The Americanist community played a vital role in the Cold War, as well as in large part directing the cultural consumption of Soviet society and shaping perceptions of the US. To shed light onto this important, yet under-studied, academic community, Sergei Zhuk here explores the personal histories of prominent Soviet Americanists, considering the myriad cultural influences - from John Wayne's bravado in the film Stagecoach to Miles Davis - that shaped their identities, careers and academic interests. Zhuk's compelling account draws on a wide range of understudied archival documents, periodicals, letters and diaries as well as more than 100 exclusive interviews with prominent Americanists to take the reader from the post-war origins of American studies, via the extremes of the Cold War, thaw and perestroika, to Putin's Russia. Soviet Americana is a comprehensive insight into shifting attitudes towards the US throughout the twentieth century and an essential resource for all Soviet and Cold War historians.

"Russian Federation, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, History and Records Department" -- p [vi].

The Americanist community played a vital role in the Cold War, as well as in large part directing the cultural consumption of Soviet society and shaping perceptions of the US. To shed light onto this important, yet under-studied, academic community, Sergei Zhuk here explores the personal histories of prominent Soviet Americanists, considering the myriad cultural influences - from John Wayne's bravado in the film Stagecoach to Miles Davis - that shaped their identities, careers and academic interests. Zhuk's compelling account draws on a wide range of understudied archival documents, periodicals, letters and diaries as well as more than 100 exclusive interviews with prominent Americanists to take the reader from the post-war origins of American studies, via the extremes of the Cold War, thaw and perestroika, to Putin's Russia. Soviet Americana is a comprehensive insight into shifting attitudes towards the US throughout the twentieth century and an essential resource for all Soviet and Cold War historians.

This book tells the full story of the earliest Soviet-American ballet exchanges, in which the governments of the USSR and the United States sent their most prestigious ballet companies on tours to the other country. Author Anne Searcy draws on Soviet- and American- archival sources and shows the spectacular misunderstandings that happened when audiences trained to view one type of ballet saw a very different style.

For half a century, the United States and the Soviet Union were in conflict. But how and where did the Cold War begin? Jamil Hasanli answers these intriguing questions in At the Dawn of the Cold War. He argues that the intergenerational crisis over Iranian Azerbaijan (1945–1946) was the first event that brought the Soviet Union to a confrontation with the United States and Britain after the period of cooperation between them during World War II. Based on top-secret archive materials from Soviet and Azerbaijani archives as well as documents from American, British, and Iranian sources, the book details Iranian Azerbaijan's independence movement, which was backed by the USSR, the Soviet struggle for oil in Iran, and the American and British reactions to these events. These events were the starting point of the longer historical period of unarmed conflict between the Soviets and the West that is now known as the Cold War. This book is a major contribution to our understanding of the Cold War and international politics following WWII.

If you were an independent, adventurous, liberated American woman in the 1920s or 1930s where might you have sought escape from the constraints and compromises of bourgeois living? Paris and the Left Bank quickly come to mind. But would you have ever thought of Russia and the wilds of Siberia? This choice was not as unusual as it seems now. As Julia L. Mickenberg uncovers in American Girls in Red Russia, there is a forgotten counterpoint to the story of the Lost Generation: beginning in the late nineteenth century, Russian revolutionary ideology attracted many women, including suffragists, reformers, educators, journalists, and artists, as well as curious travelers. Some were famous, like Isadora Duncan or Lillian Hellman; some were committed radicals, though more were just intrigued by the “Soviet experiment.” But all came to Russia in search of social arrangements that would be more equitable, just, and satisfying. And most in the end were disillusioned, some by the mundane realities, others by horrifying truths. Mickenberg reveals the complex motives that drew American women to Russia as they sought models for a revolutionary new era in which women would be not merely independent of men, but also equal builders of a new society. Soviet women, after all, earned the right to vote in 1917, and they also had abortion rights, property rights, the right to divorce, maternity benefits, and state-supported childcare. Even women from Soviet national minorities—many recently unveiled—became public figures, as African American and Jewish women noted. Yet as Mickenberg’s collective biography shows, Russia turned out to be as much a grim commune as a utopia of freedom, replete with economic, social, and sexual inequities. American Girls in Red Russia recounts the experiences of women who saved starving children from the Russian famine, worked on rural communes in Siberia, wrote for Moscow or New York newspapers, or performed on Soviet stages. Mickenberg finally tells these forgotten stories, full of hope and grave disappointments.

Americans Experience Russia analyzes how American scholars, journalists, and artists experienced and interpreted Russia/the Soviet Union over the last century. It critically engages with postcolonial theories which posit that a self-valorizing, unmediated west dictated the colonial encounter. In examining the fiction, film, journalism, treatises, and histories Americans produced out of their 'Russian experience, ' this volume closely analyzes these texts, locates them in their sociopolitical context, and gauges how their producers' profession, politics, gender, class, and interaction with native Russian interpreters conditioned their authored responses to Russian/Soviet reality.

Originally published in 1995. In the early 1970s, largely as a result of the debilitating struggle in Vietnam, the United States began to reassess and redefine its basic approach to East-West relations. At the same time, the Soviet Union was awakening to the liabilities that a continuing and unregulated state of hostility would impose on its own internal and external agenda. Keith Nelson details the circumstances and traces the steps that led to the first significant accommodation and easing of tension between the superpowers during the Cold War. "In this important study, Keith Nelson explains the detente period in an imaginative, convincing, and impressively scholarly manner. Although there have been scores of books and memoirs on the subject, none have done the job quite like Nelson's. In particular, he has used post-glasnost Russian memoirs and monographs—and, especially, his own interviews with such key players as Dobrynin and Arbatov—to present one of the most intelligent Kremlinological studies I have ever seen." —Melvin Small, Wayne State University

High adventure in this account of a group of Russians and Americans (some of whom were Eskimos) and their Arctic expedition from Siberia to Alaska.

The author sheds light on a little-known chapter of U.S.-Soviet relations, using diaries, memoirs, and letters to recall the efforts of nearly 300 relief workers in easing the suffering of Russians during one of the country's worst famines.