As World War II came to a close and the Cold War set in, the United States had precious little knowledge about its new enemy and was poorly equipped to comprehend the new global threat. How did America learn about the Soviet Union? In this book, David EnGerman, an award-winning historian of American foreign policy, Russian history, and international history, shows how a network of scholars, soldiers, spies, and philanthropists created an enterprise (known as Sovietology) to understand and shape American foreign policy towards the USSR. This group brought together some of the nation's best minds from the left, right,and center of the political spectrum, colorful individuals ranging from George Kennan and Margaret Mead to Zbigniew Brzezinski to Condoleezza Rice, to historians Sheila Fitzpatrick and Richard Pipes. Together this network created a knowledge base that helped define, shape, and fight the Cold War. While the reputation of Sovietology has been tarnished because of ideological disputes, EnGerman contends that Sovietologists deserve a good deal of credit for understanding the ethnic and class divisions, internal power struggles, and economic failures that led to the collapse of the Communist system. And this group, EnGerman argues, forever changed the relationship between the government and academe, connecting the Pentagon with the Ivy League in a way that continues to thisday, most notably with current events in the Middle East. Drawing on archivalresearch, including personally held papers, and extensive interviews with many key players, this book will be written in such a way to appeal to those interested in the history of the relationship between the US and the Soviet Union.It should also have special appeal for institutions that actively participated (and funded) Sovietology, such as the RAND Corporation, the Kennan Institute, the Woodrow Wilson Center, military intelligence schools, and Harvard's Russian Research Center. INDICE: Introduction: Knowing the Cold War Enemy; Part I: A Field in Formation; 1: The Wartime Roots of Soviet Studies Training; 2: Social Science Serves the State in War and Cold War; 3: Institution-Building on a National Scale; Part II: Growth and Dispersion; 4: The Soviet Economy and the Measuring-Rodof Money; 5: The Lost Opportunities of Slavic Literary Studies; 6: Russian History as Past Politics; 7: The Soviet Union as a Modern Society; 8: Soviet Politics and the Dynamics of Totalitarianism; Part III: Crisis, Conflict, and Collapse; 9: The Dual Crises of Russian Studies; 10: Right Turn into Halls of Power; 11: Left Turn into the Ivory Tower; 12: Perestroika and the Collapse of Soviet Studies; Essay on Sources
- ISBN: 978-0-19-532486-0
- Editorial: Oxford University
- Encuadernacion: Cartoné
- Páginas: 469
- Fecha Publicación: 14/01/2010
- Nº Volúmenes: 1
- Idioma: Inglés