2002). On his "loan" to the OSS, see Director, FBI to SAC-Washington, 13 July 1946 - FBI document 77-30528-4 .
64. The original title was "Historical bases for appraising economic development in a bipolar world." The conference resulted in a book edited by the organizer: The progress of underdeveloped areas, ed. Bert Hoselitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952);
65. his essay reappeared in Economic backwardness in historical perspective: A book of essays (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962).
66. Hans Rogger, Russia in the age of modernization and revolution, 1881-1917 (New York: Longman, 1983): 15, 22.
67. On the power and implications of this strain of argument, see George W. Breslauer, "Counterfactual reasoning in Western studies of Soviet politics and foreign relations," in Counterfactual thought experiments in world politics: Logical, methodological, and psychological perspectives, ed. Philip E. Tetlock and Aaron Belkin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996).
68. For an influential effort to dethrone the World War I counterfactual, see Leopold Haimson's articles on "The problem of social stability in urban Russia, 1905-1917," Slavic Review, 23:4 (December 1964): 419-441
69. A. Gerschenkron, Europe in the Russian minor: Four lectures in economic history (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970).
70. The effect of Gerschenkron's writings on the field of economic history is evident in Patterns of European industrialization: The nineteenth century, ed. Richard Sylla and Gianni Tonolio (New York: Routledge, 1991);
71. and Donald N. McCloskey, "Alexander Gerschenkron," American Scholar, 62 (Spring 1992): 2141-46;
72. on banks in particular, see The origins of national financial systems: Alexander Gerschenkron reconsidered, ed. Douglas J. Forsyth and Daniel Verdier (New York: Routledge, 2003).
73. James R. Millar, "Where are the young specialists on the Soviet economy and what are they doing?," Journal of Comparative Economics, 4 (1980): 317-329.
74. R. Wellek, "Prospect and retrospect," Yale Review, 69 (December 1979): 311.
75. On the Prague Circle's approach, see especially F. W. Galan, Historic structures: The Prague school project, 1928-1946 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985).
76. Victor Erlich, Russian formalism: History, doctrine (The Hague: Mouton, 1955).
77. Gerald Graff, Professing literature: An institutional history (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).
78. A useful antidote to Graff's skepticism about professionalizing motives - especially vis-à-vis the New Critics - is Catherine Gallagher, "The history of literary criticism," in Academic culture in transformation: Fifty years, four disciplines, ed. Thomas Bender and Carl E. Schorske (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).
79. Ewa M. Thompson, Russian Formalism and Anglo-American New Criticism: A comparative study (The Hague: Mouton, 1971).
80. R. Wellek, "My early life," in Contemporary authors: Autobiographical series, ed. Mark Zardzony, vol. 7 (Detroit: Gale, 1988): 205-226 (quoted p. 217).
81. Other details from Martin Bucco, René Wellek (Boston: Twayne, 1981).
82. R. Wellek, "Literary history," in Norman Foerster, et al., Literary scholarship: Its aims and methods (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1941): 97, 130, 103.
83. René Wellek and Austin Warren, The theory of literature (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1949): 285.
84. R. Wellek, "Literary scholarship," in American scholarship in the twentieth century, ed. Merle Curti (New York: Russell and Russell, 1953): 115, 123.
85. Columbia dictionary of modern European literature, ed. Horatio Smith (New York: Columbia University Press, 1949).
86. Horace Lunt in A tribute to Roman Jakobson (New York: Mouton, 1983): 76-77.
87. Roman Jakobson and Krystyna Pomorska, Dialogues (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983): 2.
88. R. Jakobson, "Phoneme and phonology" (1932)
89. and R. Jakobson and M. Halle, "Phonology and phonetics" (1955), both in R. Jakobson, Selected writings, 2nd ed., 7 vols (The Hague: Mouton, 1971): vol. I.
90. See also Hugh McLean, "A linguist among poets," in Roman Jakobson: What he taught us, ed. Morris Halle (Columbus, Ohio: Slavica, 1983).
91. Umberto Eco, "The influence of Roman Jakobson on the development of semiotics," in Roman Jakobson: Echoes of his scholarship, ed. Daniel Armstrong and C.H. van Schooneveld (Lisse: Petter de Ridder, 1977): 42.
92. Barry Scherr, "Formalism, structuralism, semiotics, and poetics," Slavic and East European Journal, 31 (1987): 127-140.
93. Frederic Jameson, The prison-house of language: A critical account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972): 85.
