S ergei I. Z huk . Nikolai Bolkhovitinov and American Studies in the USSR

Since the mid-nineteenth century, it has been commonplace to regard the intellectual outlooks and allegiances of the Russian intelligentsia as divided into two major streams: on the one hand there are the Slavophiles (slavianofily), patriotic intellectuals who reject the Western path of development and look to Russian native culture, religion, and institutions to invigorate Russian state and society; and on the other there are the Westernizers (zapadniki), reformist or revolutionary intellectuals who repudiate Russian traditions and look to the West to reform and reinvigorate Russia. Such a bifurcation certainly carried over into the Soviet era. Indeed, during the Stalin period, the Soviet intelligentsia, like their political master, became increasingly Slavophile, especially if they wanted to survive. However, in the post-Stalin period, during the intellectual “thaw” following Nikita Khrushchev’s “secret speech” denunciation of Stalin’s “cult of the personality” in 1956, neo-Westernizers began to emerge from the shadows: those who increasingly gazed westward for inspiration for Soviet reform. Partially retreating in the Leonid Brezhnev years, they reemerged with fanfare in 1985 with Mikhail Gorbachev’s reformist declarations for perestroika (reconstruction) of and glasnost’ (openness) in the Soviet Union. Sergei I. Zhuk’s Nikolai Bolkhovitinov and American Studies in the USSR is a painstakingly researched, if not always carefully edited, intellectual biography of an academic “liberal Westernizer” (158) who rose to become a leading light among Soviet scholars of North American history and politics.

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