Two individuals who personally contributed to the cultural dialogue with Soviet and Russian libraries and archives from 1980s perestroika to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of independent Russia wrote two wonderful books about the attempts of American cultural centers such as the Library of Congress and the Hoover Institution to save and modernize the collections of Russian libraries and archives, and how the American enthusiasts of Russian culture failed to “Westernize” Russian post-Soviet culture. One of them is John Van Oudenaren, former Director of the World Digital Library and Chief of the European Division at the Library of Congress, who wrote his book as a Global Fellow at the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (hereafter—WWICS) in Washington, DC. Charles G. Palm, the author of another book, his memoir, in fact, worked until 2002 as Deputy Director of the Hoover Institution, where he headed the Hoover Institution Library and Archives for eighteen years and wrote various notes about his collaboration with Russian archives. His book is a summary of the notes from his personal memoirs.

Van Oudenaren’s book covers more details of the history of this dialogue between the Library of Congress/Hoover Institution and the Russian libraries and archives. Van Oudenaren’s study, devoted to the role of James Billington (1929–2018) as Librarian of Congress (1974–2015) in the American dialogue with Soviet and post-Soviet Russia, concentrates on seven major themes in Billington’s thinking. The first theme is Billington’s obsession with the idea that the USSR and Russia was likely to change if the communist system could be replaced with a more liberal one (14). The second theme is “that the Russian intelligentsia would be a major force” behind this change (15). The third theme is that Billington considered communism a political technology that would survive the collapse of the USSR (17). The fourth theme/or idea of Billington was his belief that “in building a post-communist future, Russia would look to its historic, pre-Bolshevik culture and traditions, including Russian (Christian) Orthodoxy” (17). The fifth theme is Billington’s conviction that Russian nationalism was a positive force in changing Russia (20). The sixth theme is Billington’s idealization of America’s influence on Russia’s internal developments (21). Finally, the seventh theme of this book is an analysis of Billington’s belief “that people-to-people contacts with Russians at all levels could play an important role in shaping change in directions favorable to US interests and values” (21).

In his first chapter (10–36), Van Oudenaren analyzes factors that influenced the Library of Congress’ engagement with Soviet Russia after 1987, when James Billington was sworn as Librarian of Congress. Central was Billington’s leadership as a prominent American scholar of Russian history and culture: “the character of the Library of Congress as a Cold War institution with staff and other resources that enabled it to implement Billington’s initiatives toward Russia, and the remarkable Russian collections of the Library—books, periodicals, manuscripts, maps, photographs, prints, posters, films, and sound recordings—that provided a basis for many of its interactions with Russian institutions and society” since the 1980s (8). In Ch. 2 (37–95), Van Oudenaren traces the role of Billington in establishing the new relations with Russian cultural institutions during perestroika and rule of Mikhail Gorbachev, 1987–91. Chapter 3 focuses on the period after the collapse of the USSR and the beginning of the rule of Boris Elʹtsin, 1991–96 (96–129). Chapter 4 covers the late period of Elʹtsin’s rule, 1996–99, which was characterized by the rise of a new authoritarianism and power of oligarchs in Russia, on the one hand, and the beginning of cooperation between the Library of Congress and Russian libraries on the other (130–66).

The most interesting chapters of Van Oudenaren’s book are the last ones covering the period of Vladimir Putin’s rule, which resulted in a major failure of American efforts to build cooperation between the west and Russia. Chapter 5 describes the programs, initiated by Billington during the late Elʹtsin era that developed under Putin’s rule, such as the Meeting of Frontiers digital library, a congressionally funded effort to link Alaska and Siberia, and the Russian Leadership Program, focusing on exchanges between young leaders in Russia and in the US, subsequently renamed Open World and extended to other countries around the world (167–97). In Chs. 6 (198–233) and 7 (234–74), Van Oudenaren analyzes a decline of cooperation between Americans and Russians during the rule of Putin and Dmitry Medvedev, as illustrated by Billington’s frustration and his subsequent retirement from his post at the Library of Congress at the end of September 2015.

