Ivan Kurilla - Böcker

This bold, sweeping history of the turbulent American-Russian relationship is unique in being written jointly by American and Russian authors. David Foglesong, Ivan Kurilla and Victoria Zhuravleva together reveal how and why America and Russia shifted from being warm friends and even tacit allies to being ideological rivals, geopolitical adversaries, and demonic foils used in the construction or affirmation of their national identities. As well as examining diplomatic, economic, and military interactions between the two countries, they illuminate how filmmakers, cartoonists, writers, missionaries and political activists have admired, disparaged, lionized, envied, satirized, loved, and hated people in the other land. The book shows how the stories they told and the images they created have shaped how the two countries have understood each other from the eighteenth century to the present and how often their violent clashes have arisen from mutual misunderstanding and misrepresentations.

The contributors in this interdisciplinary collection address the problem of interconnection between the study of the “Other,” either Russian or American, and the shaping of national identities in the two countries at different stages of US–Russian relations. The focus of research interests were typically determined by the political and social debates in scholars’ native countries. In this book, leading Russian and American scholars analyze the problems arising from these intersections of academic, political, and sociocultural contexts and the implicit biases they entail. The book is divided into two parts, the first being a historical overview of past configurations of the interrelationship between fields and agendas, and the second covering the role of institutionalized area studies in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.In both parts the role of the “human factor” in the study of mutual representations is elucidating.

Through a constructivist approach, this book views the era of the American Civil War as a transnational phenomenon, emphasizing its role in shaping national identities and historical memory worldwide.Extending identity narratives across time, contributors from Brazil, Canada, France, Mexico, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States analyze a wide range of primary sources, including diplomatic correspondence, periodicals, memoirs, intellectual writings, fiction, political cartoons, and murals in order to untangle the international impact of the U.S. Civil War. The countries selected for analysis vary typologically, yet each provides particularly rich material for reconstructing national identity discourses—within a transatlantic framework, as explored in the first two parts of the volume, and within the broader context of the American continents, as addressed in the third part. Russia is treated in a separate section as a distinctive case—at once European, “the Other Europe,” and non-European—not only due to the parallels in the domestic and international developments of the Russian Empire and the United States, but also because of the enduring impact of the American Civil War on bilateral relations and mutual perceptions. Taken together, the volume’s three sections intersect and reinforce one another, demonstrating how both the Union and the Confederacy were invoked as symbolic Others to shape national self-understandings, grounded in evolving configurations of interests, ideologies, and values.

A special correspondent of The New York Times, Carl W. Ackerman traveled from Vladivostok to Irkutsk to Omsk to Ekaterinburg in the fall of 1918 in the midst of the Russian Civil War. He met with officers of the American and Japanese expeditionary forces, with members of the Czecho-Slovak corps fighting the Red Army, with ministers of the democratic Russian government in Omsk, and with military dictator Admiral Alexander Kolchak, who became the ruler of anti-Bolshevik Russia after a coup that displaced the Democrats. In fact, Ackerman was the first foreign journalist who visited the Ipatiev House in Eka-terinburg, the place of Tsar Nicholas II and his family’s imprisonment until they were murdered in July 1918. With his notes and newspaper articles to consult, Ackerman wrote Trailing the Bolsheviki soon after his return to the United States. His book was one of the very first American accounts of the Russian Civil War in Siberia and the Far East, providing his readers with the wealth of his observation and the entertainment of his travel feats. Moreover, Ackerman was among the first Americans to notice the basic split between the new political system materializing in Russia and the universalism of the Woodrow Wilson approach. Thus, he became one of the proponents of the first Red Scare and an early forerunner of the Cold War.

A special correspondent of The New York Times, Carl W. Ackerman traveled from Vladivostok to Irkutsk to Omsk to Ekaterinburg in the fall of 1918 in the midst of the Russian Civil War. He met with officers of the American and Japanese expeditionary forces, with members of the Czecho-Slovak corps fighting the Red Army, with ministers of the democratic Russian government in Omsk, and with military dictator Admiral Alexander Kolchak, who became the ruler of anti-Bolshevik Russia after a coup that displaced the Democrats. In fact, Ackerman was the first foreign journalist who visited the Ipatiev House in Eka-terinburg, the place of Tsar Nicholas II and his family’s imprisonment until they were murdered in July 1918. With his notes and newspaper articles to consult, Ackerman wrote Trailing the Bolsheviki soon after his return to the United States. His book was one of the very first American accounts of the Russian Civil War in Siberia and the Far East, providing his readers with the wealth of his observation and the entertainment of his travel feats. Moreover, Ackerman was among the first Americans to notice the basic split between the new political system materializing in Russia and the universalism of the Woodrow Wilson approach. Thus, he became one of the proponents of the first Red Scare and an early forerunner of the Cold War.