O. V. Bol'shakova . Vlast' i politika v Rossii XIX–nachala XX veka: Amerikanskaia istoriografiia [Power and Politics in Russia in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries: American Historiography]. Moscow : Nauka . 2008 . Pp. 262. $16.50.

Abstract

We are long past the day when U.S. historians writing about Russia routinely had their works ignored, dismissed as “bourgeois scholarship,” or, worse, deemed rank falsifications by Soviet officials. Yet almost twenty years after the fall of communism, the efforts of American rossievedy are often unknown to their Russian colleagues or poorly integrated into their works. In the book under review, O. V. Bol'shakova undertakes to remedy this situation. Bol'shakova limits her purview to works dealing with the tsarist government and the process of reform during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She begins by briefly sketching the origins of Russian studies in the United States in the early twentieth century and quickly moves to the years after World War II, examining some of the reigning paradigms of the 1940s and 1950s (oriental despotism and totalitarianism) that purported to explain the nature and development of Russia and the Soviet Union. But Bol'shakova gives the most attention to the contributions of Michael Karpovich, whose Harvard seminars produced the leaders of the first generation of American Russian scholars: Leopold Haimson, Martin Malia, Richard Pipes, Marc Raeff, Nicholas Riasanovsky, Donald Treadgold, and others. Their teaching and research over the next decades would define the field.