America's Soviet Experts in the Cold War

FAIN: FA-53067-07

David C. Engerman
Brandeis University (Waltham, MA 02453-2728)

"Know Your Enemy" analyzes the heart of the intellectual Cold War: Soviet Studies. It shows how much of recent American thought (concepts like totalitarianism, modernization, and literary formalism) emerged out of American scholarship on the USSR. The project runs from WWII military training and intelligence programs through the demise of the USSR, showing how scholars were not passive respondents to the Cold War but active participants in it. "Know Your Enemy" tracks the changing organization of American knowledge, tracing the links between government and academe which first enriched and then impoverished the field. It also examines the surprising ethnic and political diversity of a field long seen as an exemplar of Cold War conformity.