Know Your Enemy : The Rise and Fall of America's Soviet Experts

As World War II ended, few Americans in government or universities knew much about the Soviet Union. As David Engerman shows in this book, a network of scholars, soldiers, spies, and philanthropists created an enterprise known as Soviet Studies to fill in this dangerous gap in American knowledge. This group brought together some of the nation''s best minds from the left, right, and center, colorful and controversial individuals ranging from George Kennan to Margaret Mead to Zbigniew Brzezinski, not to mention historians Sheila Fitzpatrick and Richard Pipes. Together they created the knowledge that helped fight the Cold War and define Cold War thought. Soviet Studies became a vibrant intellectual enterprise, studying not just the Soviet threat, but Soviet society and culture at a time when many said that these were contradictions in terms, as well as Russian history and literature. And this broad network, Engerman argues, forever changed the relationship between the government and academe, connecting the Pentagon with the ivory tower in ways that still matter today.

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 this day, most notably with current events in the Middle East. Drawing on archival research, 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.