History of the USA since World War I

A university textbook, and the authors say so: it grew out of a lecture course given for several years in the history department of Moscow State University.

N. V. Sivachyov and E. F. Yazkov were professors there, and the note at the back records that both had visited the United States to work in the National Archives and in the libraries of Columbia, Harvard and Wisconsin. That is not a claim a Moscow blurb could have made in 1950, and it shows on almost every page.

The survey runs from the First World War to the middle of the 1970s - the twenties, the Depression and the New Deal, the war, the Cold War and McCarthyism, the civil rights movement, Vietnam, Nixon and Ford. Its thesis is the Brezhnev-era foreign-policy line converted into a periodisation: American politics as a contest between reactionary adventurism and a more realistic approach, with the second gaining ground because the world balance of forces obliges it to. As a way of reading Nixon and Ford it is not a stupid one.

The most useful chapter for anyone interested in the field is the eleventh, on Soviet studies of recent American history. It gives the institutional record - the first monographs of the 1930s, the Sector on US and Canadian History founded in 1953, the Institute of US studies established in 1968 and renamed in 1974 - credits dozens of working scholars by name, and is candid about gaps, admitting that the major parties, third-party movements and representative institutions were all under-studied.

For once the spine is close to honest: the narrative runs to the spring of 1975.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.