Abstract

The 1940s-1960s is a period of landmark nature in the development of foreign, primarily English-speaking, historiography on Russia. The conditional endpoint of this period is the “protest” year of 1968, which had a profound impact on both the Western educational system and historical profession. From the point of view of the history of the discipline, the main content of the period is the formation of historiographical discourse, which was forged under the influence of and in opposition to the public discourse with its stereotypes and clichés concerning Russia. In any case, the image of Russia was based on its comparison with the West, which, by the end of WWII, was embodied in the US. Russia and its successor, the Soviet Union, were interpreted as the exact opposite of the capitalist “free” West. The problem of “Russia and the West”, central to public discourse in the West, occupied an equally important place in historiography. During the first phase of the Cold War, the public image of Russia was sharply negative in the US and Western Europe. The ideologeme of “Moscow as the Third Rome” became especially popular and presented Russia as a country of a number of “eastern” features, where nothing had changed since the time of Ivan the Terrible. An increasing number of historians and studies dealt with Russia by the end of the 1950s. The theory of modernization and idea of “catch-up development” started to take hold in historical research. Representatives of the first generation of American scholars in the field of Russian history inherited much from Russian émigré historians and pre-revolutionary historiography. In their works of the 1950s-1960s, the 19th -early 20th-century Russia appeared as a country on the European way, though “lagging” in its development. The Western Russian studies set up their own historiographic discourse in the 1960s. Along with the richness of the conceptual apparatus, it demonstrates a high level of professionalism, deep understanding of the history of Russia, and application of a variety of methodological tools. In the unanimous opinion of American scholars, only a historical unpoliticized approach makes it possible to adequately analyze the problem of “Russia and the West”.