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As World War II came to a close and the Cold War set in, the United States had precious little knowledge about its new enemy and was poorly equipped to comprehend the new global threat. How did America learn about the Soviet Union? In this book, David Engerman, an award-winning historian of American foreign policy, Russian history, and international history, shows how a network of scholars, soldiers, spies, and philanthropists created an enterprise (known as Sovietology) to understand and shape American foreign policy towards the USSR. This group brought together some of the nation's best minds from the left, right, and center of the political spectrum, colorful individuals ranging from George Kennan and Margaret Mead to Zbigniew Brzezinski to Condoleezza Rice, to historians Sheila Fitzpatrick and Richard Pipes. Together this network created a knowledge base that helped define, shape, and fight the Cold War. While the reputation of Sovietology has been tarnished because of ideological disputes, Engerman contends that Sovietologists deserve a good deal of credit for understanding the ethnic and class divisions, internal power struggles, and economic failures that led to the collapse of the Communist system. And this group, Engerman argues, forever changed the relationship between the government and academe, connecting the Pentagon with the Ivy League in a way that continues to this day, most notably with current events in the Middle East. Drawing on archival research, including personally held papers, and extensive interviews with many key players, this book will be written in such a way to appeal to those interested in the history of the relationship between the US and the Soviet Union. It should also have special appeal for institutions that actively participated (and funded) Sovietology, such as the RAND Corporation, the Kennan Institute, the Woodrow Wilson Center, military intelligence schools, and Harvard's Russian Research Center.
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.
Show moreAs World War II came to a close and the Cold War set in, the United States had precious little knowledge about its new enemy and was poorly equipped to comprehend the new global threat. How did America learn about the Soviet Union? In this book, David Engerman, an award-winning historian of American foreign policy, Russian history, and international history, shows how a network of scholars, soldiers, spies, and philanthropists created an enterprise (known as Sovietology) to understand and shape American foreign policy towards the USSR. This group brought together some of the nation's best minds from the left, right, and center of the political spectrum, colorful individuals ranging from George Kennan and Margaret Mead to Zbigniew Brzezinski to Condoleezza Rice, to historians Sheila Fitzpatrick and Richard Pipes. Together this network created a knowledge base that helped define, shape, and fight the Cold War. While the reputation of Sovietology has been tarnished because of ideological disputes, Engerman contends that Sovietologists deserve a good deal of credit for understanding the ethnic and class divisions, internal power struggles, and economic failures that led to the collapse of the Communist system. And this group, Engerman argues, forever changed the relationship between the government and academe, connecting the Pentagon with the Ivy League in a way that continues to this day, most notably with current events in the Middle East. Drawing on archival research, including personally held papers, and extensive interviews with many key players, this book will be written in such a way to appeal to those interested in the history of the relationship between the US and the Soviet Union. It should also have special appeal for institutions that actively participated (and funded) Sovietology, such as the RAND Corporation, the Kennan Institute, the Woodrow Wilson Center, military intelligence schools, and Harvard's Russian Research Center.
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.
Show moreIntroduction: Knowing the Cold War Enemy
Part I: A Field in Formation
1: The Wartime Roots of Soviet 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 into the Ivory Tower
12: Perestroika and the Collapse of Soviet Studies
Essay on Sources
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.
"The extraordinary range and depth of Engerman's research and the
narrative arc knitting this book together from start to finish make
Know Your Enemy a consummate work of scholarship and historical
imagination. Engerman's critical assessment of all the diverse
components within academic 'Sovietology' shatters one cliché after
another. Soviet Studies never fashioned a single Cold War vision of
the USSR and never served simply as an ideological
arm of U.S. foreign policy--even when scholars were most closely
linked with diplomatic and military operatives."--Howard Brick,
University of Michigan
"Those in and out of the field of Soviet Studies will find genuine
revelations in Know Your Enemy. Engerman combines thorough research
with a firm footing in the sociology of knowledge of the post-World
War II world in this remarkable story of the U.S.'s most successful
area studies enterprise. The author sensibly and dispassionately
navigates the reader through the maelstrom of conflicts and
controversies that beset the field and is practitioners from
the Second World War until the fall of the Soviet Union."--Norman
M. Naimark, Stanford University
"The book treats the interaction between U.S. politics and
scholarship on the USSR with a depth and subtlety unmatched by
previous writers...Know Your Enemy is based on a sophisticated
knowledge of postwar American scholarship on the Soviet Union in
five academic disciplines--history, literary studies, economics,
socioloy, and political science... Anyone with a serious interest
in the study of the Soviet Union should read it closely and ponder
its
lessons."--Journal of Cold War Studies
"Looking at both people and institutions, David Engerman has
written the most complete and informative account of the rise and
fall of Russian/Soviet studies. Sovietology arose out of world war
and Cold War, but Engerman demonstrates that rather than simply
ideologically driven, this scholarly field contained a variety of
voices that contested with one another to influence colleagues, the
government, and the public. The fate of the field, however, was
intimately tied to the global conflict with America's adversary,
and when Soviet socialism collapsed, Sovietology disappeared along
with it. Yet the contours of understanding a distant and little
known rival
continue to influence new generations still perplexed by that part
of the world."--Ronald Grigor Suny, author of The Soviet
Experiment
"In his excellent history of Cold War Sovietology, which is solidly
grounded in interviews and more than 100 archival collections,
David Engerman has fashioned an important institutional and
intellectual history of its academic dimensions. This clearly
argued, fair-minded, and very illuminating volume reveals more
interesting individuals and a more complicated story (as archives
always do) than the oft repeated commonplaces about this history
have
revealed."--Thomas Bender, author of A Nation Among Nations:
America's Place in World History
"[D]eeply researched new book."--Evan R. Goldstein, The Chronicle
Review
"[E]ngrossing."--Wall Street Journal
"[F]ascinating history."--Robert Legvold, Foreign Affairs
"Deeply researched, well-written, this is an important chronicle
that explains much about how government and academia still
interact, and it should be read not just by
Russophiles, but by anyone interested in new academic initiatives
to focus on 'Islamic Studies.'"--Paul E. Richardson, Russian
Life
"[An] essential book for any student of the former Soviet Union-and
anyone who wants to understand how scholarship is made when it is
intertwined with national security concerns."
--William W. Finan Jr., Current History
"In writing this very readable account of the rise and fall of
Soviet Studies in teh United States, Engerman embodies the very
type of scholar that might have, in greater numbers, saved the
field...Know Your Enemy proves to be a good example of how scholars
in the humanities can use their substantial research and teaching
skills to combine a rigorous scholarly analysis of a subject with
an engaging text in order to reach a wide and varied
readership."--Belles Lettres
"It is a fascinating story, filled with colorful, outsized
personalities from various walks of life, and Engerman tells it
well, in clear and economical prose and with a keen eye for the
telling anecdote and vivid quote...[A] penetrating investigation of
the complex relationship between national security and intellectual
life in Cold War America."--Journal of American History
"An exciting odyssey into Cold War Sovietology."--Slavic Review
"A work of remarkable breadth and depth...Know Your Enemy brings
together institutional and intellectual history to add fresh
insights to the field of Cold War Studies...This important book
brings back into view the problematic role of the academy at the
intersection of scholarship, epistemology, and national
security."--Reviews in American History
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