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  • Know Your Enemy: The Rise and Fall of America's Soviet Experts by David C. Engerman
  • Bruce Parrott
David C. Engerman , Know Your Enemy: The Rise and Fall of America's Soviet Experts. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.

One serious weakness of most social-science research is that investigators know too little about the historical context and development of their own specialized fields of study. Without a sound knowledge of the broad political and intellectual trends that shaped prior scholarship, they have trouble viewing their own work from a larger critical perspective. This problem is compounded by scholars' natural tendency to view the internal history of their specialty from an angle that gives pride of place to their own writings and emphasizes the novelty of their current research.

Until now, scholars working on Soviet and Russian topics have lacked a comprehensive account that contextualizes trends within their chosen academic field. Abbott Gleason's Totalitarianism: The Inner History of the Cold War shed valuable light on a central issue in the study of Soviet politics, and over the years numerous other publications have usefully explored the achievements and shortcomings of researchers working on the Soviet system from other disciplinary perspectives. But none of these writings has provided a reliable historical account of the development of Soviet Studies as a whole, or of the interplay between Soviet Studies and broader political and intellectual trends in the United States during the Cold War.

This lacuna makes the publication of David Engerman's Know Your Enemy: The Rise and Fall of America's Soviet Experts especially welcome. The book treats the interaction between U.S. politics and scholarship on the USSR with a depth and subtlety unmatched by previous writers. It is a fitting sequel to Engerman's Modernization from the Other Shore: American Intellectuals and the Romance of Russian Development, which traced U.S. attitudes toward the USSR during the interwar period. Know Your Enemy is based on a sophisticated knowledge of postwar American scholarship on the Soviet Union in five academic disciplines—history, literary studies, economics, sociology, and political science. The chapters devoted to each of these disciplines are both nuanced and [End Page 159] penetrating—making them an impressive intellectual accomplishment. Drawing extensively on archival materials, the book also presents a revealing institutional analysis of how Soviet Studies developed under U.S. government sponsorship and changed over time. Engerman argues that the field grew rapidly in the 1940s and 1950s, flourished in the 1960s, and then declined during the USSR's final two decades.

The central theme of the book is the complex relationship between "Mars and Minerva"—the pursuit of knowledge relevant to the needs of U.S. policymakers versus the pursuit of knowledge of the Soviet system for its own sake. Soviet Studies first crystallized in the Office of Strategic Services during World War II, and the field expanded rapidly after the war as the U.S. government sought a better understanding of its new rival for global hegemony. Fortunately for scholarship, most of the entrepreneurial academics and government officials who championed Soviet Studies construed the boundaries of the field to encompass not only the USSR's current policies but also its history, economy, society, and culture. This broad definition of the field mitigated the tensions between scholars and government administrators. One significant consequence was that several of the field's academic pioneers were disciplinary specialists who were drawn to study the USSR as a distinctive model of political and social organization that constituted an important subject for the development of their particular discipline. This pattern was exemplified by Alex Inkeles in sociology and Adam Ulam in the study of Soviet foreign policy.

For several decades, the connections between scholars and government policymakers were largely symbiotic. Two major examples are the government-funded Refugee Interview Project that analyzed the attitudes of displaced Soviet citizens after World War II and the Soviet Interview Project of the late 1970s that investigated the attitudes of Soviet Jews who had been allowed to emigrate to the West as a result of superpower détente. Although the close linkage with the government provoked some frictions, it did not produce a homogeneous...

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