Nikolai Bolkhovitinov and American Studies in the USSR

People's Diplomacy in the Cold War

By (author) Sergei I. Zhuk

Publication date:

03 July 2017

Length of book:

294 pages

Publisher

Lexington Books

Dimensions:

237x160mm
6x9"

ISBN-13: 9781498551243

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.

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

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.