In late 1945, American public opinion was generally positive about the Soviet Union. A Fortune poll in September showed that only a quarter of the population believed that the USSR would attempt to spread communism into Eastern Europe. By July 1946, more than half of those polled felt that Moscow aimed to dominate as much of the world as possible.62 Within government and in the public sphere, opposing formulations of the Soviet Union contended with one another. Vice-president and later Secretary of Commerce Henry A. Wallace used the Russian character to explain why a “get tough with Russia” policy would only result in tougher Russians. Others like Walter Lippmann warned that not recognizing Soviet interests in Eastern Europe would lead to a “cold war.” But far more influential, and eventually hegemonic, were the views of a number of State Department specialists, most importantly George Kennan, who did not trust the Soviet leadership.
In 1946, Kennan sent his famous “Long Telegram” from Moscow, reiterating that Russian behavior was best explained by national characteristics. The inherent, intractable, immutable traits of the Russians as “Asiatics” required the use of countervailing force to contain the Soviets’ aggressive tendencies. When he published his views in Foreign Affairs, famously signing the article “X,” Kennan abruptly shifted his position from considering Marxism largely irrelevant to emphasizing the importance of Marxist doctrine. “The political personality of Soviet power as we know it today,” he wrote, “is the product of ideology and circumstances: ideology inherited by the present Soviet leaders from the movement in which they had their political origin, and circumstances of the power which they now have exercised for nearly three decades in Russia.”63 Soviet ideology included the idea of the innate antagonism between capitalism and socialism and the infallibility of the Kremlin as the sole repository of truth. Though his explanation had changed from national character to ideology, Kennan’s prescription for US foreign policy remained the same: the USSR was a rival, not a partner, and the United States had no other course but containment of Russian expansive tendencies.64
Under the imperatives of the American government’s apprehension about Soviet expansionism, a profession of “Sovietologists” began to form, primarily in the United States. In 1946, the first American center of Russian studies, the Russian Institute, was founded at Columbia University, soon to be followed by the Russian Research Centre at Harvard (1948). The first “area studies” centers in the United States became prototypes for a new direction in social science research, bringing together various disciplines to look intensively at a particular society and culture. A generation of scholars, many of whom had had wartime experience in the military or in intelligence, worked closely with governmental agencies and on official projects sponsored by the Central Intelligence Agency or the military. Most importantly, the Air Force funded the Harvard Interview Project, questioning thousands of Soviet émigrés and producing valuable information on daily life and thought in the USSR, as well as guides for target selection and psychological warfare. In 1950, the Institute for the Study of the USSR was founded in Munich. Secretly funded by the CIA until it was closed in 1971, the Institute produced numerous volumes and journals by émigré writers that confirmed the worst expectations of Western readers. More interesting to scholars was the American government-sponsored journal Problems of Communism, edited from 1952 to 1970 by a skeptical scion of the Polish Jewish Bund, Abraham Brumberg, which managed to condemn the Soviet Union as a totalitarian tyranny while avoiding the worst excesses of anti-Communist hysteria.
American scholars, particularly political scientists and sociologists, were caught in a schizophrenic tension between their disciplinary identity as detached scientists and their political commitment to (and often financial dependency on) the American state. The benefits of working in tandem with the interests of the state were enormous; the dangers of non-conformity were omnipresent. Two of the founders of Columbia’s Russian Institute, Soviet legal expert John N. Hazard and Soviet literature specialist Ernest J. Simmons, were named by Senator McCarthy in 1953 as members of the “Communist conspiracy.”65 The intellectual historian H. Stuart Hughes was dismissed as associate director of Harvard’s Russian Research Center when a trustee of the Carnegie Corporation, a major funder of the Center, complained that Hughes supported the 1948 Henry Wallace presidential campaign.66 In Britain, the most prominent historian of Russia, E. H. Carr, reported in 1950 that “it had become very difficult … to speak dispassionately about Russia except in a ‘very woolly Christian kind of way’ without endangering, if not your bread and butter, then your legitimate hopes of advancement,” and the Marxist historian Eric J. Hobsbawm affirmed that “there is no question that the principle of freedom of expression did not apply to communist and Marxist views, at least in the official media.”67
The Totalitarian Model
With the collapse of the Grand Alliance, the more sympathetic renderings of Stalin’s USSR, popular during the war, gave way to the powerful image of “Red Fascism” that melded the practices of Nazi Germany with those of the Soviet Union.68 In order to conceptualize these terror-based, one-party ideological regimes, political scientists elaborated the concept of “totalitarianism.” Carl Friedrich (1901–1984) and Zbigniew Brzezinski formulated the classic definition of totalitarianism, with its six systemic characteristics: a ruling ideology, a single party typically led by one man, a terroristic police, a communications monopoly, a weapons monopoly, and a centrally directed economy.69 Such states, with their mass manipulation, suppression of voluntary associations, violence, and expansionism, were contrasted with liberal democratic, pluralistic societies. Because such systems were able so effectively to suppress internal dissension, many theorists concluded they would never change unless overthrown from outside.
The T-model dominated scholarship, particularly in political science, through the 1950s and well into the 1960s, a time when the academy was intimately involved in the global struggle that pitted the West against the Soviet Union, its “satellite” states, and anti-colonial nationalism. The model of a gargantuan prison state, “a huge reformatory in which the primary difference between the forced labor camps and the rest of the Soviet Union is that inside the camps the regimen is much more brutal and humiliating,” was compelling—both because high Stalinism matched much of the image of a degenerated autocracy, and because Soviet restrictions and censorship eliminated most other sources, like travelers, journalists, and scholars with in-country experience.70 The image of an imperialist totalitarianism, spreading its red grip over the globe, was at one and the same time the product of Western anxieties and the producer of inflated fears. George Orwell (1903–1950), already well-known for his satire on Soviet politics, Animal Farm (1945), produced the most effective literary vision of totalitarianism in his popular novel 1984 (1949). Its hero, Winston Smith, tries valiantly to revolt against the totally administered society presided over by Big Brother, but by novel’s end he has been ground into submission and spouts the doublespeak slogans of the regime. The political philosopher Hannah Arendt (1906–1975), a refugee from Nazism, provided the most sophisticated and subtle interpretation of The Origins of Totalitarianism, which she connected to anti-Semitism, nationalism, pan-national movements, imperialism, and the replacement of class politics by mass politics.71
Scholars explained the origins and spread of totalitarianism in various ways. Arendt linked totalitarianism with the coming of mass democracy; Waldemar Gurian saw the source in the utopian ambitions of leftist politicians; Stefan Possony tied it to the personality of Lenin; Robert C. Tucker to the personality of Stalin; and Nathan Leites employed psychoanalytic concepts to write about the psychopathology of the Bolshevik elite, distinguished primarily by paranoia. The anthropologists Geoffrey Gorer and Margaret Mead reverted to the ever-handy notion of national character, in this case patterns of inbred submissiveness to authority caused by the peasant practice of swaddling Russian infants.72 In 1947 Mead, then the most famous anthropologist in the United States,
secured funding from the Air Force’s new think tank, the Rand Corporation, to set up a Studies in Soviet Culture Project, recruiting Gorer [her lover at the time] to run it. Gorer had never been to Russia and didn’t
