NEH Institute: The United States and Boris Yeltsin

David Foglesong tells the fascinating story of American efforts to liberate and remake Russia since the 1880s. He analyzes the involvement of journalists, political activists, propagandists, missionaries, diplomats, engineers, and others in this grand crusade, paying special attention to the influence of religious beliefs on Americans' sense of duty to emancipate, convert, or reform Russia.

Shiraev and Zubok analyze growing anti-Americanism in Russia, now high again after several years of "honeymoon" with the United States. An evaluation of this phenomenon is significant for assessments of current and future international developments and especially some “worst-case scenarios” in light of further steps towards European integration, NATO expansion, and of future regional conflicts. This analysis is also crucial for theoretical and popular discussions about the course of democratic transition, as well as the practical aspects of the nature of relations between democracies.

"A compassionate glimpse into the extremes where the new Russia meets the old," writes Robert Legvold (Foreign Affairs) about Andrew Meier's enthralling new work. Journeying across a resurgent and reputedly free land, Meier has produced a virtuosic mix of nuanced history, lyric travelogue, and unflinching reportage. Throughout, Meier captures the country's present limbo—a land rich in potential but on the brink of staggering back into tyranny—in an account that is by turns heartrending and celebratory, comic and terrifying.

Boris Yeltsin is one of modern history's most dynamic and underappreciated figures. In this vivid, analytical masterwork, Herbert J. Ellison establishes Yeltsin as the principal leader and defender of Russia's democratic revolution - the very embodiment of Russia's fragile new liberties, including the evolving respect for the rule of law and private property as well as core freedoms of speech, religion, press, and political association. In 1987 President Mikhail Gorbachev expelled Boris Yeltsin from his team of reform politicians, but Yeltsin rebounded from this potentially devastating setback to become the leader of the Russian democratic movement.

Failed Crusade is a deeply informed and passionate call for a fundamentally different American-Russian relationship in the post-Yeltsin era. Author Stephen Cohen shows that what US officials and other experts call "reform" has for most Russians been a catastrophic development--namely the unprecedented demodernization of a twentieth-century country--and for the United States the worst foreign policy disaster since Vietnam. What emerges is an alarming analysis of nuclear-laden Russia after 1991, representing an even greater threat to our national security than during the Cold War, and an indictment of American journalists and policy makers who failed to see or report the truth about the complicity of U.S. policy in a great human tragedy.

On Christmas Day, 1991, President George H. W. Bush addressed the nation to declare an American victory in the Cold War: earlier that day Mikhail Gorbachev had resigned as the first and last Soviet president. The enshrining of that narrative, one in which the end of the Cold War was linked to the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the triumph of democratic values over communism, took center stage in American public discourse immediately after Bush’s speech and has persisted for decades--with disastrous consequences for American standing in the world. As prize-winning historian Serhii Plokhy reveals in The Last Empire, the collapse of the Soviet Union was anything but the handiwork of the United States. On the contrary, American leaders dreaded the possibility that the Soviet Union--weakened by infighting and economic turmoil--might suddenly crumble, throwing all of Eurasia into chaos. Bush was firmly committed to supporting his ally and personal friend Gorbachev, and remained wary of nationalist or radical leaders such as recently elected Russian President Boris Yeltsin.

Taking up the torch of George Kennan, Pulitzer Prize winner Walter McDougall proposes nothing less than to cleanse the vocabulary of our post-Cold War debate on America's place in world affairs. Looking back over two centuries, he draws a striking contrast between America as a Promised Land, a vision inspired by the Old Testament of our diplomatic wisdom through the nineteenth century, and the contrary vision of America as a Crusader State, which inspired the New Testament of our foreign policy beginning at the time of the Spanish-American War and reaching its fulfillment in Vietnam.

Russian history is first and foremost a history of personalized power. As Russia startles the international community with its assertiveness and faces both parliamentary and presidential elections, Lilia Shevtsova searches the histories of the Yeltsin and Putin regimes. She explores within them conventional truths and myths about Russia, paradoxes of Russian political development, and Russia's role in the world.

The first volume in a series that explores Eurasia's security environment. It examines not only traditional political-military concerns but also economic, ethnic, and environmental issues and the role of crime terrorism, the drug trade, and migration in the security environment of Russia and its neighbors to the west. The dynamic approach use in the book takes account of both the internal and external aspects of security problems and their interplay.

Throughout history, strong-willed Russian autocrats have rescued their country from foreign domination, disorder, and possible chaos, often using the cruelest means to achieve their ends. Gorbachev tried to implement socialism with a human face in the Soviet Union, but failed. In the early 1990s, once again, Russia needed a strong hand to pull it out of chaos. In August 1991 Boris Yeltin emerged as such a leader, but unlike earlier strong leaders, he was determined to pull Russia out of the Communist morass and affect his country's integration with Western democracies through democratic means. Felkay carefully analyzes the impact of Yeltsin on the newly evolving relationship between Russia and the Western democracies. But separating the process of formulating foreign and domestic policies would be impossible.