Nikolai Bolkhovitinov and American Studies in the USSR: People's Diplomacy in the Cold War

by Sergei I. Zhuk

Overview

This study is an intellectual biography of Nikolai N. Bolkhovitinov (1930–2008), the prominent Soviet historian who was a pioneering scholar of US history and US–Russian relations. Alongside the personal history of Bolkhovitinov, this study also examines the broader social, cultural, and intellectual developments within the Americanist scholarly community in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia. Using archival documents, numerous studies by Russian and Ukrainian Americanists, various periodicals, personal correspondence, diaries, and more than one hundred interviews, it demonstrates how concepts, genealogies, and images of modernity shaped a national self-perception of the intellectual elites in both nations during the Cold War.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781498551243
Publisher:	Lexington Books
Publication date:	07/03/2017
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	294
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Sergei I. Zhuk is professor of East European and Russian history at Ball State University.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Institutionalization of American Studies in the USSR and Academic Exchanges
Chapter 2: The United States in the Soviet Interpretation under Stalin: From Lev Zubok to Aleksei Efimov
Chapter 3: “Stalin’s Last Generation”: Nikolai Bolkhovitinov and Making a Soviet Americanist after the Second World War
Chapter 4: Khrushchev Thaw, Nikolai Bolkhovitinov and the Discovery of the Origins of Russian–US Relations
Chapter 5: The Rise of Soviet Americanist: Nikolai Bolkhovitinov during the Early Brezhnev Era (1964–70)
Chapter 6: Nikolai Bolkhovitinov and Academic Détente, 1971–79
Chapter 7: “Out of Favor”: Bolkhovitinov’s Career and Shaping of the New Directions in the Soviet Studies of US History, 1979–85
Chapter 8: Socialist Modernity, Soviet Americanists, and “Epistemological Revolution” of Perestroika
Epilogue: State Business in Russian/Soviet Historical Perspectives on the US from Nicholas I to Putin

Editorial Reviews

This superbly researched book, which mines Soviet and American archives, the Soviet press, and includes a rich trove of personal interviews, makes a significant and original contribution to the cultural history of the Cold War. As a former Soviet Americanist who is presently a leading specialist in late Soviet cultural history, Sergei I. Zhuk is uniquely placed to write this fascinating study.

Denise J. Youngblood

This study is an unvarnished account of how ‘an idea of America’ shaped Soviet intellectuals, both in their idealism and national ressentiment. Sergei I. Zhuk’s history of the rise and fall of American studies in the Soviet Union—highly personal, yet rigorously academic—contains valuable lessons for today’s observers of Russian–American relations.

Vladislav Zubok

The author’s style is informal and engaging. Historians, sociologists, and political psychologists— and not only those who study the Cold War—will be enlightened and should find this book very useful in their studies and classes.

Slavic Review

Sergei I. Zhuk tells the compelling and largely unknown story of how Soviet Americanists both provided a solid foundation for relations between the Soviet Union and the United States throughout much of the Cold War and drew on their knowledge of the United States to erode the ideological blinders inhibiting reform within the Soviet Union. By focusing on Nikolai Bolkhovitinov—a modest, hard-working scholar who was well-regarded for his integrity by Soviet and American colleagues alike—Zhuk amplifies the ways in which large-scale political and social transformations can begin with the most quiet among us. Anyone wanting to understand why the Soviet Union collapsed would do well by reading this study.

Blair Ruble

Zhuk’s Nikolai Bolkhovitinov and American Studies in the USSRis a painstakinglyresearched, if not always carefully edited, intellectual biographyof an academic “liberal Westernizer” (158) whorose to become a leading light among Soviet scholars ofNorth American history and politics.

American Historical Review

Zhuk’s book is an intellectual biography of Nikolai Bolkhovitinov.. . the book is worth reading, both to follow one Soviet academic through his scientific life during the Cold War and to get a sense of the opportunities that opened up for Soviet historians after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History

Trained as an American studies expert in the former Soviet Union, Sergei I. Zhuk has written an engaging and informative account of the shaping of generations of Soviet American specialists, drawing on archives, interviews, and his own experience under the guidance of his teacher, Professor Nikolai Bolkhovitinov.

Hiroaki Kuromiya