Memoirs by the deputy director of the Hoover Institution, Charles Palm, represent an interesting addition to the detailed historical study by Van Oudenaren. Those memoirs focus on the only episode of cooperation between Americans and Russians: the attempt to microfilm and publish ten million pages of the secret archives of the Soviet Communist Party and State (including the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs, NKVD, the future KGB) between 1991 and 2002. This episode was described in detail by Van Oudenaren, who emphasized the pioneering role of Billington in a project to microfilm and publish as early as 1991 the documents from the central Soviet archives (Van Oudenaren, 102–9). Unfortunately, Charles Palm ignored Billington’s connection to Rudolf Pikhoia, the major archivist of Elʹtsin’s Russia and recently appointed chairman of the State Archival Service of Russia (now Rosarkhiv). Pikhoia met the Librarian of Congress in 1990 and began his collaboration with Billington before his meeting with Palm. These connections led to the opening of The Revelations from the Russian Archives at the Library of Congress, which eventually led to the Hoover Project to microfilm Soviet archival documents. The project engaged cooperation with the British microform publisher Chadwyck-Healey, which became a project partner after 1992. In his memoirs, unfortunately, Charles Palm tries to deny the pioneering role of Billington and criticized his position in negotiations about microfilming Soviet documents (Palm, 43–48). Following negotiations with the Library of Congress, however, Palm admits that the Hoover Institution gave five thousand microfilm reels of Russian documents. At the end of his book, Palm mentions that after receiving the Russian microfilms, “Billington wrote me a gracious letter of acknowledgement, stating that the Rosarkhiv-Hoover project microfilm was ‘an important contribution to the Library’s collections’ and was of ‘high interest to their researchers’” (Palm, 47).

Despite their disagreements, both Billington and Palm, who believed in different paths to cultural dialogue with Russia, acknowledged their failure to make Russia an equal partner in the geopolitics of culture. Both Van Oudenaren and Palm stressed the major goals of both the Library of Congress and the Hoover Institution, “documenting an ideology that produced nearly a century of tyranny over the Russian people and that menaced liberal and democratic values everywhere” (Palm, 121).

Palm covered the story of microfilming the Soviet archival documents in four chapters of his memoirs. The first chapter is about the birth of this project, starting with the May 1991 meeting between Palm and Pikhoia at the Hoover Institution during the Soviet times and finishing with agreements about copying the Soviet archival documents in 1992–96 (Palm, 13–48). The second chapter describes the major principles and strategies to select Soviet documents for microfilming (Palm, 49–76). According to Palm, the Soviet records selected for filming reflected

As a result of all efforts to implement these principles, the Hoover project of microfilming succeeded, despite all political crises inside Russia and attempts by Russian politicians to stop it. In the next (third) chapter Palm shows in detail how both American and Russian archivists created the unique microfilmed collection of the precious documents for studies of various subjects of Soviet history, like the role of the NKVD (the future KGB), history of the Gulag, and materials from the 1992 Constitutional Court hearings exposing the crimes of the Communist Party (Palm, 77–102). The fourth chapter is basically Palm’s response to Russian and especially to American critics, such as J. Arch Getty from UCLA, and professional organizations such as the American Historical Association and the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic StudiesFootnote ³ (Palm, 103–16). Palm defends the historical and political significance of microfilming Soviet documents from Russian and American accusations of the betrayal of Russian national interests and the commercialization of the Hover project, showing how the microfilming provided new venues for the important historical documents, making them available to millions of international scholars all over the world. The last (fifth) chapter (117–21) and appendix, “Red Archives” (123–52), were written by Elena Danielson, Palm’s successor at the Hoover Institution Library and Archives from December 2001, and by Charles Chadwyck-Healey, the British provider of all the Soviet documents’ microfilming. These final parts of the book explain to the reading audience all the difficulties and significance of this project for present day scholars.

The authors of both books under review, in describing a process of spreading American influence in Russian “informational” culture, emphasize how this process, which is called “Americanization” by cultural historians, determined everyday life in post-Soviet Russia. Both authors also covered the role of the Soviet political police, the KGB, in the cultural dialogue. Unfortunately, both authors ignored the rise of the KGB regime under Putin after 2000, which eventually contributed to the failure of the efforts of both the Library of Congress and the Hoover Institution to bring western/American influences in major cultural institutions of post-Soviet Russia, such as historical archives and libraries.

