Nikolai Bolkhovitinov Analyzes the US Enemy in the USSR

Nikolai Nikolaevich Bolkhovitinov (1930–2008) was one of the most influential Soviet historians of US studies.¹ After graduating from the Soviet cadre factory MGIMO (the Moscow State Institute for International Relations), he wrote his doctoral thesis about the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 and qualified as a professor in 1965 on the subject of Russian-American relations between 1775 and 1815. In the heyday of the Cold War, Bolkhovitinov found himself at the beginning of a scientific debate with the class enemy. He ranks among the founders of US studies in the USSR, and his biography provides fascinating insights into this area of knowledge. The perspective is skillfully chosen: by exploring the life of the influential historian, personal connections between the continents and over the confrontation lines of ideologies can be deconstructed. With this approach the book joins a series of recent publications about the personal ties of historians, scientists, and diplomats during the Cold War.²

Sergei I. Zhuk, one of Bolkhovitinov's students, acknowledges the importance of his teacher's life in this book. Using numerous unpublished quotations, interviews, memories of conversations, e-mails, phone calls, and photographs (xii–xiv), he focuses on two things: the man Bolkhovitinov and the development of US expertise in the Soviet Union. Chronologically structured in eight chapters, Zhuk's book begins by analyzing the institutionalization of US studies in the USSR and the Soviet interpretation of the United States under Stalin. He then follows Bolkhovitinov's academic and private life from birth to death. Very instructive is Zhuk's epilogue with its remarks about the state business in Russian/Soviet historical perspectives on the United States from Nicholas I to Putin.

Zhuk's book is an intellectual biography of Nikolai Bolkhovitinov. Of course, Zhuk expresses his respect, praising his mentor's productivity and contribution to Soviet US Studies. At times, this tribute seems overemphasized. Reading the book, one clearly sense how important Bolkhovitinov was to Zhuk, who today teaches at Ball State University. Nonetheless, the book is worth reading, both to follow one Soviet academic through his scientific life during the Cold War and to get a sense of the opportunities that opened up for Soviet historians after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Bolkhovitinov was aware of the differences in daily life between the United States and the USSR, and he knew how reactionary the Soviet Union was when it came to the concerns of ordinary people. He discerned these things from reading US scholarship and by studying the American Way of Life. Hence I think one of the key scenes in his biography and of the Cold War lies in an early exhibition visit: with his father, Nikolai Fedosievich, Bolkhovitinov visited the American National Exhibition in Sokol´niki Park in Moscow. His father got the tickets due to valuable contacts. Both men walked past a long queue of people and into the exhibition, where they saw American home appliances—"a fascination with the rationality and effectiveness of the US economy, which satisfied the demands of the ordinary people rather than only the interests of the military industrial complex" (98). To his colleagues at the institute, Bolkhovitinov explained: "This visit showed how the American people live and what we, the Soviet people, had to borrow from the modern American economy to improve and make our socialist life better."

With his wife Liudmila, he enjoyed watching American movies that were shown in Moscow as part of Khrushchev's new Cultural Diplomacy. He was a film enthusiast who particularly appreciated Hollywood movies (79–80 and passim). He was convinced that the people in the United States led a comfortable life, but he himself would never renounce the Soviet way of life. In the 1950s, he sincerely believed that "the socialist system is the best possible form of the organization of human society on the planet" (102). He was not the only one who...