Political Consciousness in the USA

A Soviet anatomy of the American mind: an attempt to map, type by type, the whole spectrum of how Americans think about power, and to explain how that thinking is produced, held together and, at its upper reaches, managed.

It is the work of the Institute of US and Canadian Studies, the Moscow institute Georgi Arbatov built into the Soviet Union's most sophisticated window on the United States. Two general editors, Zamoshkin and Batalov, divide five authors across the chapters: Batalov takes the introduction, the methodological chapter, the long chapter on the American left and the conclusion; B. V. Mikhaylov the liberals; A. Yu. Melvil the conservatives; S. M. Plekhanov the right radicals; and Zamoshkin the closing chapter on the machinery behind the whole.

These were professional Americanists rather than functionaries filling a template, and it shows. Melvil went on to a long career as one of post-Soviet Russia's leading academic political scientists. The chapters on the conservative revival and on right radicalism are particularly worth having: written at the moment the American right had just taken the presidency, by people whose job was to understand why.

The manuscript closed around 1982-83, with the arrival of the Reagan administration as its horizon, and its mood is the mood of the second Cold War.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.