Modernization from the Other Shore or Wealth and Freedom

Modernization from the Other Shore: American Intellectuals and the Romance of Russian Development

Author: David C Engerman

From the late nineteenth century to the eve of World War II, America's experts on Russia watched as Russia and the Soviet Union embarked on a course of rapid industrialization. Captivated by the idea of modernization, diplomats, journalists, and scholars across the political spectrum rationalized the enormous human cost of this path to progress. In a fascinating examination of this crucial era, David Engerman underscores the key role economic development played in America's understanding of Russia and explores its profound effects on U.S. policy.

American intellectuals from George Kennan to Samuel Harper to Calvin Hoover understood Russian events in terms of national character. Many of them used stereotypes of Russian passivity, backwardness, and fatalism to explain the need for—and the costs of—Soviet economic development. These costs included devastating famines that left millions starving while the government still exported grain.

This book is a stellar example of the new international history that seamlessly blends cultural and intellectual currents with policymaking and foreign relations. It offers valuable insights into the role of cultural differences and the shaping of economic policy for developing nations even today.

Foreign Affairs

This fascinating, full-blown account of how Russia was reflected in the American mind ranges from the late 1800s, across the 1917 Revolution, and into the harsh, hopeful, tragic assault of modernization in the 1930s. What began with the travel adventures of people such as the senior George Kennan by the turn of the century widened to include the founders of Russian studies in the United States, Archibald Cary Coolidge and Samuel Harper, as well as their students and wealthy well-connected patrons such as Charles Crane. They, the author argues, applied to the Russian autocracy and peasantry stereotypes of national character as surely as did their less expert forerunners and then exported these images into the Wilson, Coolidge, and Harding administrations. Their intellectual successors carried on, idealizing the modernizing model they expected the Soviet Union to be and closing their eyes to the human cost. Engerman digs deep into decades of published and unpublished writings by a broad spectrum of Russia experts and traces with skill their impact on government.

Table of Contents:

	Introduction: From the Other Shore	1
Pt. I	Autocratic Russia, Lethargic Russians
1	An Empire of Climate	17
2	Endurance without Limit	28
3	Studying Our Nearest Oriental Neighbor	54
Pt. II	Revolutionary Russia, Instinctual Russians
4	Little above the Brute	69
5	Sheep without a Shepherd	84
6	Feeding the Mute Millions of Muzhiks	103
Pt. III	Modernizing Russia, Backward Russians
7	New Society, New Scholars	127
8	The Romance of Economic Development	153
9	Starving Itself Great	194
10	Scratch a Soviet and You'll Find a Russian	244
	Epilogue: Russian Expertise in an Age of Social Science	273
	Sources	289
	Abbreviations	299
	Notes	303
	Acknowledgments	381
	Index	385

Look this: Timed Readings Plus Book 1 or Alternative Strategies for Economic Development

Wealth and Freedom: An Introduction to Political Economy

Author: David P Levin

Wealth and Freedom provides a comprehensive introduction to political economy for the student or other interested nonspecialist. The book explores such key issues as: the place of our economy in the larger social system, the importance of market institutions for individual autonomy, private enterprise as a system of economic development, poverty and inequality in market economies, global inequality, the limits of the market and the role of government. The book is distinctive in employing a rights-based approach to understanding and evaluating economic institutions.