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American Sovietology: In Service of Mars and Minerva?

Know Your Enemy: The Rise and Fall of America’s Soviet Experts is a work of remarkable depth and breadth. In twelve succinct chapters organized in three parts, David C. Engerman explains the formation, elaboration, and near demolition of the field of Sovietology, drawing on extensive research in archival collections, oral histories, and an extraordinary swath of scholarship. Engerman’s study begins toward the close of WWII, when hostile suspicions were rising between Russia and the Allies. Stalin’s takeover of Eastern Europe prompted Winston Churchill in a 1946 speech in Fulton, Missouri, to deploy his powerful metaphor of “the iron curtain.” The following year, financier Bernard Baruch and journalist Walter Lippmann clinched the rigidity and the feel of this metaphor in a fresh way by using the term “cold war” to characterize relations between the Soviet Union and the United States. At the time, most Americans knew little about their nation’s new enemy, their WWII ally. Worse yet, most U.S. policymakers were remarkably uninformed. In 1948, the newly organized CIA employed only thirty-eight Soviet analysts, a mere twelve of whom were Russian-speaking experts (with a lone Ph.D). Washington realized the nation suffered from an acute lack of Soviet expertise. During WWII the U.S. government tapped available academic expertise, and, as Engerman shows, this experience shaped the postwar period’s unprecedented intellectual mobilization. Federal and nonprofit organizations quickly collaborated to fund relevant studies in universities and research centers. An interdisciplinary field of Soviet Studies, or Sovietology, was created from scratch through tightly knit groups of scholars, soldiers, spies, students, diplomats, foreign service officers, knowledgeable laymen, and philanthropists. While the U.S. military built the machinery of defenses, a new network of analysts compiled the knowledge vital to the policy of deterrence. At the same time, diplomats puzzled over Soviet intentions. The challenge seemed urgent. American leaders demanded wide-ranging studies to under-