94. Also F. Jameson, Marxism and form: Twentieth-century dialectical theories of literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971).
95. Sean Homer, Frederic Jameson: Marxism, hermeneutics, postmodernism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998): 27.
96. M. M. Bakhtin, The dialogic imagination: Four essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981);
97. Katerina Clark and Michael Holquist, Mikhail Bakhtin (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1984).
98. J. Thomas Shaw, "AATSEEL: The first fifty years," Slavic and East European Journal, 35 (1991): 76.
99. See the correspondence between Abram Bergson, Geroid Robinson, and Ernest Simmons in fall 1945 - all in Geroid Tanquary Robinson Papers (Columbia University Archives), Box 50.
100. on Parsons, see Howard Brick, "The reformist dimension of Talcott Parsons's early social theory," in The culture of the market: Historical essays, eds. Thomas L. Haskell and Richard F. Teichgraber III (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993): 365.
101. On Hughes, see H. Stuart Hughes, Gentleman rebel: The memoirs of H. Stuart Hughes (New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1990): 205-210.
102. G. Robinson, "Russia re-examined," Freeman, 1 (21 April 1920): 132-133.
103. G. Robinson, "Russia's double experiment" (8 May [1919?]), Robinson Papers, box 16.
104. Mosely himself ran afoul of the security clearance process, in 1954, based apparently on accusations of association with Popular Front organizations in the 1930s; see Philip Edward Mosely Papers (University of Illinois Archives), Box 12.
105. see, for instance, The Lamont case: History of a congressional investigation, ed. Philip Wittenberg (New York: Horizon, 1957): 24, 30.
106. Stiven Rudi [Stephen Rudy], "Iakobson pri Makkartizme," in Roman Iakobson: Teksty, dokumenty, issledovaniia, ed. Kh. Baran et al. (Moscow: RGGU, 1999);
107. Seymour Martin Lipset and David Reisman, Education and politics at Harvard (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1975): 184-185;
108. Raymond Bauer, Alex Inkeles, and Clyde Kluckhohn, How the Soviet system works: Cultural, psychological and social themes (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1956). Books by Joseph Berliner, Mark Field, Alex Inkeles, and other Interview Project alumni were influential in the field.
109. George W. Croker, "Some principles regarding the utilization of Social Science research within the military," in Case studies in bringing behavioral science into use (Stanford: Stanford Institute for Communication Research, 1961): 122-124.
110. William Edgerton, "Adventures of an innocent American professor with the CIA and the KGB," Russian History/Histoire Russe, 24 (1997): 321-327;
111. Robert F. Byrnes, A history of Russian and East European Studies in the United States: Selected essays (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1994): 248.
112. Abraham Brumberg, "Problems of Communism and early Soviet Studies," unpublished paper (2000): 1.
113. Adam B. Ulam, Understanding the Cold War: A historian's personal reflections, 2nd ed. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 2002): 107.
114. Robert Cohen, When the old left was young: Student radicals and America's first mass student movement, 1929-1941 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).
115. Robert C. Tyler, "The American Veterans Committee: Out of a Hot War and into the Cold," American Quarterly, 18 (Fall 1966): 419-436.
116. See, for instance, John Patrick Diggins, Up from communism: Consenative Odysseys in American intellectual history (New York: Harper and Row, 1975),
117. or, in a less triumphalist spirit, Judy Kutulas, The long war: The intellectual people's front and anti-Stalinism, 1930-1940 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995).
118. Jonathan Haslam, The vices of integrity: E. H. Carr, 1892-1982 (New York: Verso, 2001): 120-124.
119. Sabine Hering and Kurt Schilde, Kampfname Ruth Fischer: Wandlungen einer Deutschen Kommunistin (Frankfurt: Dipa-Verlag, 1995): chap. 4.
120. On the institutional and funding frameworks supporting Soviet Studies, see Alexander Dallin, "Soviet and East European Studies in the United States," in Soviet and East European Studies in the international framework, ed. Arnold Buchholz (Berlin: Berlin Verlag, 1982);
121. More generally, see Robert A. McCaughey, International studies and academic enterprise: A chapter in the enclosure of American learning (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984): chap. 7;
122. and Roger L. Geiger, Research and relevant knowledge: American research universities since World War II (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993): chap. 6.
123. Richard Lambert, Language and area studies re view (Philadelphia: American Academy of Political and Social Science, 1973): 150-154.