Blacks in United States History

Most of this is good history, and a reader should be told so first.

Robert Ivanov was a working Soviet Americanist and a specialist on the Civil War, and the middle chapters are the product of archival research. His notes cite the Russian Foreign Policy Archives by case and page, US National Archives microfilm, the Congressional Globe, the official records of the War of the Rebellion, Basler's edition of Lincoln, and the Russian press of the 1770s and 1860s.

His secondary reading is serious and not confined to friends. Alongside Aptheker, Foster, Philip Foner and James Allen he uses Du Bois's Black Reconstruction, Benjamin Quarles, John Hope Franklin, J. G. Randall, the Stampp and Litwack anthology on Reconstruction, and Eric Foner - whom he quotes approvingly on the Reconstruction governments' inability to protect black citizens against violence, treating an American historian's judgement as a judgement rather than an exhibit. He had also lectured in New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Ithaca and California in 1972.

What the book is for, Ivanov states himself without embarrassment in the introduction, writing of the Carter administration's human rights campaign as an attempt to divert attention from conditions at home. It was written in the trough of the second Cold War, and its job was to answer an American human rights offensive with an American subject.

Both things are true at once, and the archival chapters survive the purpose.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.