JFK Through Russian Eyes

Abstract

Over the last few years a number of American scholars have made the casual observation, based on brief interactions with their Russian counterparts, that it is very difficult to get Soviet specialists in United States studies interested in discussing American politics. To Americans who specialize in American politics, this is invariably puzzling and disconcerting, for many of us see in the American political system a complexity that poses, no less to us than to others, a formidable array of intellectual challenges. Consequently we are on the whole eager to learn what the fresh perspectives of outsiders can offer to our common understanding of the ins and outs of American politics. With a fair frequency, we are richly rewarded by foreign observers: Tocqueville, Bryce, and Ostrogorskii are of course still read and pondered by American specialists on America. In our own day we have been enlightened by the late Denis Brogan, by Henry Fairlie, Max Freedman, M. J. C. Vile, and many others, mostly journalists, who have successfully turned their hands to explaining America to Americans, as well as to readers in their own homelands. Not all their observations have by any means been flattering, but a warts-and-all portrait is the highest compliment an inquiring visitor can pay a society that purports to be open. American politics specialists at the U.S.A. Institute of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, such as Anatolii A. Gromyko, have not yet entered into