“What is Past is Prologue:” Russia Observed (1970) and the Cold War Future | Ingrid Kleespies

In 1970-1971 the New York Times-affiliated Arno Press published a series entitled “Russia Observed” that consisted of 91 high-quality reprints of accounts by Western travelers ranging from the seventeenth century to the early years of World War II (1942). A number of questions emerge around this series: what was the intent, or what did the press and series editors envision as the purpose of reprinting extremely varied works? Why would the Arno Press rely on individuals who had not been trained in the field of Russian and Soviet studies to serve as editors? Most importantly, what messages does the series impart about the “Russia” under observation – and what might it reveal about the observers? This talk will address Russia Observed as a Cold War publishing phenomenon and look at an example in the reprinted 1914 Baedeker travel guide to the Russian Empire, introduced by the well-known journalist and Soviet affairs specialist, Harrison Salisbury. Russia Observed offers an illuminating window not only into the role of literature in Cold War culture but also into a key American narrative in which “Soviet communism” was imagined as something transitory and distinct from the “real Russia.”

Ingrid Kleespies is Associate Professor of Russian Studies at the University of Florida. Her areas of interest include Russian Romanticism, intellectual history, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature and culture, and literature of travel and empire more generally. She is the author of A Nation Astray: Nomadism and National Identity in Russian Literature (2012), The Necessary Man: Petr Chaadaev and the Invention of Russian Literature (2026), and co-editor of Goncharov in the Twenty-First Century. She is currently working on a project that examines the Cold War publishing in the U.S. and its imagined pasts and futures for Russia. In other recent work she examines the place of Siberia and the eastern “frontier” in Russian and Soviet culture.