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showered their blessings upon the countries of western Europe and North America, those institutions were destined to be carried to the furthest reaches of the earth, and bring light to those living in darkness.²

      Those sentences retain their relevance at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Western, particularly American, attitudes to and understandings of Russia and the Soviet Union unfolded in the last hundred years within a broad discourse of optimism about human progress, that relied on the comforting thought that capitalist democracy represented the best possible solution to human society, if not the “end of history.” Within that universe of ideas, Russians were constructed as people fundamentally different from Westerners, with deep, largely immutable national characteristics. Ideas of a “Russian soul” or an essentially spiritual or collectivist nature guided the interpretations and policy prescriptions of foreign observers. This tradition dates back to the very first travelers to Muscovy. In his Notes Upon Russia (1517–1549), Sigismund von Herberstein wrote, “The people enjoy slavery more than freedom,” an observation echoed by Adam Olearius in the seventeenth century, who saw Russians as “comfortable in slavery” and requiring “cudgels and whips” to make them work. Montesquieu and others believed that national character was determined by climate and geography, and the harsh environment in which Russians lived had produced a barbarous and uncivilized people, ungovernable, lacking discipline, lazy, superstitious, subject to despotism, yet collective, passionate, poetical and musical. The adjectives differed from writer to writer, yet they clustered around the instinctual and emotional pole of human behavior rather than the cognitive and rational. Race and blood, more than culture and choice, decided what Russians were able to do. In order to make them civilized and modern, it was often asserted, force and rule from above was unavoidable. Ironically, the spokesmen of civilization justified the use of violence and terror on the backward and passive people of Russia as the necessary means to modernity.

      The most influential works on Russia in the early twentieth century were the great classics of nineteenth-century travelers and scholars, like the Marquis de Custine, Baron August von Haxthausen, Donald Mackenzie Wallace, Alfred Rambaud, Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu, and George Kennan, the best-selling author of Siberia and the Exile System.³ France offered the most professional academic study of Russia, and the influential Leroy-Beaulieu’s eloquent descriptions of the patience, submissiveness, lack of individuality, and fatalism of the Russians contributed to the ubiquitous sense of a Slavic character that contrasted with the Gallic, Anglo-Saxon, or Teutonic. American writers, like Kennan and Eugene Schuyler, subscribed equally to such ideas of nationality, but rather than climate or geography as causative, they emphasized the role of institutions, like tsarism, in generating a national character that in some ways was mutable.⁴ Kennan first went to Russia in 1865, became an amateur ethnographer, and grew to admire the courageous revolutionaries (“educated, reasonable, self-controlled gentlemen, not different in any essential respect from one’s self”) that he encountered in Siberian exile.⁵ For his sympathies, the tsarist government banned him from Russia, placing him in a long line of interpreters whose exposures of Russian life and politics would be so punished.⁶

      Russia as an autocracy remained the political “other” of Western democracy and republicanism, and it was with great joy and relief that liberals, including President Woodrow Wilson, greeted the February Revolution of 1917 as “the impossible dream” realized. Now the new Russian government could be enlisted in the Great War to make “the world safe for democracy.”⁷ But the Bolshevik seizure of power in Petrograd turned the liberal world upside down. For Wilson’s Secretary of State, Robert Lansing, Bolshevism was “the worst form of anarchism,” “the madness of famished men.”⁸ In the years immediately following the October Revolution, the first accounts of the new regime reaching the West were by journalists and diplomats. The radical freelance journalist John Reed, his wife and fellow radical Louise Bryant, Bessie Beatty of the San Francisco Bulletin, the British journalist Arthur Ransome, and Congregational minister Albert Rhys Williams all witnessed events in 1917 and conveyed the immediacy and excitement of the revolutionary days to an eager public back home.⁹ After several trips to Russia, the progressive writer Lincoln Steffens told his friends, “I have seen the future and it works.” Enthusiasm for the revolution propelled liberals and socialists further to the left, and small Communist parties emerged from the radical wing of Social Democracy. From the right came sensationalist accounts of atrocities, debauchery, and tyranny, leavened with the repeated assurance that the days of the Bolsheviks were numbered. L’Echo de Paris and the London Morning Post, as well as papers throughout Western Europe and the United States, wrote that the Bolsheviks were “servants of Germany” or “Russian Jews of German extraction.”¹⁰ The New York Times so frequently predicted the fall of the Communists that two young journalists, Walter Lippmann and Charles Merz, exposed their misreadings in a long piece in The New Republic.¹¹

      The Western reaction to the Bolsheviks approached panic. Officials and advisors to the Wilson administration spoke of Russia as drunk, the country as mad, taken over by a mob, the people victims of an “outburst of elemental forces,” “sheep without a shepherd,” a terrible fate for a country in which “there were simply too few brains per square mile.”¹² Slightly more generously, the American ambassador David Francis told the State Department that the Bolsheviks might be just what Russia needed: strong men for a people that do not value human life and “will obey strength … and nothing else.”¹³ To allay fears of domestic revolution the American government deported over 200 political radicals in December 1919 to the land of the Soviets on the Buford, an old ship dubbed “the Red Ark.” The virus of Bolshevism seemed pervasive, and powerful voices raised fears of international subversion. The arsenal of the Right included the familiar weapon of anti-Semitism. In early 1920, Winston Churchill told demonstrators that the Bolsheviks “believe in the international Soviet of the Russian and Polish Jews.”¹⁴ Baron N. Wrangel opened his account of the Bolshevik revolution with the words “The sons of Israel had carried out their mission; and Germany’s agents, having become the representatives of Russia, signed peace with their patron at Brest-Litovsk.”¹⁵

      Western reading publics, hungry for news and analyses of the enigmatic social experiment underway in Soviet Russia, turned to journalists and scholars for information. The philosopher Bertrand Russell, who had accompanied a delegation of the British Labour Party to Russia in 1919, rejected Bolshevism for two reasons: “the price mankind must pay to achieve communism by Bolshevik methods is too terrible; and secondly, … even after paying the price I do not believe the result would be what the Bolsheviks profess to desire.”¹⁶ Other radical dissenters included the anarchist Emma Goldman, who spent nearly two years in Bolshevik Russia only to break decisively with the Soviets after the repression of the Kronstadt mutiny in March 1921.¹⁷

      The historian Bernard Pares (1867–1949) had begun visiting Russia regularly from 1898, and reported on the beginnings of parliamentarianism in Russia after 1905. As British military observer to the Russian army he remained in the country from the outbreak of World War I until the early days of the Soviet government. After service as British commissioner to Admiral Kolchak’s anti-Bolshevik White government, Pares taught Russian history at the University of London, where he founded The Slavonic Review in 1922 and directed the new School of Slavonic Studies. A friend of the liberal leader Pavl Miliukov and supporter of constitutional monarchy in Russia, by the 1930s Pares had become more sympathetic to the Soviets and an advocate of Anglo-Russian rapprochement. Like most of his contemporaries, Pares believed that climate and environment shaped the Russians. “The happy instinctive character of clever children,” he wrote, “so open, so kindly and so attractive, still remains; but the interludes of depression or idleness are longer than is normal.”¹⁸ In part because of his reliance on the concept of “national character,” widely accepted among scholars, journalists, and diplomats, Pares’s influence remained strong, particularly during the years of the Anglo-American-Soviet alliance. But with the coming of the Cold War, he, like others “soft on communism,” was denounced as an apologist for Stalin.¹⁹

      In the United States the most important of the few scholars studying Russia were Archibald Cary Coolidge (1866–1928) at Harvard and Samuel Northrup Harper (1882–1943)

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