When on February 24, 2022, the Russian Federation started the full-scale military invasion of Ukraine, openly blaming the west and especially the US for using Ukraine against Russia, it was a shock for many political observers and scholars in the west, who used to emphasize the westernization and Americanization of post-Soviet Russia. Now the same observers suddenly noted how Putin’s “Americanized” Russia imitated American political practices, such as “the US intrusion under Hilary Clinton into Russian domestic politics” or using US military contractors for foreign military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. As a result of this copycatting of American actions, Russia interfered in US politics in 2016, supporting Donald Trump, and used the private military mercenary organization Wagner in the Russian war against Ukraine in 2022–23.Footnote ⁴

Paradoxically, Putin’s Russia, which became openly anti-western and anti-American, still incorporates and utilizes the typical forms of cultural production/consumption and political practices traditionally known as “American/Western” ones. The events of the Russian wars against independent Ukraine in 2014, and especially in 2022, revealed the ambivalent (“love-hate”) attitudes towards a concept of “Westernization/Americanization” not only among Russian political elites, especially among Russian/former Soviet intelligence officers—who play an important role in shaping such attitudes in Putin’s Russia—but also among ordinary Russians at least since 2001, since the rise of “the KGB oligarchy,” or the “Chekist regime” in the post-Soviet geopolitical space.

After the Second World War, during the Cold War, the Soviet political police and major intelligence agency, the KGB, targeted the US as the USSR’s “main enemy in the world.” According to Christopher Andrew, “throughout the Cold War, Soviet intelligence regarded the United States as its ‘main adversary.’”Footnote ⁵ In their everyday counterintelligence activities in Soviet Ukraine, through the entire period of post-Stalin socialism, KGB operatives still dealt mainly with intelligence from the “main adversary,” the US. According to official counter-intelligence research of the KGB in Kyiv, the number of spies from the US always dominated over the number of spies from other capitalist countries. Thus, in January-August 1969, for example, there were 133 cases of espionage in Soviet Ukraine, committed by foreigners. Seventy-four of them were committed by Americans, twelve by Englishmen, nineteen by French, and eleven by West Germans. The major accusation against foreign agents was “their attempt to use Soviet archives and libraries for anti-Soviet goals.”Footnote ⁶ This was a typical ratio for KGB operations in Ukraine: during the 1970s and 80s more than 60% of all recorded and reported KGB counter-intelligence operations targeted the US and Canada only.

“Capitalist America” became not only the “main,” but also the “seductive” “adversary” of the KGB, creating attractive cultural products and practices for Soviet consumers. Paradoxically, KGB operatives were also attracted to various “material and cultural items” they associated with “seductive America.” As one retired KGB officer recalled, “despite all our ideological communist upbringing, we, young KGB officers, still dreamed about products ‘made in the USA,’ about a possibility to get a special assignment involving a ‘business trip’ to America, which would allow us to bring the desired items from America to Ukraine.”Footnote ⁷ Former KGB officers, like Oleg Kalugin, recalled how the KGB agents, living in the US on intelligence assignments, enjoyed the consumption of American products and services, literally “falling in love with America” and the American way of life. As Kalugin (who was sent officially to the US as a journalism exchange student) described his own fascination with America in his memoirs:

But the most important effect of the exchange program on Soviet Americanists was the developing even among the “KGB people” of a psychological phenomenon, which some contemporaries called “a fondness for America and its people.”Footnote ⁹ As Allen H. Kassof from IREX explained this phenomenon:

This hidden curiosity and fascination about “capitalist America” were obviously present in all individual KGB reports (including counterintelligence), which were submitted to their administration by KGB operatives, who worked with American visitors to Soviet Ukraine. Those KGB officers, who “worked” with American tourists in Kyiv, recalled, that “after long communication with an American visitor, besides the classified intelligence information, a KGB agent usually reported the numerous details of his visitor’s everyday life in America: about American cars, education, food, fashion, even films and television shows.”Footnote ¹¹ As KGB operatives joked, by participating in those anti-American operations, the KGB officers “discovered the various details of everyday life in American civilization: it was a peculiar process of the ‘discovery of America/the American Other’ by struggling not only with the alleged American intelligence agents, but also with American propaganda during consumption of ‘seductive American products,’ including American books.” KGB supervisors always reminded people of “the danger of American propagandist centers, such as the Library of Congress, which used their book collections against the Soviet Union.”Footnote ¹² As former KGB officers emphasized, such fascination with the American cultural products led to the Americanization of the entire Soviet society.Footnote ¹³

