| This dissertation is a cultural history of how Americans' understanding of the Soviet Union developed through encounter, experience, intellectual tradition and rumor. How did Americans understand a society closed off to them? And how did that understanding develop as the Soviet Union opened its borders through de-Stalinization, detente, glasnost and perestroika? Drawing from the accounts, diaries, correspondence and memoirs of a cross-section of Americans, I argue that the Cold War developed as a tenuous narrative to contain such differences between Russia and the Soviet Union, history and ideology, nationalism and communism, foreign and domestic, war and peace.;I argue that at the heart of this understanding of Sovietism was a bifurcated vision of confusion and communion, revulsion and empathy. The most common depiction (sometimes racial, sometimes humanistic) was Americans' identification of Russians as innocents enslaved by the Soviet state, as history hijacked by ideology. Through the Khrushchev era, Soviets appeared most often as pitiful characters too weak or too cowed to overthrow their communist minders. While adopting a more empathic valence, this conception intensified in the era of detente. In dances like the twist and music like rock `n roll, Americans saw Russians as kindred spirits trying to break free. In dissidents they found kindred minds. To assess the US-Soviet relationship anew, my dissertation employs methodologies of European and postcolonial historians, scholars of photography and painting, theorists of race and literary critics. Beyond Clifford Geertz's focus on "thick description" of cultural practices, my dissertation is concerned with what I call thick narrative; that is, the construction of stories over time, locally, nationally and transnationally, the incongruities between the serious and the play, the high and the low, the echoes and the shouts, where stories cohered and when they fell apart. |
