SUMMARY:

In the introduction to the archival section, Alla Zeide reconstructs obscure and misinterpreted moments in the history of the Russian Review. The section compares the emergence of this journal with that of the Slavic Review in the context of three other Russia-oriented periodicals in the Anglo-Saxon world, the first Russian Review (1912–1914) and the Slavonic and East European Review (1922–to the present), and the New York-based second Russian Review (1916–1918) founded by Leo Pasvolsky. The present Russian Review (RR) was founded and run by Russian émigrés, with the participation of American-born scholars. Contrary to the official story of the journal’s early history as composed by some of RR’s later editors, which excludes its important émigré legacy, Zeide shows why this legacy is in fact crucial for the understanding of the journal’s genesis, although RR by no means was an émigré publication. It was an American journal about Russia, the Soviet Union, and Russian emigration in the United States, and as such, is an inseparable part of the field of Russian studies. RR did not simply play an important role in the history of Russian studies in the United States but in many ways embodied this history with all of its complexities and problems. These problems include the complicated and often contradictory self-identifications and orientations of the émigrés with respect to different political factions of the emigration, the Soviet Union, or the academic and larger societies in the United States. These complexities were also further exacerbated by the lines of division within the Russian émigré community: was “Russianness” to be defined through support of the Soviet Union during the war? Did opposition to the Soviet regime preclude this support? Was the critical attitude toward the Soviet regime legitimate during the war, particularly once the Soviet Union and the United States became allies? But the same lines of division also defined those Americans who contributed to the journal and it is in this sense that the RR embodied the history of Russian studies in the United States.