Know Your Enemy

Abstract

When Winston Churchill ominously announced in March 1946 that an “Iron Curtain had descended over Europe,” the U.S. government was grossly unprepared for a world divided between East and West; it employed around two dozen Soviet experts and even fewer on Central and Eastern Europe. Two years later, after a steady drumbeat of Cold War crises, the young Central Intelligence Agency employed thirty-eight Soviet analysts, a number less impressive than it seems. Only twelve spoke any Russian, only one had a Ph.D., and their college majors ranged from civil engineering to library science. Th e government could not draw on scholars knowledgeable about its enemy, as it had done in World War II; there were only a few dozen academic Soviet experts, many of whom had never been to the USSR. How could American offi cials chart a foreign policy without knowing what was going on inside the Kremlin—without even knowing exactly who was inside the Kremlin—and without any idea of the people in that vast and diverse country, let alone their views? Never before, one professor-cum-intelligence analyst warned, “did so many know so little about so much.”1 Know Your Enemy tells the story of the U.S. intellectual mobilization against Soviet Communism from the World War II–era crises to the collapse of the USSR. Government offi cials worked together with scholars and foundation offi cers to establish a new enterprise, unprecedented in academic life. Variously known as Russian Studies, Soviet Studies, or—often with a hint of derision— Sovietology, it aimed to serve both Mars and Minerva, both the national security state and academic life.2 It sat at the heart of Cold War thought and not too far from the center of foreign policy making. Sovietology brought together iconoclasts, geniuses, lone wolves, and careerists to analyze an entire nation: its people and its past, its economy and its politics, its rulers and its ruling ideas. Th e group included some of America’s best minds from the left, the right, and, especially, from the center of the political spectrum. It included intelligence analysts and scholars—though this distinction sometimes was blurred because World War