Instead of Conclusion: The Crisis of American Cultural Geopolitics and the End of the Americanization of post-Soviet Russia under Putin’s KGB Regime

The process of Americanization for post-Soviet Russian politics and culture was gradually changed after 2000, when a new Russian President, Vladimir Putin, a former KGB officer, began transforming the political system of the Russian Federation into a so-called “KGB kleptocratic regime.”Footnote ¹⁴ The notion of Americanization never influenced the deep social, economic, political, and ideological foundations of the Soviet, and after 1991, the Russian political regimes. Both the political elites, including Putin’s KGB kleptocracy, and ordinary Russians enjoyed only the material comfort and various forms of entertainment they associated with this Americanization, mostly through various venues and forms of consumption, starting with reading James Fenimore Cooper’s novels and watching American westerns, or listening to Anglo-American rock and roll. They never understood or accepted the rules of a democratic system of politics and rule of law in Russia. Moreover, after Putin’s 2007 Munich speech, when he blamed the west and especially the US for anti-Russian politics, the Russian ruling elites, supervised by Putin’s kleptocracy, gradually began moving toward old perceptions of Americanization. Peak of this movement from “dangerous American influences” was in July of 2021, when Putin published a historical essay in which he blamed the US for using Ukraine against Russia. This publication became his theoretical justification for full-scale war against Ukraine, which was publicly presented to the public as a war against the American/NATO threat to Russian security. Paradoxically, the indigenization of American influences led to their complete rejection. The very people who used to provide and justify those influences into Russian society, the Russian experts in American Studies (many of them were, and still are, KGB/FSB officers and agents), are now justifying Putin’s expansionism and his anti-Americanism.

The imperial ideal of tsarist Russia mixed with Soviet political and cultural stereotypes now shapes not only political, but also academic discourse in post-Soviet space. Like in the nineteenth century, according to Maxim Kovalevsky’s complaint, the state (today it is Putin’s nationalist autocracy) again dominates the Russian interpretations of US history and politics. Russian experts in international politics still call on Russian politicians to “resist by all available means” the “the American threat.”Footnote ¹⁵

Unfortunately, Russian politicians today forgot what Nikolai N. Bolkhovitinov, a Russian pioneer in studies of Russian-American relations in Soviet times, emphasized in 1968 that during the Cold War: “We do not intend to present an idealized picture and create an impression that no disagreement or antagonism existed between Russia and America … The lesson of Russian-American relations consists not in the absence of differences and conflicts, but in the fact that history testifies to the possibility of overcoming them—not with the help of weapons, but peacefully, by means of negotiation.”Footnote ¹⁶

To some extent Bolkhovitinov, who was a close friend of James Billington, demonstrated the necessity for dialogue between the US and Russia, including cultural dialog, in order to avoid military conflict. Both Billington (a hero of Van Oudenaren’s book) and Charles Palm (a major character of Palm’s memoir) tried to build such a dialogue using both the Library of Congress and the Hoover Institution. Their major mistake was ignoring of the major actors in those Russian-American relations: the KGB and other Soviet/Russian intelligence organizations (such as the GRU). This mistake would lead to the failure of establishing any meaningful cultural dialogue between the US and Russia.

Despite my criticism of Van Oudenaren and Palm for their dismissal of the decisive role of the Russian intelligence personnel in Russian-American relations, their books are still fascinating attempts to analyze the failure of geopolitics of culture, which eventually became the failed quest of Americans for a new democratic Russia. Van Oudenaren’s and Palm’s books will be a good source not only for graduate students’ research of US-Russia relations, but also a good read for the general audience, who are interested to know about forgotten attempts by American intellectual enthusiasts (such as James Billington and Charles Palm) to incorporate Russian research libraries and archives in the international system of information and cultural exchange.