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”.

The article examines the period preceding the creation of the discipline of Russian studies on the basis of Slavic studies in the post-war USA. The transition from descriptive Slavic studies, which focused on philology, to rigorous scholarship of regional studies evolved in the difficult circumstances of the World War, the search for a new configuration of the world order, and the transition from the allied relationship between the Soviet Union and the United States to their acute confrontation. Against this background, the initial plans for cooperation with the USSR in the emerging discipline of Russian studies were revised, which, however, did not affect its content as much as might have been expected. This was facilitated by the fact that at the outbreak of the World War II Slavic studies were a very advanced academic discipline with clear principles, which included, alongside objectivity and impartiality, a love of the country under study and not involving politics. An important factor was the activity of Russian émigrés in the United States. The Russian Review, which they established in 1941, actively promoted mutual understanding and created a positive (“real”) image of Russia, while paying attention to an objective and scientific (as opposed to propagandistic) representation of its history. The analysis of publications on Russian history between 1941 and 1947 demonstrates that American discourse on Russia had a sufficient number of formulas and images aimed at bringing the two countries closer together. The Soviet Union also had some potential in this regard, but the transition to sharp confrontation with the West occurred very quickly in a context of increased internal repression. In the US, despite the Cold War, Russian studies steadily developed towards professionalization.