This study is an intellectual biography of Nikolai N. Bolkhovitinov (1930–2008), the prominent Soviet historian who was a pioneering scholar of US history and US–Russian relations. Alongside the personal history of Bolkhovitinov, this study also examines the broader social, cultural, and intellectual developments within the Americanist scholarly community in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia. Using archival documents, numerous studies by Russian and Ukrainian Americanists, various periodicals, personal correspondence, diaries, and more than one hundred interviews, it demonstrates how concepts, genealogies, and images of modernity shaped a national self-perception of the intellectual elites in both nations during the Cold War.

"Zhuk’s Nikolai Bolkhovitinov and American Studies in the USSRis a painstakinglyresearched, if not always carefully edited, intellectual biographyof an academic “liberal Westernizer” (158) whorose to become a leading light among Soviet scholars ofNorth American history and politics." - American Historical Review

"The author’s style is informal and engaging. Historians, sociologists, and political psychologists— and not only those who study the Cold War—will be enlightened and should find this book very useful in their studies and classes." - Slavic Review

"Zhuk’s book is an intellectual biography of Nikolai Bolkhovitinov. . . the book is worth reading, both to follow one Soviet academic through his scientific life during the Cold War and to get a sense of the opportunities that opened up for Soviet historians after the collapse of the Soviet Union." - Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History