New Thinking and the Study of the History of the United States in the Soviet Union

Abstract

For decades, the theme of America has been one of the most popular in Soviet historical literature. Since the early 1970s, hundreds of books and articles have been published every year on the history of the United States and its presentday role in the world. Specialized journals have appeared: USA: Economics, Politics, Ideology, American Yearbook, and Problems of American Studies. Hundreds of specialists in American history have become doctors of sciences in the USSR. The successes and achievements of these Americanists are well known.1 This article is not about those achievements and successes, but rather about shortcomings and unsolved problems, about blanks or black holes in the study of U.S. history. The quantitative growth of our American studies is not, unfortunately, accompanied by an improvement in the quality and application of modern research methods, nor by growth at the professional and scholarly level. Moreover, although the academic merit of many of the theses on the history of the U.S. presented for scientific degrees is questionable, I do not remember a single case of any thesis on the history of the United States being rejected, or a negative review of a book written by an Americanist. The absence of serious criticism and the urge to publish has led to the multiplication of poorly written and compilatory works, many of which have been gathering dust for decades in bookshops (even in the context of a great shortage of books in general). But perhaps the gravest shortcoming of Soviet Americanists is their tendentiousness. A denigrating and vituperative approach has excluded comprehensive and objective investigation, and reduced some fields of historyespecially, modern American foreign policy-to vacuous insubstantiality. Works by these scholars tend to accuse the United States and its leaders of nearly all mortal sins and thus to portray the U.S. to Soviet readers as a persistent enemy. As N. Popov recently pointed out with justification: