Perhaps I could start this review with a little history. Russia and the USA spent much of the nineteenth century enlarging their borders. They pushed east and west respectively. However their activities have been differently remembered. Russia's activities in Siberia and Central Asia are called imperialism whereas US expansion to the Pacific has been cloaked in the mantle of “Manifest Destiny”. On the whole these activities did not bring the two powers face‐to‐face. Contacts between them were thin.
The pattern of US‐Russian relations in the twentieth century is so different that we might almost be dealing with two new countries. The differences were both strategic and ideological. Starting tentatively with Theodore Roosevelt, America began to spread its wings worldwide and by Woodrow Wilson's time the USA had taken on a heavy‐duty role in European affairs. This would have been unthinkable 50 years earlier. It was the first phase of America's emergence as a world power. At the same time, Russia had become a revolutionary society with a Communist government. America reacted sharply against it. In Washington Russia was seen as being expansionist, repellent to America's own ideals of democracy and civil rights and inimical to the interests of American capitalism. The new Bolshevik regime for its part, saw the USA as a leading member of the capitalist club – a hostile bourgeois society which could not wait to destroy the first workers' state. This mutual distrust has persisted ever since, even during the common struggle against Nazi Germany. In the aftermath of the Second World War both nations emerged as fully‐fledged world powers – and irreconcilable enemies.
Their relationship had been transformed by the global ambitions of both powers and the ideological divide between them. Perhaps the world was not big enough for both of them. This can still be seen in the uneasy co‐existence between late capitalist America and the new, semi‐capitalist, semi‐democratic Russia of Putin and his protégé.
Norman Saul, who appears to have written the entire book himself, has produced a useful reference work for students of this relationship. At the beginning he includes a chronology and a historical introduction; at the end there are lists of the relevant ministers and ambassadors and a very good, 50‐page bibliography (some articles but mainly books). In between is the main body of the dictionary. It covers 375 pages. The articles are a mixture of biographical entries, (just over half the book), geographical areas in which both the countries had interests, policies and programmes, great events and various relevant bodies and institutions. Professor Saul has cast his attention evenly over two centuries and more. He is, let us not forget, the author of several scholarly tomes on US relations with tsarist Russia. The entries range from John Adams, born in 1735 to modern figures like Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Khodorkovsky is the oligarch who headed Yukos and who is still in gaol after a dubious political trial.
Professor Saul has worked diligently to search out every conceivable link between the two countries, however marginal it may be: Louis Armstrong competing with Russians in an Italian trumpet contest; Shostakovich, playing piano in the 1920 s to accompany American silent films and Leon Trotsky working as a journalist on the Lower East Side of New York just before the October revolution. Apparently, President Grant had a granddaughter who became the Russian Countess Julia Speransky Cantacuzene (when she died, aged 99, Gerald Ford was in the White House). All credit to Saul for ferreting out these obscure facts although they do not cast much light on Russian‐American relations. Other figures of course are absolutely central to an understanding of the subject: they include George Kennan, the author of the famous “Long Telegram” from Moscow in 1948, John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower's Secretary of State for eight years and of course Henry Kissinger.
The term “relations” does not simply mean official state relations but private links as well. The book has entries on the YMCA, the Ford Foundation and the American Relief Administration. This was the body set up by Herbert Hoover for dispensing food aid to Russia during the famine of 1919. Some individuals have lived much of their lives abroad: they are covered too. The St Petersburg American Colony was well established in the Russian capital for a hundred years; in the 1930 s the American Press Corps boasted several well known figures in Moscow political circles: Walter Duranty, Maurice Hindus, Louis Fischer and Eugene Lyons. In America, Brighton Beach is well known as the community of Russians living in New York (“Little Odessa”). There is also an article on the Lacy‐Zarubin programme of exchange visits dating from 1958. Professor Saul believes that the steady flow of western cultural influences ultimately did a lot to weaken the Soviet system.
As for commercial links between the two countries, Armand Hammer, through his company, Occidental Oil, was deeply involved in Soviet affairs. Westinghouse, International Harvester and the Singer Sewing Machine Company all had interests in Soviet Russia. Apparently Singer dominated the Russian market in domestic sewing machines until the 1920s. Imagine hundreds of middle‐class Russian ladies sitting in St Petersburg drawing rooms madly working their treddles!
Very usefully, Saul has included entries on the leading scholars of Russian‐American studies. Anybody familiar with the literature will recognize names from the US academy such as Michael Florinsky, Geroid T. Robinson, Adam Ulam and many more. I do not know why Richard Pipes has escaped a mention. From Russia we have Alexander Nikoliukin on American literature and Georgi Arbatov on political relations between the two sides. Soviet commentators were always amazingly well informed on the affairs of the bourgeois west and it was due, in no small part, to Arbatov's Institute for US and Canadian Studies – a division of the Soviet Academy of Sciences.
Some features of the book did not impress me. As with other volumes in this series, I did not like the lack of further reading with each article. The booklist at the end, classified into eight sections, is some compensation for this but sorting out further reading for the individual entries is difficult. As a starting point, even one reference per entry, would have done the trick. On another point, the book has no index. Even in a work of reference, the index is an essential tool for finding items which do not merit an entry in themselves. On that same point, a reference book is easier to navigate if a plain list of entries is provided at the start; better still if there is also a classified list. These desiderata would have added a little to the length of the book but added greatly to its value.
Quibbles apart, I found lots of material to interest me in Professor Saul's work. Saul has confined himself to brief factual entries between half a page and one page long. There are no broader contextual articles. For instance his entry on the whole Cold War is the same weight as the others: one page long. This is strictly a quick reference book. Users should know what they are looking for before they take it down from the shelf.
The format is identical with other volumes in the Scarecrow series: a smallish octavo, strongly bound and on thick paper. It also comes in e‐book form. It is a good book by a real specialist.
