Émigrés, Immigration, and the Historical Profession in the United States Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter Jonathan W. Daly, Pillars of the Profession: The Correspondence of Richard Pipes and Marc Raeff. xx + 433 pp. Leiden: Brill, 2019. ISBN-13 978-9004361669. $147.00. Oleg Igorevich Zakharov, Otkryvaia Ameriku: Monografiia (Discovering America: A Monograph). 214 pp. Moscow: U Nikitskikh vorot, 2019. ISBN-13 978-5000957585. The history of Russian émigré scholars working in the United States is one that touches on the personal and professional lives of many currently practicing historians. Although some readers may find the topic difficult to approach from a strictly scholarly point of view, Oleg Zakharov's Otkryvaia Ameriku is sufficiently removed from the subject(s) of study, in time and space, to qualify as scholarly analysis. Zakharov explores the immigration to the United States of four historians from diverse subfields who belonged to a Russian academic community formed before the Bolshevik Revolution. These include the classical scholar Mikhail Ivanovich Rostovtsev (Michael Rostovtseff), the Byzantine scholar Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Vasil´ev (Alexander Vasiliev), the Russian and Byzantine historian Georgii Vladimirovich Vernadskii (George Vernadsky), and the Russian historian Mikhail Mikhailovich Karpovich (Michael Karpovich). Among Russianists, Vernadsky is remembered for disseminating a Eurasianist interpretation of Russian history and Karpovich for the historians he trained and the émigré publication he edited. All four scholars emigrated (or remained abroad) because of ideological disagreements with the Soviet regime, which made them vulnerable to Bolshevik repressions. All of them also made successful academic careers in the United States, though for a time, they lived with [End Page 660] the expectation or hope that the fall of Soviet power would allow them to return to Russia. Based on letters, memoirs, diaries, scholarly works, and journalistic writings, Zakharov's study covers the period from Rostovtsev's arrival in the United States in 1920 to Vernadsky's death in 1973. The author situates his monograph within scholarship dating from the 1990s that explores how Russian émigrés adapted to the United States. Focused on the everyday life, material and emotional, of the historians and their families, Zakharov identifies four stages in the process of adaptation: the introduction (usually dominated by financial and job insecurity), the stage of tolerance or indulgence (terpimost´), and the final stages of accommodation and assimilation. In taking this approach, Zakharov follows sociological theory and the "social history of science" (32), which lead him to highlight the economic, social, and cultural conditions of the émigrés' lives together with their strategies of survival and integration. After tracing the progression from initial financial hardship to the securing of academic positions to the ability to pursue scholarship and the recognition that they would not be going home, Zakharov seeks to determine whether or not his subjects found fulfillment in their new home. Zakharov's émigré scholars generally preferred European life but benefited from greater professional opportunity in the United States. Their distance from Russia (in contrast to the émigré community that settled in Prague) and the limited bureaucratic demands imposed on them (once the long investigations required to obtain a visa had been completed) also facilitated integration into American society. Although in the United States the émigrés lacked the social networks and government support available in Czechoslovakia, they obtained suitable academic employment prior to the Great Depression. By the 1930s, allowing for individual differences, they achieved a measure of economic security and could afford cars, summer homes, and housekeepers. The émigrés could be critical of American education (describing the universities as factories) and culture (decrying the dominance of sports and cinema), but over time they began to feel comfortable and even expressed satisfaction with their life circumstances. An important aside for American historians is that the émigré scholars came to the United States as members of the elite Russian intelligentsia. They displayed little sympathy for the Russian common people (the muzhik), and they considered scholarship and culture in the United States to be underdeveloped and inferior to what existed in Europe and Russia. Although the émigrés could find Russian communities and neighborhoods in the United States, these were not intelligentsia enclaves but rather home to people from all classes and [End Page 661] occupations. The...